Battle of the J.R. Williams

The steamboat is still out there. The J. R. Williams had been detailed to carry supplies from Fort Smith to the Union garrison at Fort Gibson, and Watie's men opened up with cannon and muskets as she slowed to round the bend at Pleasant Bluff, beside the Choctaw landing at Tamaha. Crippled, she ran aground opposite the bluff and was taken. Glenn O. Hyder's encyclopedia entry on Tamaha reports that the boat's rusted skeleton still lay there at the start of the twenty-first century, the most notable riverboat ever to land at the town.

What the plaque says

Battle of the J.R. Williams Site of Civil War naval battle. Confederate Indian forces, led by Cherokee Brig. Gen. Stand Watie, forced aground and captured Union steamboat J.R. Williams with cargo valued at $120,000, on June 15, 1864. Southern troops included Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Oklahoma Historical Society 69-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Robbers Cave State Park — 26 mi
  A sandstone cave in the Sans Bois Mountains north of Wilburton, wrapped in outlaw stories, and the park that Boy Scouts, prison labor and the CCC built around it.
• Sequoyah's Cabin Museum — 29 mi
  The log cabin near Akins where Sequoyah, who gave the Cherokee language its syllabary, settled in 1829, kept since 2016 by the Cherokee Nation inside a stone shelter of 1936.
• Honey Springs Battlefield — 30 mi
  The July 17, 1863 battlefield on the Texas Road, the largest fight in Indian Territory, where Cherokee and Muscogee regiments fought on both sides and the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry held.

More markers nearby

• Tamaha Jail and Ferry Landing — steps away
• Dwight Mission — 17 mi
• Tahlonteeskee — 17 mi
• Webbers Falls — 18 mi