Chickasaw National Recreation Area

More than thirty springs, fresh and mineral, rise in the hills south of Sulphur, and their strong-smelling mineral water drew Caddo, Comanche and Wichita people before the Chickasaw came. By 1900 a town had grown up around them and developers talked of a resort to rival Hot Springs, Arkansas. The Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, afraid of losing access to the water, appealed to federal officials, and in 1902 the United States bought 640 acres from them as the Sulphur Springs Reservation. In 1906 Congress made it Platt National Park, named for Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut.

The look of the place is the Civilian Conservation Corps'. CCC Company 808 camped here from 1933 to 1940, about two hundred men at a time, and built campgrounds, pavilions, trails, dams and springhouses of native stone and wood. More than two hundred survive, and the Platt district became a National Historic Landmark in 2011. In 1976 the park was joined with the Arbuckle Recreation Area and Lake of the Arbuckles and given the name of the people who first offered the land.

Start at the Travertine Nature Center, built across Travertine Creek in 1969 in a style modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright's. Antelope and Buffalo springs feed the creek at the east end, and bison graze the east pasture, seen from the Veterans Trail. There is no entrance fee. On summer weekends and holidays every lot fills; the park says parking rarely fills on weekdays or from late fall to early spring.