Camp Leavenworth

By the time the dragoons camped near the mouth of the Washita, nearly a third of the regiment was down with disease, and the rest were reorganized into six companies of forty-two men. Leavenworth, wracked by fever, handed the march to Dodge and then followed anyway. He had led the Arikara War campaign of 1823 and founded Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 1827. He was buried first at Delhi, New York, and later reinterred at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery. From the Fort Gibson hospital, George Catlin estimated that as many as 150 men had died since June.

What the plaque says

Camp Leavenworth About 2 mi. South Named for Gen. Henry Leavenworth who died near here July 21, 1834 while en- route from Ft. Gibson to Wichita Village in western Oklahoma for a peace con- ference with the Plains Indians. The ex- pedition continued under Col. Henry Dodge, assisted by many notable offi- cers and civilians including Lt. Jeff- erson Davis and George Catlin, the artist of Indian life. Oklahoma Historical Society and State Highway Commission 1949

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chickasaw National Capitol — 17 mi
  The red granite capitol the Chickasaw Nation finished at Tishomingo in 1898, forced out of at statehood, used as the county courthouse for most of a century and reclaimed by the Nation in 1992.
• Choctaw Cultural Center — 17 mi
  The Choctaw Nation's history told from the Chahta side at Calera, with galleries from Nanih Waiya to the Trail of Tears and the reservation today, a living village and daily stickball.
• Lake Murray State Park — 21 mi
  Oklahoma's first and largest state park, built by New Deal crews on former Chickasaw Nation land south of Ardmore, with Tucker Tower, a governors' retreat never finished, on a point above the lake.

More markers nearby

• Fort Washita — 12 mi
• General Douglas Hancock Cooper — 12 mi
• Edmund Pickens (Ok-chan-tubby) — 15 mi
• Fisher's Station — 15 mi