Baker's Ranch

The attack the stone mentions came in the summer the Red River War began. Delayed and short rations, fear of encroachment and white buffalo hunters on Texas Panhandle land the nations believed was reserved for them drove as many as five thousand Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne and others off their Indian Territory reservations in 1874. Agents enrolled those who stayed and declared everyone else hostile, and the Army sent five columns after them, some still in the field in January 1875. Afterward seventy-four men named as leaders were imprisoned in Florida.

What the plaque says

Baker's Ranch Site one-half mile west. This ranch station, noted watering place on the old Chisholm Trail, was attack- ed in the last Indian wars and found deserted a few days later, July 5, 1874, by Indian Agent J. D. Miles who asked for U.S. Cavalry to guard the trail in this section. This site was laid out in 1890 as Baker City, a ghost town now. Oklahoma Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Chisholm — 15 mi
  Kingfisher's farming and ranching museum on the Chisholm Trail's stage branch, with a heritage village and Horizon Hill, the mansion a territorial governor built for a capital that never came.
• Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center — 23 mi
  The Oklahoma Historical Society's Enid museum of the September 1893 run into the Cherokee Outlet, with the town's original land office among the old buildings out back.

More markers nearby

• Bull Foot Station — 3.0 mi
• First Rural Mail Route — 3.8 mi
• Roy V. Cashion — 3.8 mi
• Massacre of Pat Hennessey — 3.8 mi