Mountain Station

The first westbound mail crossed this part of the Choctaw Nation on Sunday, September 19, 1858, carrying Waterman Ormsby of the New York Herald. Breakfast and dinner came out of a basket Butterfield had put aboard at Fort Smith: cold ham, cakes, crackers and cheese. Ormsby wrote of rich black land, Choctaws driving large herds of cattle, Texas emigrants in covered wagons holding their families and all their worldly possessions, and ball grounds with tall posts. Late that evening, at Pusley's, he traded an Indian boy a paper of tobacco for enough water to wash his face.

What the plaque says

Mountain Station Site of Old Ft. Smith-Boggy Depot Road A stage stand for changing horses and a toll road over this mountain pass were established here in 1866, under Choctaw law. This road was the Overland Mail route in 1858-61. Oklahoma Historical Society, 1959

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Robbers Cave State Park — 11 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.
• Tvshkahomma Capitol Museum — 16 mi
  The Choctaw Nation's 1884 brick capitol in the Kiamichi valley, seat of its senate, house and supreme court until statehood, now the Nation's museum and the ground of its Labor Day Festival.

More markers nearby

• Bernard de La Harpe 1719 — 4.2 mi
• Riddle's Station — 11 mi
• Choctaw Capitols — 15 mi
• The Choctaw Nation Capitol Building — 16 mi