Camp Radziminski

The camp moved twice before it reached this valley. Van Dorn's column came up from Fort Belknap, Texas, in September 1858 and first camped on the left bank of Otter Creek near present Tipton. In November it shifted upstream for better forage, and in March 1859 it moved to a sheltered site on the right bank, four miles northwest of present Mountain Park. From here Van Dorn struck the Comanche at Crooked Creek in southwestern Kansas in May 1859. After Fort Cobb was finished, Texas Rangers used the camp briefly. The site joined the National Register in 1972.

What the plaque says

Camp Radziminski Site 2 mi. West Established Sept., 1858, by four troops of crack 2nd Cav., under Major Earl Van Dorn. Named in memory of Lt. Charles Radzimin- ski, a former member of the Regt. E. Kirby Smith, Cornelius Van Camp, Fitzhugh Lee, W. B. Royall all served there. Permanent type buildings never erected; post aban- doned by Army, Dec. 6, 1859. Oklahoma Historical Society and State Highway Commission 1950

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  Worn granite peaks and mixed-grass prairie in Comanche and Kiowa homeland, set aside in 1901 and restocked in 1907 with fifteen bison sent by train from the New York Zoological Park.
• Museum of the Western Prairie — 22 mi
  The Oklahoma Historical Society's museum in Altus, telling southwest Oklahoma from the granite uplift through the Western Trail, Texas's Greer County, dugouts, irrigation and the air base.
• Quartz Mountain State Park — 23 mi
  The granite Quartz Mountains, the low western range of the Wichitas, rising from Lake Altus-Lugert, with a CCC-built park of 1937, a rebuilt lodge and the climbing rock of Baldy Point.

More markers nearby

• Cutthroat Gap Massacre — 8.7 mi
• Craterville Park — 19 mi
• Altus-Jackson County Well — 23 mi
• Peace on the Plains — 23 mi