Fort Gibson: A Brief History

by Grant Foreman; Carolyn Thomas Foreman

General Blunt had made a forced march from Kansas to Fort Gibson and on the night of July 16, 1863, crossed the Arkansas River, proceeded down the Texas Road, and the next morning attacked the Confederate command under General Douglas H. Cooper at Honey Springs, near the site of the present Oktaha, south of Muskogee. By this engagement, the most important battle in the Indian Territory during the war, the Union forces succeeded in preventing a union of Cooper’s forces with those of General William L. Cabell, coming from Fort Smith, and the probable recapture of Fort Gibson by the Confederates.

After this battle the strength of Fort Gibson was increased until on July 31 it aggregated 5,204, and on August 31 there were 6,014 troops at the garrison, with eighteen field pieces. Being the most important fortified point in the Territory, it served as headquarters for the military operations in this region during the remainder of the Civil War and played a conspicuous part in strengthening the hands of the loyal elements among the tribes. The name of Blunt was officially attached to the post until December 31, 1863, when it was dropped in favor of the old name, Fort Gibson.

After the Union forces took possession of the fort it was surrounded by several thousand destitute Indian and Negro refugees who remained there for protection and for the food that was issued to them in small quantities. The multitude of people thus congregated presented a problem to the commandant. Some of them put in small crops under the protection of the guns of the fort; they would have gone farther away to their homes but for the fear that they would be raided by predatory bands from both sides, ranging over the country.

A detachment of regular troops from the first battalion of the Tenth United States Infantry in command of Major James M. Mulligan, on February 17, 1866, relieved the Sixty-second Illinois Volunteers then constituting the garrison. The post remained garrisoned under the name of Fort Gibson by four companies of the Sixth Infantry until September 30, 1871; it was then vacated by the command under General W. B. Hazen and broken up as a military post; there was left only a guard composed of a small detachment of the Sixth Infantry for the quartermaster’s department, which temporarily occupied the post as a depot for such transportation and other facilities as were necessary to enable paymasters and other officers to communicate with Fort Sill.

Beginning with that of 1811, nearly all the classes of the United States Military Academy at West Point were represented among the more than one hundred graduates who were stationed at Fort Gibson from time to time prior to the Civil War. Every class after 1819 had from three to ten graduates who served in later years at that famous post. Many graduates were sent from West Point direct to Fort Gibson to get their first taste of army life and frontier experience. Eight of the class of 1842 came for their frontier service to this fort from whence they were engaged in protecting the Santa Fe traders.

Except for short intervals, General Arbuckle commanded at Fort Gibson for 17 years until 1841 when, because of the dilapidated condition of the buildings there, he removed his department headquarters (but not the garrison), to Fort Smith. Soon afterward the command was given to General Zachary Taylor. When Taylor departed for service in Mexico, Arbuckle was returned to the command of Fort Gibson and remained there through the years of trouble and turmoil of his Indian neighbors of the Cherokee Nation, with whom he was more or less involved.

Fort Gibson was garrisoned by detachments of the Seventh Infantry from its inception in 1824 to February 7, 1839, when the troops left for service in Florida and were replaced by the Fourth Infantry that had arrived the day before, after a long, weary march from that remote Seminole battleground. For a time three companies of the Third Infantry served at the fort until the spring of 1840. The next year General Arbuckle was relieved of his command and it was transferred for a time to Colonel Alexander Cummings of the Fourth Infantry.

In 1843 the post was garrisoned by three troops of Dragoons and four companies of the Sixth Infantry under the command of Colonel William Davenport. Another well-known officer who was in command of the post in 1850 was General W. G. Belknap of the Fifth Infantry. Belknap and Arbuckle died in 1851.

The conclusion of the Civil War returned Fort Gibson to the unimportant status to which it was reduced by its abandonment in 1857. For years, however, the large number of substantial buildings of the post were found useful from time to time. It was reoccupied in July, 1872, by two companies of the Tenth Cavalry under Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson who was sent there to cope with the lawless element attracted by the movement of the railroad camps engaged in building the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad from the Kansas line to the Red River.

After the brief stay of the Tenth Cavalry a company of the Sixth Cavalry and a detachment of the Fifth Infantry were assigned to the post to help police the country, with Lieutenant Thomas M. Woodruff of the Fifth Infantry in command. They were mainly occupied in aiding the Cherokee agent in resisting the encroachment of intruding white men unlawfully seeking to settle in the Cherokee Nation. In order to maintain communication with the outside world a telegraph line was constructed to the fort from the railroad at Gibson Station. Men engaged in cutting poles for the line were crossing the Grand River on a ferry flatboat on April 20, 1874, when in the middle of the river, by awkward handling of the front guy rope, the boat was allowed to swing broadside to the current; this caused it to fill with water and sink. As a result six soldiers of the Fifth Infantry and the Sixth Cavalry and one civilian drowned.