Fort Gibson is a historic military site next to the modern city of Fort Gibson, in Muskogee CountyOklahoma. It guarded the American frontier in Indian Territory from 1824 to 1888. When it was constructed, the fort was farther west than any other military post in the United States. It formed part of the north–south chain of forts that was intended to maintain peace on the frontier of the American West and to protect the southwestern border of the Louisiana Purchase. The fort succeeded in its peacekeeping mission for more than 50 years, as no massacres or battles occurred there.[5]
The site is now managed by the Oklahoma Historical Society as the Fort Gibson Historical Site and is a National Historic Landmark.
Building the fort
Colonel Matthew Arbuckle commanded the 7th Infantry Regiment (United States) from Fort Smith, Arkansas. He moved some of his troops to establish Cantonment Gibson on 21 April 1824 on the Grand River (Oklahoma) just above its confluence with the Arkansas River. This was part of a series of forts which the United States established to protect its western border and the extensive Louisiana Purchase. The US Army named the fort for Colonel (later General) George Gibson, Commissary General of Subsistence. The post surgeon began taking meteorological observations in 1824, and the fort provided the earliest known weather records in Oklahoma.[5] Colonel Arbuckle also established Fort Towson in southern Indian Territory. In the early years, troops constructed a stockade, barracks, other facilities, and roads. They also settled strife between the indigenous Osage Nation, which had been in the area since the seventeenth century, and the earliest bands of western Cherokee settlers.[5]
Indian removal
Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which led to a new mission for Cantonment Gibson. The Army designated the cantonment as Fort Gibson in 1832, reflecting its change from a temporary outpost to a semi-permanent garrison. Soldiers at Fort Gibson increasingly dealt with Indians forcibly removed from the eastern states to Indian Territory. These newcomers complained about hostility from the Osage Nation and other Plains Indian tribes indigenous to the region. Montfort Stokes, former governor of North Carolina, convened a commission at Fort Gibson to address these problems, and troops at the fort supported its work. The American author Washington Irving accompanied troops exploring the southern Plains west of Fort Gibson in 1832. This excursion and another journey in 1833 both failed to find any significant nomadic Indian tribes, but Washington Irving wrote A Tour of the Prairies in 1835 from his experiences.
General Henry Leavenworth in 1834 led the First Dragoon Expedition on a peace mission to the west, and finally established contact with the nomadic Indian tribes. The artist George Catlin traveled with the dragoons and made numerous studies. General Leavenworth died during the march, and Colonel Henry Dodge replaced him in command. The expedition finally established contact and negotiated the first treaty with the Indian tribes. Debilitating fevers struck and killed many men on this expedition, posing more of a danger than the Native Americans. A West Point officer assigned to the fort said the men felt that expeditions to the Plains in the 1830s were "a veritable death sentence."[5] During these years, the soldiers at Fort Gibson built roads, provisioned incoming American Indians removed from the eastern states, and worked to maintain peace among antagonistic tribes and factions, including the Osage Nation, who settled the region in the 18th century,[6] and the Cherokee Nation, a people forcibly removed from the American South to the Indian Territory.[5]
During the Texas Revolution against the weak Mexican government, the Army sent most of the troops stationed at Fort Gibson to the Texas border region. Their absence weakened the military power and pacification capacity at Fort Gibson, but the reduced garrison maintained stability in the region.[5]
At the height of Indian removal in the 1830s, the garrison at Fort Gibson ranked as the largest in the nation. Notable American soldiers stationed at (or at least visiting) Fort Gibson include Stephen W. Kearny, Robert E. Lee, and Zachary Taylor. The Army stationed Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederate States of America, and more than 100 other West Point cadets at the fort. The Army also assigned Nathan Boone, son of the famous explorer Daniel Boone, to the post. After leaving Tennessee, Sam Houston owned a trading post in the area; he later moved to Texas.
At a bitterly contentious meeting at Fort Gibson in 1836, the majority faction of the Muscogee (Creek) reluctantly accepted the existing tribal government under the leadership of Chilly McIntosh, son of William McIntosh, and his faction. Colonel Arbuckle tried to prevent intratribal strife within the Cherokee, but Chief John Ross and his followers refused to acknowledge the government that earlier "Old Settlers" had established in Indian Territory. After suing for peace in the Florida Seminole Wars against the United States Army, many of the Seminole arrived in Indian Territory "bitter and dispirited." Officials at Fort Gibson prevented bloodshed and disunity among them.[5]
Pacification and first abandonment
When Colonel Arbuckle left Fort Gibson in 1841, he reported that despite the arrival of 40,000 eastern Native Americans of decidedly unfriendly disposition, "I have maintained peace on this frontier and at no period have the Whites on our border or the Red people of this frontier been in a more perfect state of quiet and Security than they enjoy now."[5] The removed Native American nations gradually lost their desire for American military protection.[5]
In the 1850s, the Cherokee complained about the liquor and brothels at Fort Gibson. They tried to prevent the sale of alcohol to their people. The Cherokee ultimately urged Congress to close Fort Gibson, and the War Department heeded their request. On May 7, 1857, Brevet Lt. General Winfield Scott issued General Orders No. 6.[8] to abandon the Fort for the first time. The Cherokee nation received the deed to the property and improvements, and established the village of Kee-too-wah on the site.[5] It became a center of traditionalists and eventually an independently federally recognized tribe of Cherokee.
American Civil War
During the American Civil War, Union troops occasionally occupied the post. During the summer of 1862, Union soldiers repulsed a Confederate invasion of Indian Territory. They left the fort and withdrew to Kansas. In April 1863, Colonel William A. Phillips of the Indian Home Guard (Union Indian Brigade) reoccupied Fort Gibson and kept it in Union hands throughout the remainder of the war. The Army briefly renamed the post Fort Blunt in honor of Brigadier General James G. Blunt, commander of the Department of Kansas. The fort dominated the junction between the Arkansas River and Texas Road, but Confederates never attacked the fort, though an attack on the fort's nearby livestock grew to a heavy encounter in the battle of Fort Gibson. Its troops under General Blunt marched southward in July 1863 and won the Battle of Honey Springs, the most important in Indian Territory.[5]
In the summer of 1864, a steamboat came up the Arkansas River with a thousand barrels of flour and 15 tons of bacon to resupply Union troops at Fort Gibson. Cherokee Gen. Stand Watie, largely cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, didn't want to sink the boat. He wanted to capture it, along with the food and other supplies on board. The ensuing battle is the only naval battle to have been fought in Oklahoma/Indian Territory History.[9]
After the American Civil War, the US Army retained Fort Gibson. American soldiers ultimately established enduring peace with the Indian tribes of the southern Plains only after 1870, but forts farther west increasingly took on the duties of securing that peace. For more than 50 years, Fort Gibson had kept peace in its area.[5] The Army transferred most troops elsewhere in 1871, leaving only a detachment responsible for provisions in a quartermaster depot.[5]
Cavalry mission
Ft. Gibson in the 1870s.
In 1872 the Tenth Cavalry reoccupied Fort Gibson. Soon after, workers were sent to the area to build the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad from Baxter Springs, the first "cow town," in Kansas, to the Red River crossing at Colbert's Ferry, Indian Territory, along the Texas border. This would improve transportation of cattle and beef to the east as well as shipping of goods from that area to the West. The cavalry from Fort Gibson was used to police the camps of local workers. Soldiers tried to manage threats from outlaws, white encroachment on Indian lands, intra-tribal disputes, and other issues. The size of the garrison varied with the workload.
The Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway built track through the area in 1888, and the town of Fort Gibson, Oklahoma began to develop. In the summer of 1890, the Army abandoned Fort Gibson for the last time. Troops occasionally camped at the site when unrest brought them to the town of Fort Gibson, which took the name of the fort. After the military permanently departed, the civilian town expanded into the former military grounds of the fort.
The old fort was located in present Muskogee County, Oklahoma. It is located at Lee and Ash Streets in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma.[11] The Oklahoma Historical Society operates the site, which includes a reconstruction of the early log fort, original buildings from the 1840s through 1870s, and the Commissary Visitor Center, which has museum exhibits about the history of the fort. The site hosts special living history events and programs.
Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the United States government for the relocation of Native Americans who held original Indian title to their land as an independent nation-state. The concept of an Indian territory was an outcome of the U.S. federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the policy of the U.S. government was one of assimilation.
Muskogee County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 66,339. The county seat is Muskogee. The county and city were named for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. The official spelling of the name was changed to Muskogee by the post office in 1900.
Fort Gibson is a town in Cherokee and Muskogee counties in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The population was 4,154 at the 2010 census, an increase of 2.5 percent over the figure of 4,054 recorded in 2000. It is the location of Fort Gibson Historical Site and Fort Gibson National Cemetery and is located near the end of the Cherokees' Trail of Tears at Tahlequah.
Fort Towson was a frontier outpost for Frontier Army Quartermasters along the Permanent Indian Frontier located about two miles (3 km) northeast of the present community of Fort Towson, Oklahoma. Located on Gates Creek near the confluence of the Kiamichi River and the Red River in present-day Choctaw County, Oklahoma, it was named for General Nathaniel Towson.
Fort Scott National Historic Site is a historical area under the control of the United States National Park Service in Bourbon County, Kansas, United States. Named after General Winfield Scott, who achieved renown during the Mexican–American War, during the middle of the 19th century the fort served as a military base for US Army action in what was the edge of settlement in 1850. For the next quarter century, it was used as a supply base and to provide security in turbulent areas during the opening of the West to settlement, a period which included Bleeding Kansas and the American Civil War.
Fort Smith National Historic Site is a National Historic Site located in Fort Smith, Arkansas, along the Arkansas River. The first fort at this site was established by the United States in 1817, before this area was established as part of Indian Territory. It was later replaced and the second fort was operated by the US until 1871. This site was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1961.
The Battle of Honey Springs, also known as the Affair at Elk Creek, on July 17, 1863, was an American Civil War engagement and an important victory for Union forces in their efforts to gain control of the Indian Territory. It was the largest confrontation between Union and Confederate forces in the area that would eventually become Oklahoma. The engagement was also unique in the fact that white soldiers were the minority in both fighting forces. Native Americans made up a significant portion of each of the opposing armies and the Union force contained African-American units.
Fort Washita is the former United States military post and National Historic Landmark located in Durant, Oklahoma on SH 199. Established in 1842 by General Zachary Taylor to protect citizens of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations from the Plains Indians, it was later abandoned by Federal forces at the beginning of the American Civil War. Confederate troops held the post until the end of the war when they burned the remaining structures. It was never reoccupied by the United States military. After years in private hands the Oklahoma Historical Society bought the fort grounds in 1962 and restored the site. In 2017, the Chickasaw Nation purchased Fort Washita from the Oklahoma Historical Society and assumed responsibility for the site and its management. Today, Fort Washita is a tourist attraction and hosts several events throughout the year. In August 2023, the Fort Washita Historic Site was placed into federal trust with the U.S. government.
During the American Civil War, most of what is now the U.S. state of Oklahoma was designated as the Indian Territory. It served as an unorganized region that had been set aside specifically for Native American tribes and was occupied mostly by tribes which had been removed from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. As part of the Trans-Mississippi Theater, the Indian Territory was the scene of numerous skirmishes and seven officially recognized battles involving both Native American units allied with the Confederate States of America and Native Americans loyal to the United States government, as well as other Union and Confederate troops.
Fort McCulloch was a Confederate military fort built by CSA Brigadier General Albert Pike in the Indian Territory during the American Civil War after the Battle of Pea Ridge.
Matthew Arbuckle (1778–1851) was a career soldier in the US Army closely identified with the Indian Territory for the last thirty years of his life.
Fort Cobb was a United States Army post established in what is now Caddo County, Oklahoma in 1859 to protect relocated Native Americans from raids by the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. The fort was abandoned by Maj. William H. Emory at the beginning of the Civil War, but then occupied by Confederate forces from 1861–1862. The post was eventually reoccupied by US forces starting in 1868. After establishing Fort Sill the US Army abandoned Fort Cobb. Today there is little left of the former military post.
Black Beaver or Se-ket-tu-may-qua was a trapper and interpreter who worked for the American Fur Company. He served as a scout and guide as he was fluent in English, as well as several European and Native American languages. He is credited with establishing the California and Chisholm trails.
Three Forks Oklahoma is an imprecisely defined area of what is now eastern Oklahoma, around the confluence of the Arkansas, Verdigris, and Grand Rivers.
Fort Davis, Oklahoma was established in 1861 on the south bank of the Arkansas River two and one-half miles northeast of present-day Muskogee, Oklahoma to serve as a Confederate States of America headquarters in Indian Territory. The fort's name honored President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis. First called Cantonment Davis, its purposes were to help retain the loyalty of the Indian Territory to the Confederacy and to prevent Union Army invasions into Texas from the north.
The First Battle of Cabin Creek took place on July 1 through July 2, 1863, in Mayes County, Oklahoma during the American Civil War. The Confederate forces under Colonel Stand Watie attempted to ambush a Union supply convoy led by Colonel James Monroe Williams. Williams was alerted to the attack and, despite the waters of the creek being swelled by rain, made a successful attack upon the entrenched Confederate position and forced them to flee. The raid by a Confederate Army detachment on a Union Army supply train bound for Fort Gibson in July 1863 failed to stop the Union detachment, which enabled the Union to succeed in winning the Battle of Honey Springs later that month. The battle was the first in which African American troops fought side-by-side with their white comrades.
The Osage Battalion was a Native American unit of the Confederate States Army. Recruited from among the Osage tribe, whose loyalties were split between the Union and Confederacy, it did not meet its 500-man establishment. From early 1863 a four-company battalion of 200 men served under Brigadier General Douglas H. Cooper in the Trans-Mississippi Department. In 1864 the unit was transferred to the First Indian Brigade under Native American Brigadier General Stand Watie and fought under his command at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek on September 19, 1864. The battalion surrendered to Union forces on June 23, 1865, one of the last Confederate units to lay down its arms.
William Dutch or Tahchee was a prominent leader of the Cherokee "Old Settlers" in the American West. He was renowned as a notorious enemy of the Osage tribe, and a spokesman for the Cherokee.
Lovely's Purchase, also called Lovely's Donation, was part of the Missouri Territory and the Arkansaw Territory of the early nineteenth century. It was created in 1817, to give a haven to the Cherokee and other Native Americans who were being forced to leave the southeastern United States and moving west to Indian Territory through territory then inhabited by sometimes hostile White settlers and several other Indigenous nations, especially citizens of the Osage Nation. Following years of political maneuvering and sometimes conflicting treaties, the purchase was finally split between the Cherokee and White American settlers, with the larger section going solely to the Cherokee Nation.
Wright, Murial H.; George H. Shirk; Kenny A. Franks. Mark of Heritage. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1976.
Further reading
Brad Agnew, Fort Gibson: Terminal on the Trail of Tears (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).
Grant Foreman, Fort Gibson: A Brief History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936). *Richard C. Rohrs, "Fort Gibson: Forgotten Glory," in Early Military Forts and Posts in Oklahoma, ed. Odie B. Faulk, Kenny A. Franks, and Paul F. Lambert (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1978).
Robert W. Frazer, Forts of the West: Military Forts and Presidios, and Posts Commonly Called Forts, West of the Mississippi River to 1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
Trent, William Peterfield; Hellman, George S., eds. (1919). The Journals of Washington Irving. Boston: The Bibliophile Society. Retrieved October 22, 2016.
External links
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