Part 2

This was a disastrous expedition which resulted in the deaths of nearly 150 men from disease and the effects of excessive hot weather and poor water upon the unseasoned and undisciplined soldiers lately recruited from private life in the North and East. Included among the casualties of this expedition was that of General Leavenworth, who died July 21 near the Washita River.

However, they did succeed in bringing back to Fort Gibson representatives of the Kiowa, Wichita, and Waco tribes, and after their return invitations were extended to all the Indians within reach to attend a grand council at the post—Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Senecas, Osages, Delawares, and others. Here, on September 2, 1834, began one of the most interesting and important Indian councils ever held in the country. On this occasion every effort was made to impress the wild Indians who had never made a treaty with the United States and make them understand the changed political condition of the country. There were 150 Indians participating in the council, and with their numerous women and children, tepees and tents, they made one of the most picturesque scenes ever witnessed at any army post.

Governor Stokes and the army officers who attended did not have authority at this time to enter into a treaty, but, with the potent influence of Colonel A. P. Chouteau, who participated in the council, the commissioners secured an agreement with the wild Indians to meet in treaty council the following year. And so the plans which were launched and carried out at Fort Gibson resulted in a treaty council begun August 24, 1835, at Fort Mason on the Canadian River near the present Purcell, Oklahoma, where was negotiated the first treaty ever entered into by a number of these western tribes.

In 1837 members of the Kiowa, Apache, and Tawakoni tribes were induced to send representatives to Fort Gibson, where on May 26 another important treaty, the first with these Indians, was negotiated. These treaties gave assurance of peace on the part of the Indians and guarantees of safe passage for the traders over the Santa Fe route.

After the return of the Dragoon Expedition there were a number of resignations of young officers who were thoroughly tired of frontier service. An amusing incident growing out of the tension between them resulted in a charge of insubordination against Lieutenant Jefferson Davis by Major R. B. Mason, followed by a court martial of the young officer at Fort Gibson. The court found him guilty but attached no criminality to the facts, and the judgment was that he be acquitted. While the records and decision were being considered by General E. P. Gaines, commander of the Southwestern Military Department at Memphis, Tennessee, Lieutenant Davis resigned from the army and went to Kentucky, where he met and married Sarah Knox, the daughter of General Zachary Taylor, whom he had wooed when he was serving under her father at Fort Crawford on the upper Mississippi River.

This statement, based on the life of Davis written by his widow, and other authentic accounts, disposes of the romantic but wholly fictitious yarn that Davis and his bride eloped from Fort Gibson; equally apocryphal is a house nearby that formerly was pointed out by the credulous as the “Jeff Davis house,” since during the period of scarcely more than a year that young Lieutenant Davis served there, he and the other members of the Dragoons did not live in a house but were quartered in tents half a mile from the fort.

At Fort Gibson were planned and launched other important military expeditions among the wild Indians to the west that made possible the negotiation of numerous essential treaties with these tribes. A number of picturesque Indian councils were held at the fort, with representatives of many tribes from large areas of the West and Southwest participating. These councils and negotiations exerted a profound influence over the country, and Fort Gibson became known far and wide as the source of important information concerning this remote country. The early newspapers of the East consequently carried a Fort Gibson date line more often than that of any other place west of the Mississippi.

This ancient fort performed a multitude of other services in connection with the civilization of this western country. Through the years numerous military escorts were provided for the protection of parties engaged in exploring meandering streams and surveying boundaries of the lands occupied by different Indian tribes, pursuant to treaties made from time to time. In the effort to prevent the introduction of whiskey into the Indian country, detachments frequently were sent out from the fort to seize shipments of that contraband or arrest and remove across the line whiskey peddlers who were engaged in this unlawful activity; others were employed either on land or in boats in patrolling the Arkansas River for the same purpose.

The commandant at the fort was frequently called upon by the authorities in Washington to aid parents or other relatives living in Texas in the rescue of children captured in raids by Kiowa and Comanche Indians. Emissaries were sent out to bring their captive children to the fort, where a ransom was effected and the children turned over to grateful relatives.

From several points of view Fort Gibson enjoyed a unique association with the growth of the army. In 1832 a call was made for six companies of mounted troops known as Rangers for service in the Black Hawk War in Illinois. Before the companies had all been recruited the orders were changed, and the Rangers were directed to proceed to Fort Gibson to aid in preparing that country for the reception of the tribes about to be emigrated from the East. The company commanded by Captain Jesse Bean was the first to reach the fort, and they went on the scouting tour, already mentioned, that was accompanied by Washington Irving.

The next year it was decided to discontinue the Ranger organization and merge the six companies with the regiment of Dragoons authorized that year by Congress. Major Henry Dodge headed this regiment, Major Stephen Watts Kearney was lieutenant colonel, and Captain Richard B. Mason was appointed major. Five companies were recruited and concentrated at Jefferson Barracks. After a proud send-off by the citizens of St. Louis, they departed for Fort Gibson where they arrived on December 17, 1834. They were not quartered in the fort but had their own reservation on land about half a mile south of it, and for a time lived in tents. This regiment began its distinguished service by the tragic expedition of that year which left so many of its members in unmarked graves along the route, and in the little cemeteries around the fort. They were accompanied by George Catlin, the artist, who not only painted many portraits of the Indians he saw, but wrote an interesting account of the experiences of the regiment.

One company of this regiment did not go on this celebrated expedition because it was engaged, under Captain Clifton Wharton, in escorting a company of traders on the Santa Fe Trail as far as the Spanish boundary. In the summer of 1836 three troops of the Dragoon regiment, with six companies of the Seventh Infantry, marched from Fort Gibson to Nachitoches to aid the Texans in resisting what was thought to be an impending attack by a large force of Mexicans. The peril did not materialize and the troops returned to Fort Gibson after an arduous campaign of several months involving a march of a month each way. During their absence, and due to an exaggerated alarm of war with Mexico; several hundred men in Arkansas were mustered in as volunteers and remained in camp at Fort Gibson for months.

Again, in 1837, a company under Captain Eustace Trenor escorted Colonel A. P. Chouteau to his trading house near the present Purcell, Oklahoma, where he called the wild Indians to a conference in an effort to counteract the machinations of the emissaries from Mexico and Texas who were trying to enlist them in their respective controversies.

And in 1839 a detachment of Dragoons commanded by Lieutenant James M. Bowman escorted the famous trading expedition headed by Dr. Josiah Gregg to the limits of the United States on the way to Santa Fe and Chihuahua. Captain Nathan Boone headed a command of Dragoons that left Fort Gibson May 14, 1843, and followed an interesting route over the Santa Fe Trail and through the country west of this post in order to afford protection to traders from Texas. The Dragoons continued to police the West until this service was interrupted by the Mexican War, in which it distinguished itself in several important battles.

Frequent reports came to Fort Gibson of the hostilities of the Plains Indians against the people of Texas, along with rumors that the Mexicans were aiding and abetting them. Requests were made for the authorities at Fort Gibson to aid in making peace with these Indians on both sides of the Red River. The Secretary of War directed this to be done and in March, 1843, Cherokee Agent Pierce Butler left the post, and with an escort attended a council on Tawakoni Creek in Texas, where, however, nothing definite was accomplished. Another effort was made in the fall when Butler was accompanied by eighty men commanded by Colonel Harney. Again the Indians were elusive and non-committal. The next summer in 1844, another effort was made when Captain Nathan Boone, with a company of the First Dragoons, left the post September 25 and went to the rendezvous in Texas; but the Indians had left when Boone arrived and he returned to Fort Gibson unsuccessful, after an absence of six weeks. A fourth attempt was made when in January, 1846, Governor Butler departed from Fort Gibson with a large company of civilian hunters and adventurers and representatives of the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes. Butler was finally successful, and on May 15, 1846, at Council Springs, Texas, negotiated a treaty of peace with the Comanche, Anadarko, Caddo, Wichita, Waco, and other western tribes that brought a sense of security to the frontier settlers of Texas.

Officers and men went from Fort Gibson to take their places in the war with Mexico; the veteran commander Colonel Gustavus Loomis was the last high ranking officer to leave, when he departed in February, 1848, for his post in Mexico City. After that many war veterans who had seen service in Mexico became part of the military establishment at Fort Gibson.

Captain Braxton Bragg, who was to become a celebrated commander in the Confederate Army, arrived at Fort Gibson from St. Louis on October 31, 1853, at the head of Company C of the Third Artillery and assumed command of the post, which he retained until June 20 of the following year.

Indian hostilities were harassing a large extent of the surrounding country and Colonel Pitcairn Morrison was ordered out from Fort Gibson with three companies of the Seventh Infantry, numbering 235 officers and men. They left in June and went out over the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas to Fort Mann and Bent’s Fort, where Morrison held councils with the chiefs of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, Apache, and Cheyenne Indians. He then returned and arrived at Fort Gibson October 15. And so the policing of the western country from Fort Gibson went on and on.

Soon after Morrison’s return, the post entertained the Second Cavalry just created by Congress, which was on its way to Fort Belknap, its station in Texas, to police that country against the Indians. They left Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis October 27, 1855, and a month later arrived at Fort Gibson, where they remained a few days to shoe their horses and give them a much needed rest. This regiment was commanded by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston; other officers of the regiment were Colonel E. V. Sumner, Colonel J. E. Johnston, Colonel W. H. Emory, Delos B. Sackett, J. E. B. Stuart, and other men who became known to history. Colonel Robert E. Lee was second in command of the regiment, George H. Thomas was a major, Edmund Kirby Smith was a captain, and John B. Hood a lieutenant.

After the Mexican War the First Dragoons continued as regulators of the wild Indians throughout the West. On August 3, 1861, its designation was changed to the First United States Cavalry, and it served with distinction during the Civil War. For the next seventy-one years this veteran organization maintained its fine traditions. Less than two years ago, after a hundred years of service in the saddle, this organization ceased to exist as a mounted regiment and was removed by gas power from Marfa, Texas to Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Fort Gibson was a haven of refuge for many classes of people. When the emigration of the Creeks began in 1828 the first arrivals settled on the Verdigris and Arkansas rivers near the fort to enjoy the protection it afforded against the wild Indians occupying their lands to the west.

In 1836 the remainder of the Creek Indians were forcibly removed from their homes in Alabama. After appalling suffering and many deaths on the way, their conductor brought them to Fort Gibson. Ten thousand of them, cold, destitute, and broken spirited, were encamped through the winter around the fort where they were given food enough to sustain life until spring, when they could be removed to the land intended for them. Later, when the Seminole Indians were brought as prisoners from their old home in Florida, they were landed from the boats at Fort Gibson. Several thousand of them were established in camps in this locality where rations were issued to them; some of them remained several years before they could be induced to remove to the lands intended for them. At one time a few hundred Seminole Negroes were located at the same place. They had surrendered to General Jesup in Florida, and claimed that they had been promised emancipation in return for their surrender. Some of the wealthier Seminoles claimed them as slaves, and they were retained in the custody of the garrison while their status was being investigated and determined by the authorities in Washington. They were employed in 1845 and 1846 in the construction of the stone buildings at the fort.

Some of the Creek immigrants who had ventured to locate on their lands in the more remote part of their country near the present site of Holdenville, in 1843 became involved with a band of Wichita Indians, four of whom were killed by the Creeks. A call for help was sent in to the settlements and a general alarm spread over the Creek country. The Creeks became panic stricken, and women and children came flocking into Fort Gibson. The Creek agent and some of the traders on the Verdigris also rushed to the post for protection. Captain Boone was sent with his company to the mouth of Little River and returned a week later with the report that the alarm was unfounded.

Fort Gibson was employed also as a base for the establishment of other garrisons; thus in 1833 Fort Smith was temporarily re-established by a detachment of the Seventh Infantry from Fort Gibson commanded by Captain John Stuart. Two years later this detachment was again removed up the river thirteen miles to make Fort Coffee, to which point a road was constructed from Fort Gibson. In 1838 they were removed from Fort Coffee to create, near the Arkansas line, an establishment called Fort Wayne, another subsidiary to Fort Gibson. In the summer of 1834, under the direction of General Leavenworth, Camp Arbuckle at the mouth of the Cimarron River and Fort Holmes at the mouth of Little River were established, and the necessary buildings erected by detachments of the Seventh Infantry sent out from Fort Gibson.

In the spring of 1841 a detachment from Fort Gibson commanded by Captain B. D. Moore was dispatched to select a location for a fort on the Washita River; it was visited the next year by General Zachary Taylor who approved the site for the fort, which he named Fort Washita.

Details from Fort Gibson were engaged also in the construction of a number of important roads; thus in 1826 Captain Pierce M. Butler and Lieutenant James L. Dawson surveyed a military road from Fort Gibson to Fort Smith, the first planned road construction within the limits of the present Oklahoma. Other details built the road from the post to the site of Camp Arbuckle at the mouth of the Cimarron, and another to the mouth of the Washita River.

The unhealthful location of Fort Gibson and the appalling death rate there resulted in ceaseless agitation for the abandonment of the old log fort and the removal of the garrison to a more healthful situation. The people of Arkansas had never given up hope that the garrison might be returned to them. When they were admitted into the Union in 1836 they had sufficient influence to secure the passage of a bill by Congress providing for the removal of the post to that new state. A commission of army officers was appointed to select a new site but they definitely reported against the wisdom of changing the location of the fort which, they said, was greatly needed where it was; but they said that if it were to be removed, the site selected should be at Fort Coffee, still within the limits of the Indian Territory, about thirteen miles up the Arkansas River from Fort Smith. As this did not meet the wishes of the people of Arkansas the matter was dropped.

It was necessary to make constant repairs on the decaying buildings; in 1843 a sawmill was set up at the post for cutting lumber with which to do this work, and a contract was let to Thomas Rogers for the delivery there of 2,000 pine logs which he was to cut on the Spavinaw and float down Grand River.

An order was made the next summer requiring all troops to appear on all parades and drills in white trousers, and in white jackets on all drills. First fatigue call was to be at 5:30 in the morning and guard mount an hour and a half later.

Continued agitation for the construction of more substantial quarters for the garrison resulted in an appropriation by Congress, and on July 17, 1845, General Thomas S. Jesup, quartermaster of the army, arrived at Fort Gibson to direct the construction of new buildings of stone on the hill above, and on the slope between it and the old log fort. Work on the new structures was soon started and by March 1846, a barracks for two companies had progressed above the second floor and timbers for both floors and piazzas were laid.

When the work had reached this stage it was stopped by the burning of the saw mill at the fort with the loss of mill, lumber, and tools. By 1855, the only building completed was the commissary, which is to be seen across the present street from the barracks. The walls of the partially constructed barracks stood for more than ten years, and still marked the unfinished plans of the army when the post was abandoned. The other structures of the fort at that time were principally log barracks, although a substantial number of those originally standing had been destroyed by a disastrous fire in December 1854.

The Cherokee people had been agitating for several years for the removal of Fort Gibson from their country in order that they might enjoy the use of the boat landing which was claimed to be the only good landing place giving access to the interior of the Cherokee Nation. Their argument was strengthened by the fact that, as the frontier had advanced, newer forts had supplanted Fort Gibson in usefulness and strategic location.

The Cherokees were finally successful; the order to abandon the fort was issued June 8, 1857, and within the month was substantially executed. The fort and reservation were turned over to the Cherokee Nation, and the Cherokee Council, on November 6, 1857, passed an act creating the town of Kee-too-wah upon what had been the military reservation, and provided for the sale to Cherokee citizens of lots therein.

The Civil War brought further changes to the old fort. For a time in possession of the Confederate Army, it was afterwards regained by the Union side and on April 5, 1863, the whole hill was reoccupied by three Cherokee regiments, four companies of Kansas cavalry, and Hopkins’ Battery of Volunteers, an aggregate of 3,150 men, with four field pieces and two mountain howitzers.

A main works embraced fifteen to twenty acres with angles and facings; from this extended a line of earthworks about a quarter of a mile in length, the whole defense being considered strong enough to resist a force of 20,000 men. To this work was, for a time, given the name of Fort Blunt, in compliment to Major General James G. Blunt, then commanding the district of the frontier.

General Blunt had made a forced march from Kansas to Fort Gibson and on the night of July 16, 1863, crossed the Arkansas River, proceeded down the Texas Road, and the next morning attacked the Confederate command under General Douglas H. Cooper at Honey Springs, near the site of the present Oktaha, south of Muskogee. By this engagement, the most important battle in the Indian Territory during the war, the Union forces succeeded in preventing a union of Cooper’s forces with those of General William L. Cabell, coming from Fort Smith, and the probable recapture of Fort Gibson by the Confederates.

After this battle the strength of Fort Gibson was increased until on July 31 it aggregated 5,204, and on August 31 there were 6,014 troops at the garrison, with eighteen field pieces. Being the most important fortified point in the Territory, it served as headquarters for the military operations in this region during the remainder of the Civil War and played a conspicuous part in strengthening the hands of the loyal elements among the tribes. The name of Blunt was officially attached to the post until December 31, 1863, when it was dropped in favor of the old name, Fort Gibson.

After the Union forces took possession of the fort it was surrounded by several thousand destitute Indian and Negro refugees who remained there for protection and for the food that was issued to them in small quantities. The multitude of people thus congregated presented a problem to the commandant. Some of them put in small crops under the protection of the guns of the fort; they would have gone farther away to their homes but for the fear that they would be raided by predatory bands from both sides, ranging over the country.

A detachment of regular troops from the first battalion of the Tenth United States Infantry in command of Major James M. Mulligan, on February 17, 1866, relieved the Sixty-second Illinois Volunteers then constituting the garrison. The post remained garrisoned under the name of Fort Gibson by four companies of the Sixth Infantry until September 30, 1871; it was then vacated by the command under General W. B. Hazen and broken up as a military post; there was left only a guard composed of a small detachment of the Sixth Infantry for the quartermaster’s department, which temporarily occupied the post as a depot for such transportation and other facilities as were necessary to enable paymasters and other officers to communicate with Fort Sill.

Beginning with that of 1811, nearly all the classes of the United States Military Academy at West Point were represented among the more than one hundred graduates who were stationed at Fort Gibson from time to time prior to the Civil War. Every class after 1819 had from three to ten graduates who served in later years at that famous post. Many graduates were sent from West Point direct to Fort Gibson to get their first taste of army life and frontier experience. Eight of the class of 1842 came for their frontier service to this fort from whence they were engaged in protecting the Santa Fe traders.