Fort Towson Historic Site

A company of the Seventh Infantry camped on Gates Creek near the mouth of the Kiamichi in May 1824 and named the post for Gen. Nathan Towson. It guarded the border with Mexico, which then held Texas, and removed settlers who claimed the area as part of Arkansas. Abandoned in 1829, it was reoccupied in 1830, the year of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and for the next years it was the end of the Choctaw Trail of Tears, the place from which arriving Choctaw and Chickasaw families were dispersed to their new land. Jefferson Davis served here as a young lieutenant.

Doaksville grew beside it. Josiah Doak, whose Mississippi trading stand had hosted a Choctaw treaty in 1820, came west ahead of the Choctaw, and Red River steamboats made his town prosper. In 1837 the Chickasaw Nation signed the Treaty of Doaksville with the Choctaw Nation, buying the right to settle in its own district. Doaksville was the Choctaw capital off and on after 1850 and steadily from 1858 to 1863, and its 1860 constitution guided the Nation's government until 1906. The army left in 1854; Confederates later made it their headquarters, and in 1865 Stand Watie, the Cherokee brigadier general, surrendered near Doaksville, the last Confederate general to do so.

The Oklahoma Historical Society acquired the site in 1967. A visitor center covers the fort, Doaksville and the steamboat Heroine, sunk in 1838 on its way here; outside are a reconstructed sutler store, a teamster's cabin and a trail through the ruins.