Fort Gibson Historic Site

Col. Matthew Arbuckle brought the Seventh Infantry up from Fort Smith in 1824 and built Cantonment Gibson on the Grand River a mile above the Arkansas, at the Three Forks where the Verdigris joins them. It was the first army post in what became Oklahoma, sent to keep peace between the Cherokee and the Osage and to watch the Texas Road. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830 it became Fort Gibson, and its troops built roads and provisioned the arriving parties. At the height of removal it had the largest garrison in the country, and by the time Arbuckle left in 1841 about forty thousand people from the eastern nations had arrived in the country around it.

A council here in 1836 persuaded the majority of the Muscogee (Creek) people to accept the government the McIntosh faction had already set up in the West. The Seminole came in after their war in Florida. In the 1850s the Cherokee complained of the liquor and brothels around the post and asked Congress to remove it, and in 1857 the army left and deeded it to them. Union troops took it back in 1863 as Fort Blunt and marched from it to Honey Springs. The army finally left in 1890, and the Dawes Commission later worked here enrolling the Five Tribes, Cherokee Freedmen above all.

The site keeps original buildings of the 1840s to 1870s, among them stone barracks, the commissary, a bakehouse and the hospital that is now the visitor center, beside a reconstruction of the early log fort and stockade.