Part 1
FORT GIBSON A BRIEF HISTORY
GRANT FOREMAN CAROLYN THOMAS FOREMAN
_To the Friends whose assistance has made possible the restoration now in evidence in Fort Gibson_
Copyright by Carolyn Thomas Foreman
Books by GRANT FOREMAN Published by the University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma
INDIAN REMOVAL (Out of Print) ADVANCING THE FRONTIER 1830-1860 THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES INDIANS AND PIONEERS FORT GIBSON DOWN THE TEXAS ROAD ADVENTURE ON RED RIVER (Editor) MARCY AND THE GOLD SEEKERS A TRAVELER IN INDIAN TERRITORY (Editor: Privately Printed) SEQUOYAH A PATHFINDER IN THE SOUTHWEST (Editor) A HISTORY OF OKLAHOMA MUSKOGEE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN OKLAHOMA TOWN PIONEER DAYS IN THE EARLY SOUTHWEST (Editor: Cleveland, Ohio) INDIAN JUSTICE (Editor: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
HOFFMAN-SPEED PRINTING CO., MUSKOGEE, OKLA.
Fort Gibson was not only the oldest and most celebrated military establishment in the annals of Oklahoma but in its early days it was the farthest west outpost of the United States, and in many respects continued for years to be one of the most important on that frontier. It was one of the chain of forts reaching from the northern to the southern boundaries of the nation, which included Fort Snelling, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Gibson, Fort Towson, and Fort Jesup, at times there were as many soldiers stationed at Fort Gibson as in all the other forts together. It was constructed in a wilderness frequented by bears, wolves, and panthers, while the neighboring prairies were the feeding grounds of wild horses, buffalo and deer. The nearby streams were rich in beaver, and furs were shipped by trappers and traders to eastern markets.
This fort actually owed its establishment to the indomitable spirit of the Osage Indians who ranged the surrounding country and claimed exclusive right to the game in that locality; consequently they challenged the hunters from eastern Indian tribes, notably the Cherokees, and were constantly engaging in savage battles with them. This situation resulted in the establishment, in 1817, of a garrison at Belle Point, subsequently called Fort Smith, which it was hoped would be able to abate the warlike activities of the Osages. As it was not able to achieve the desired results, the garrison was abandoned and the troops were directed to find a new location at the mouth of the Verdigris River, where they would be near the towns of the Osages and better able to watch and control their movements.
When Colonel Matthew Arbuckle came up the Arkansas River with his command of the Seventh Infantry, he found the best boat landing on the Verdigris River, and adjacent territory for three miles above its mouth, occupied by a considerable settlement of white traders and trappers, the earliest trading settlement within the limits of Oklahoma. Most conspicuous among the settlers was Colonel A. P. Chouteau, a graduate of West Point of the class of 1806, who resigned from the army the next year to engage in Indian trade. From 1815 to the time of his death in 1838 he was identified with the Indian Territory and performed valuable service for the government in the negotiation of important treaties with the Indians, with whom he had more influence than any other man of his time. He was long a familiar and welcome figure at Fort Gibson. His judgment commanded greater respect of army officers, commissioners and Washington officials than that of any other man on the frontier; he was frequently consulted and his services solicited for the settlement of important problems relating to the Indians.
In connection with his Indian trade at the Three Forks, Chouteau’s establishment was integrated with the facilities of river navigation. He employed a large number of men for assorting and packing for shipment the peltries purchased from the Indians; he also maintained a little shipyard on the bank of the river where he made the boats in which, with the help of a rough and hardy class of river men, he shipped his peltries to New Orleans and St. Louis. As the settlement of traders and trappers would have made it troublesome to establish a garrison on the site, Arbuckle decided to find a location for his fort a short distance up the nearby Grand River, which discharged its waters into the Arkansas about half a mile from the mouth of the Verdigris.
It was on the twenty-first day of April 1824, that two long flatboats were to be seen ascending Grand River, manned by bearded young men in the uniform of the United States Army. As they worked the boats up the river they scanned the shore for a landing place, and about three miles from the river’s mouth they were successful in discovering a wide ledge of shelving rock on the east bank, which made a natural boat landing. They tied up their boats at this ledge, and unloaded axes, adzes, froes, saws, food supplies, tents, baggage, and a miscellaneous assortment of camp equipment. On the bank they met other uniformed young men, unshaved and long of hair, who had come by land to the place from Fort Smith with their horses and oxen. They were, in all, 122 officers and privates of companies B, C, G, and K of the Seventh Infantry.
The river bottom land near their landing place was low and fertile, and covered by an immense canebrake, great forest trees, and a jungle of vines and undergrowth. The soldiers were soon engaged in clearing sufficient space in which to set up their tents. Then began the weeks and months of labor necessary to remove the cane, vines, and brambles from an area large enough for an army post; the ring of the ax and the crash of the huge falling trees were heard, and roaring fires consumed the prodigality of nature. Logs were fashioned by axes and cross-cut saws into lengths and shapes suitable to form the walls of houses; other logs were split into puncheons for floors, or rived into clapboards to roof the structures to be built.
By the early part of 1826 a number of log houses had been completed, providing quarters for the soldiers, quartermaster, sergeants, surgeon, and a hospital, guard room, matron’s room and storeroom. These buildings were constructed on four sides of a square and, with the upright logs or pickets surrounding them, constituted the stockade, so arranged for protection against possible attack by the Indians. This stockade has long since fallen into decay; but on the site another has been constructed from the original plans, as nearly like the old one as possible, where it is now to be seen.
Fort Gibson maintained communication with the outside world by means of transportation on the Arkansas River over which, at first, the keelboat brought men and supplies to the fort from remote distances, and down which furs and peltries were shipped by the traders living in the neighborhood. Later, steamboats that supplanted the keelboats came up to the fort with military supplies and merchandise for the sutler at the post and for merchants in that vicinity. During 1833, seventeen steamboats were tied up to the boat landing from time to time through the season. Under the railroad bridge which now spans the river at this spot may be seen one of the rings anchored in the rock to which the boats were secured many years ago. The fort was also reached by the famous thoroughfare known as the Texas Road, which came through southwestern Missouri, southeastern Kansas, and following the course of Grand River passed Fort Gibson and continued on to Texas. For many years an amazing number of emigrants, freighters, and traders going to or returning from the then unknown country beyond Red River passed over this road.
In 1831, the whole of the Seventh Infantry was ordered to Fort Gibson and the officers reported the interior of the stockade much overcrowded by the host of officers and men, laundresses and servants. The year 1832 was a notable one in the history of Fort Gibson. A commission had been created by Congress for the purpose of locating in the Indian Territory the Indians about to be removed from the East. It was necessary for the commission to make its headquarters at Fort Gibson, and negotiate treaties with the wild Indians which were to prepare them for the impending changes in their neighbors. The commissioners were Montford Stokes, until then governor of North Carolina, Henry L. Ellsworth, of Hartford, Connecticut, and Rev. John Schermerhorn. They were afforded protection by the Ranger company of Captain Jesse Bean, who arrived at the post in October, 1832, and was then ordered to the West on an exploring tour. Mr. Ellsworth arrived at Fort Gibson that same month, accompanied by Washington Irving and some friends whom he had met on Lake Erie and had invited to accompany him to Fort Gibson. They came down the Texas Road past the Creek agency at Three Forks, just below the site of Okay, and arrived at the bank of Grand River, across which Irving noted the neatly whitewashed blockhouses and palisades of Fort Gibson. Someone halooed across the river, and a scow, which served as ferryboat, was brought over; the travelers entered the boat, which was poled by soldiers across the stream; as it was tied up to the landing the visitors stepped ashore and walked up the bank 150 yards to the gate of the garrison. A sergeant’s guard admitted them, and as they entered the fort their attention was attracted to a number of men pilloried in stocks and riding the wooden horse. Startled at this spectacle, Irving made a note of it in his journal.
On their arrival at Fort Gibson, Washington Irving and Commissioner Ellsworth and their friends, on learning that Captain Bean’s company was somewhere up the Arkansas River, after spending two nights in Colonel Arbuckle’s quarters in the fort, started out to overtake the Rangers and share in their adventures. They were gone a month on this trip, and from his experiences on that expedition Irving wrote his famous book, A Tour on the Prairies. The company returned to Fort Gibson on the ninth of November, and the next day Irving departed down the Arkansas River by steamboat for New Orleans and Washington.
The inhabitants of the fort were awakened each morning as the bugler sounded reveille at daybreak to rouse a sleeping garrison; later the crash of the morning gun echoed and re-echoed among the neighboring hills and rumbled across the more distant prairies, startling deer and bear in their sheltered beds. The flag was run to the top of the staff to catch the first rays of the rising sun. After an early breakfast the soldiers went about their routine duties; details worked in the garrison garden among the vegetables; oxen, horses, and mules were fed, watered, and cared for; recruits were put through their drills by the sharp commands of officers, and the bugle sounded at intervals throughout the day, carrying its lively messages over the surrounding valleys and hills.
The end of the day of toil or boredom, as the case might be, was announced by the drums sounding retreat, followed by the evening gun and the ceremony of lowering the flag at sunset. The roll of the drum and the shrill notes of the fife sounded tatoo at nine o’clock and warned stragglers to cease their amours and other diversions and return to their quarters within the palisades before the great gates should close and shut them out; taps then sounded, and Fort Gibson was again stilled in darkness. This routine repeated day after day, month after month, and year after year, made life at the post a dull experience. It was an isolated station in the western wilderness, far from civilization and white settlements of consequence. The officers and men, exiled, as they termed it, to this remote garrison, wearied of its limited possibilities for entertainment. Trifling incidents varied the dull routine of their lives, and episodes that mattered were of absorbing interest.
Some cheerful diversions were available, however; there was good fishing in the river a few yards from the post, and thousands of prairie chickens and other game afforded zestful hunting. A billiard room furnished entertainment. Plays were written and presented in the “theater,” the building used on occasions for Indian councils and religious services.
A course was laid out and every year there were exciting horse races for high stakes with entries from all divisions of the fort’s population—officers, traders, and Indians. Indian ponies, that hardly had time to rest up from running buffalo, were entered against the horses of the post. And there were crooked race horse owners who came up the river to the fort for the sole purpose of making what money they could by their peculiar methods. This situation became so demoralizing that Colonel Loomis issued an order barring these people from the reservation. When other things palled—and when they did not—there was always the gossip of the post, rumors and confirmation of promotions, expeditions, and details; the departure of a command on a commission that would at least give the men a change of scene; the rare arrival of the paymaster, with fifty to one hundred thousand dollars in the custody of his military escort; the frequent arrival of steamboats when the rivers were high; and when they were not, visitors and supplies coming by keelboats, wagons, or pack trains.
The hoarse resonance of a steam whistle in the distance told a jaded garrison that a steamboat on the Arkansas River was approaching the fort. Presently the boom of the signal gun on board announced that she had passed the bars three miles below and had safely entered the Grand River. There was always a crowd at the landing place to see her as she came into view down the stream. As the jangle of her bell or the exhaust of her engines heralded her arrival, the multitude was increased by people who were anxious to share in the excitement when she was tied up to the shelving rock that made a natural dock.
For there were passengers to come ashore—friends to greet, who were returning from leave with news from the outside world, messages, and newspapers, and strangers to inspect—young officers from West Point, older officers trained by service in other posts who had come to a new assignment, recruits to fill gaps in the ranks. There were civilians, too, merchants from the neighborhood who had been east exchanging furs and skins for fresh supplies of merchandise; sutlers who brought stores to sell to the officers and soldiers, and bonnets, dresses, and finery for the ladies of the post. And there were wives and children come to unite long-separated families, and young ladies who planned to visit and bring a measure of gaiety to the garrison. Mail bags promised letters from distant relatives and friends. Deck hands and soldiers unloaded boxes and crates of merchandise. It was a busy and noisy scene. Officers went aboard to enjoy the hospitality of the captain and to sample the liquors on his boat.
Young ladies came from the East to visit relatives at the post and they frequently married officers whom they met there, or had previously known. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, when Fort Gibson received many young officers recently out of West Point, such romances were common.
Propinquity and the charm of the Cherokee maidens accounted for many unions between them and the soldiers and officers at the post. Fort Gibson was the center of society and gaiety for a large section of the country that included the Cherokee Nation. The young women of that tribe were much sought by the officers and were welcome guests at the parties given at the post, where many romances budded and bloomed during the seventy years the old fort existed. The result was that in that part of Oklahoma which formerly constituted the Cherokee Nation, many families descended from unions between the soldiers and Indians. Frequently, when their terms of enlistment expired, soldiers remained in the neighborhood, married Indian girls, reared Indian families, and become prosperous from the land holdings these alliances brought them.
For want of diversions of greater interest, numbers of soldiers at Fort Gibson sought such excitement as they could find in the doggeries maintained by mixed-blood Cherokee Indians on tribal lands just off the reservation, where drinking and gambling were indulged in. Violations of the rule forbidding a soldier to remain outside the garrison after retreat had sounded were frequent, and iron bars were employed on the windows in the outer walls of the houses to enforce the regulations. These precautionary measures, said an observer, gave the barracks the appearance of a dilapidated Arkansas jail: the enclosure, he said, was made to hold five companies of troops—officers and men, laundresses and servants herded together in a climate where the temperature ranged in summer from eighty to one hundred degrees. These remarks truly painted a picture that explained much of the resistance to discipline and violation of regulations.
As an instance of punishment, an offender was sentenced to “stand on the head of a barrel with an empty bottle in each hand, in front of the dragoon guardhouse every alternate two hours from reveille until retreat for eight days with a board around his neck marked ‘Whiskey Seller,’ to carry a pack on his back weighing fifty pounds every alternate two hours for eight days, from reveille until retreat; to work at hard labor in charge of the guard for fourteen days, and to have seven days of his pay stopped.” Another culprit was sentenced “to be drummed around the garrison immediately in the rear of Corporal Charles Kelloun of H Company, First Dragoons, carrying a keg in his arms, to have a plank hanging on his back marked ‘Whiskey Runner,’ and to serve fifteen days at hard labor in charge of the guard, making good all time lost by sickness.”
Drunkenness and desertion were the most persistent and difficult violations with which officers had to deal. The courts martial varied the punishments inflicted upon offenders as far as their imagination would permit. One culprit was sentenced to the custody of the guard for thirty days “and during that period to walk in front of the guardhouse with a pack of stones weighing fifty pounds upon his back from eight o’clock A. M. to one P. M., and from two o’clock P. M. to retreat.” Another, in the winter was condemned “to be immersed for ten consecutive mornings in the river, fifteen minutes before breakfast roll call.” Another’s sentence was to have his “hands tied to a post above his head from reveille to guard mount, five days at hard labor, and to forfeit one dollar per day and his portion of sugar and coffee.” Forfeiture of sugar, coffee, and whiskey was a cruel measure often resorted to. Sentence to the stocks was employed, and frequently the garrison displayed the ghastly spectacle of a dozen men with hands and heads projected through these cruel devices which compelled them to stand and gave them no support. It was charged that in some cases culprits had died under this punishment. In October 1833, two privates of the First Dragoons convicted of desertion were sentenced to be branded with the letter “D” on the right thigh, to have their heads shaved, and be drummed out of the service of the United States with strong halters around their necks.
In the early 1850’s a traveler coming from the Northwest left an interesting picture of Fort Gibson: The Verdigris River forded, “another ride of an hour or more brought us to the Neosho (Grand River); this forded, we ride into Fort Gibson. This is a pretty place. There is the fort itself, with its blockhouses, the palisades with their heavy wooden gates, the stables on a hill nearby, the quarters of the dragoons in a former day and their look-out, the campus outside the fort, a plot of ground elevated above the river, having on two sides the houses of the officers, the chapel and schoolhouse, the government store, and all newly whitewashed. In this enclosure was a little burying ground, carefully protected and tastefully adorned with trees and shrubs. We pass out into the Cherokee country by a large gate, near which is a store having one entrance from the fort, and another from the Indian country. Around this door a great number of horses were tied while their riders were within, some with articles to barter for goods, others endeavoring to purchase by giving a lien on the annuity which will come next year, which annuity may be sold or gambled away to several other parties, all of whom will be at the council to claim it when it at length arrives.”
Fort Gibson was still a young fort when it was discovered that the green logs of which the houses were built were rapidly decaying and constant repairs were required to make them habitable. It was a sickly place and the great number of deaths which occurred there gave it the name of the charnel house of the army. From the time of its founding to December 8, 1835, eleven and a half years, 561 privates and 9 officers had died at the post. During the years 1834 and 1835 the deaths numbered 293 privates and 6 officers. In the summertime, in order to avoid the miasmic breezes carrying disease from the surrounding swamps and canebrakes, detachments of troops were ordered to camp on the hill above, or seven miles east on Bayou Manard at a place known as Clark’s Springs, where at one time the Cherokee agency, and later the home known as the McLain place, were situated.
Probably no fort in the West exerted a greater influence for the civilization of the surrounding country than did Fort Gibson, and this became the purpose of its maintenance for many years. With the appointment of the Stokes Indian Commission in 1832, efforts were made to bring representatives of the wild tribes to Fort Gibson for the purpose of making treaties with them and impressing them with the sovereignty of the United States; it was hoped that they would conform their conduct accordingly and become friends of the whites and of the Indian immigrants from the East who were to be the new owners of the Indian Territory. Ellsworth’s efforts in 1832, when Irving accompanied him, failed to accomplish this result. In 1833 another expedition set out from Fort Gibson commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Many. In his command were two select companies of the Seventh Infantry and three companies of Rangers commanded by captains Bean, Ford, and Boone, the latter Nathan Boone, son of the famous Daniel. They went as far as the country on the Washita, Blue, and Red rivers, but returned empty-handed after suffering tremendous hardships.
The third effort to make contact with these Western Indians was successfully carried out in 1834, by what became known as the famous Dragoon Expedition. General Henry Leavenworth arrived at Fort Gibson April 28 of that year and assumed command of the post, which he held until June 12 when he departed in command of the expedition. This expedition included also Colonel Henry Dodge, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney, and Major R. B. Mason. Jefferson Davis, a lieutenant a few years out of West Point, was in command of one company. This train of five hundred mounted troops, a large number of white-covered baggage wagons, and seventy head of beeves made an imposing procession. It was accompanied by eleven Osage, eight Cherokee, six Delaware, and seven Seneca Indians who went along to serve as guides, hunters, interpreters, and as representatives of their respective nations. They crossed the Arkansas River below the mouth of Grand River, passed over the prairies near the site of the future Muskogee, traveled southwest to the mouth of the Washita River, then northwest, where they visited the site of a Comanche village at the western end of the Wichita Mountains.