Webbers Falls

On November 15, 1842, more than twenty-five enslaved people, most of them held on Joseph Vann's plantation here, locked their enslavers and overseers in their houses as they slept, took guns, horses and food, and set out for Mexico, where slavery was illegal. Enslaved people from the Creek Nation joined them. The Cherokee National Council sent eighty-seven militiamen under Capt. John Drew, who caught the exhausted group seven miles north of the Red River on November 28. Five were executed, and Vann put most of the rest to work on his steamboats.

What the plaque says

Webbers Falls Settled in 1829. Named for Walter Webber, Western Cherokee chief, who had a trading post here. Home of "Rich Joe" Vann to 1844, owner of "Lucy Walker", famous quarter mile race horse, for which he named his Mississippi River steamboat. In Civil War battle, April 25, 1863, Webbers Falls was burned by Federal troops. Oklahoma Historical Society 75-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Honey Springs Battlefield — 20 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.
• Fort Gibson Historic Site — 21 mi
  The army's first post in what became Oklahoma, built at Three Forks in 1824, where removed nations arrived; deeded to the Cherokee in 1857, it later housed the Dawes Commission.

More markers nearby

• Tahlonteeskee — 2.9 mi
• Dwight Mission — 15 mi
• Cephas Washburn, Founding Missionary, Dwight Mission — 16 mi
• Battle of the J.R. Williams — 18 mi