BARRACKS OF FORT GIBSON
Some cheerful diversions were available, however; there was good fishing in the river a few yards from the post, and thousands of prairie chickens and other game afforded zestful hunting. A billiard room furnished entertainment. Plays were written and presented in the “theater,” the building used on occasions for Indian councils and religious services.
A course was laid out and every year there were exciting horse races for high stakes with entries from all divisions of the fort’s population—officers, traders, and Indians. Indian ponies, that hardly had time to rest up from running buffalo, were entered against the horses of the post. And there were crooked race horse owners who came up the river to the fort for the sole purpose of making what money they could by their peculiar methods. This situation became so demoralizing that Colonel Loomis issued an order barring these people from the reservation. When other things palled—and when they did not—there was always the gossip of the post, rumors and confirmation of promotions, expeditions, and details; the departure of a command on a commission that would at least give the men a change of scene; the rare arrival of the paymaster, with fifty to one hundred thousand dollars in the custody of his military escort; the frequent arrival of steamboats when the rivers were high; and when they were not, visitors and supplies coming by keelboats, wagons, or pack trains.
The hoarse resonance of a steam whistle in the distance told a jaded garrison that a steamboat on the Arkansas River was approaching the fort. Presently the boom of the signal gun on board announced that she had passed the bars three miles below and had safely entered the Grand River. There was always a crowd at the landing place to see her as she came into view down the stream. As the jangle of her bell or the exhaust of her engines heralded her arrival, the multitude was increased by people who were anxious to share in the excitement when she was tied up to the shelving rock that made a natural dock.
For there were passengers to come ashore—friends to greet, who were returning from leave with news from the outside world, messages, and newspapers, and strangers to inspect—young officers from West Point, older officers trained by service in other posts who had come to a new assignment, recruits to fill gaps in the ranks. There were civilians, too, merchants from the neighborhood who had been east exchanging furs and skins for fresh supplies of merchandise; sutlers who brought stores to sell to the officers and soldiers, and bonnets, dresses, and finery for the ladies of the post. And there were wives and children come to unite long-separated families, and young ladies who planned to visit and bring a measure of gaiety to the garrison. Mail bags promised letters from distant relatives and friends. Deck hands and soldiers unloaded boxes and crates of merchandise. It was a busy and noisy scene. Officers went aboard to enjoy the hospitality of the captain and to sample the liquors on his boat.
Young ladies came from the East to visit relatives at the post and they frequently married officers whom they met there, or had previously known. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, when Fort Gibson received many young officers recently out of West Point, such romances were common.
Propinquity and the charm of the Cherokee maidens accounted for many unions between them and the soldiers and officers at the post. Fort Gibson was the center of society and gaiety for a large section of the country that included the Cherokee Nation. The young women of that tribe were much sought by the officers and were welcome guests at the parties given at the post, where many romances budded and bloomed during the seventy years the old fort existed. The result was that in that part of Oklahoma which formerly constituted the Cherokee Nation, many families descended from unions between the soldiers and Indians. Frequently, when their terms of enlistment expired, soldiers remained in the neighborhood, married Indian girls, reared Indian families, and become prosperous from the land holdings these alliances brought them.
For want of diversions of greater interest, numbers of soldiers at Fort Gibson sought such excitement as they could find in the doggeries maintained by mixed-blood Cherokee Indians on tribal lands just off the reservation, where drinking and gambling were indulged in. Violations of the rule forbidding a soldier to remain outside the garrison after retreat had sounded were frequent, and iron bars were employed on the windows in the outer walls of the houses to enforce the regulations. These precautionary measures, said an observer, gave the barracks the appearance of a dilapidated Arkansas jail: the enclosure, he said, was made to hold five companies of troops—officers and men, laundresses and servants herded together in a climate where the temperature ranged in summer from eighty to one hundred degrees. These remarks truly painted a picture that explained much of the resistance to discipline and violation of regulations.
As an instance of punishment, an offender was sentenced to “stand on the head of a barrel with an empty bottle in each hand, in front of the dragoon guardhouse every alternate two hours from reveille until retreat for eight days with a board around his neck marked ‘Whiskey Seller,’ to carry a pack on his back weighing fifty pounds every alternate two hours for eight days, from reveille until retreat; to work at hard labor in charge of the guard for fourteen days, and to have seven days of his pay stopped.” Another culprit was sentenced “to be drummed around the garrison immediately in the rear of Corporal Charles Kelloun of H Company, First Dragoons, carrying a keg in his arms, to have a plank hanging on his back marked ‘Whiskey Runner,’ and to serve fifteen days at hard labor in charge of the guard, making good all time lost by sickness.”