Battle of Round Mountain

Where this fight happened is still argued. The Keystone site, now under Keystone Lake, was long accepted, but in 1949 researcher John H. Melton, with historians Berlin B. Chapman and Angie Debo, placed the battle four miles west of Yale in Payne County and called it Twin Mounds. The column moving north numbered nearly seventeen hundred: Upper Creek followers of Opothleyahola with Comanche, Delaware, Kickapoo, Seminole, Wichita and Shawnee Unionists, and enslaved people and Freedmen hoping to reach the north. Darkness and the danger of a prairie fire ended the fighting, and the column pushed on that night.

What the plaque says

Battle of Round Mountain This first battle of the Civil War in Ind. Ter., began 6 mi. south, Nov. 19, 1861, when Col. D.H. Cooper's Confederate vanguard was repulsed by Little Captain's warrior's from Opothleyahola's Indian allies moving to north of Ark. River to avoid war. Oklahoma Historical Society 173-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Creek Nation Council Oak Park — 17 mi
  The oak on a south Tulsa hill where the Lochapoka Muscogee lit their fire in 1836 after removal from Alabama, the ceremonial ground from which Tulsa took its name.
• Greenwood Rising — 17 mi
  The history center at Greenwood and Archer that tells how Tulsa's Black Wall Street was built, how white mobs burned it in 1921, and how its people rebuilt it.
• Philbrook Museum of Art — 18 mi
  Waite Phillips's 1927 Italian villa and its Villa Lante-inspired gardens, given to Tulsa in 1938 and open as an art museum since October 1939, strong in Native American art.

More markers nearby

• Sapulpa — 14 mi
• First Oil Well, Tulsa County — 15 mi
• Cleveland, Oklahoma's Pioneer Oil City — 16 mi
• Booker T. Washington High School — 17 mi