A Very OK Podcast
Episode 35: “200 Years of Fort Gibson and Fort Towson”
April 17, 2024
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And here with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to see you again.
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Good to see you, Trait. It’s always good to be back in the History Center.
Thompson: Well, I Bob, I want to talk, just for a second, because you and I have a new passion, and that’s playing pickleball. (laughter) And we’ve had such a good time talking. I picked the game up this summer. We were in Michigan, and just right down the street from where our Airbnb was, was the pickleball courts in the city park, and my mom and I went and bought paddles at Walmart. And we go down there, we do some pickup games, and now I’m hooked, and I’m playing like two or three times a week, and I’m loving the pickleball. In fact, I had my first pickleball injury earlier this year. I had to sit out a month because my back was hurt. And so, but then now, Bob, you’re into the game, right?
Blackburn: As of about six weeks I’ve been playing, and it’s convincing me I don’t need to work as hard as I have been in retirement. For those out there who knew me before I retired, I was kind of a workaholic. That’s my rep, and I was having a hard time slowing down. So I was doing museum exhibit design, books. Now I’m down to one book and one museum exhibit consulting. But pickleball is a reason for me to start saying no. I’m just a boy who can’t say no, but I’ve got to learn, and pickleball is helping me, and I’m just loving it. I’m an old tennis player, old, as well as tennis. And, it’s coming pretty easy. I’m really enjoying it.
Thompson: Yeah, it’s a great game. And, I’ve been playing, there’s a group that meets up at my church on Sunday nights, and it’s great exercise. And I’m a tennis player too. I played in high school and afterwards, but it’s a lot of fun. So hopefully we all stay healthy with our pickleball addiction. I remember you telling me a few weeks ago that your golf game is now taking a hit because of your new pickleball obsession.
Blackburn: That’s right. Some days I think, well, which would I rather do? And it’s kind of a toss-up, but I’m still playing a little golf. I played once last week and hopefully once next week.
Thompson: Well good deal. Well, Bob, I’m so excited about today’s topic on our podcast. And this is something that has been 200 years in the making. We have the opportunity to talk about the 200th anniversary of Fort Gibson and Fort Towson, which are two great OHS sites that are located in the eastern part of the state. And there’s not many things in Oklahoma, at least built structures or places like that, that have turned 200 years old. And so, we have the opportunity to talk about this and to talk about it with us, we have two fantastic guests today with us, and our guests are going to be with us for the duration of the episode. And I would like to bring in Jennifer Frazee, who is the director of the Fort Gibson Historic Site. And I would also like to bring in Calista Stephens, who is the director of the Fort Towson Historic Site. Ladies, it is, I’ve had the opportunity to work with you for several years now since I’ve come into the OHS, and you both do an incredible job as the site administrators out there. And both of those sites are vibrant, and we’re portraying history, and I’m thrilled to bring you into the podcast, and I’m even more thrilled that you work here with us at the OHS.
Jennifer Frazee: Thanks for having us.
Calista Stephens: Yes, thank you for having us.
Thompson: Well, we’re glad to have you here. Before we get too far into today’s episode, I want to talk a little bit about— we’ve been having planning meetings over the last probably year and a half or so, getting ready for this 200th anniversary. And because it is such a significant milestone for these two important sites in Oklahoma history, and of course, as we get into the rest of the episode, we’re going to talk about why these sites are important. But, Jennifer, can you start off and tell us what kinds of things are we doing at Fort Gibson to commemorate the 200th this year?
Frazee: So we’re going to have nearly a year of programming out there, but the big kicker is going to be our anniversary commemoration day, and that’s going to be April 20, 2024, obviously. And so we’ll have, the town is going to have a parade. They’ve been very supportive, you know, of helping us kind of get the anniversary programs off the ground. And so they’re going to have a parade to kick off, and they’ll have a really big concert. Stoney LaRue is going to be out that weekend playing for them and everything. So we’ll get a lot of folks out. At the fort itself, we will have commemoration ceremonies where we’ll start with some dedication speeches and things, kind of recommitting ourselves to teaching history, you know, in fun and engaging ways. And then we are going to have just about the whole entire 80 acres of the site having living history demonstrations from one end all the way to the other, with, you know, self-guided maps and things for people to be able to kind of see. And it’s going to run on the timeline from 1820s all the way up to the turn of the century. So people can kind of have a living timeline to be able to kind of see how the fort unrolled in history.
Thompson: That’s going to be great, and the day before, you have an education day. We’re going to have over 3,000 kids out there, right?
Frazee: Yes, we are going to, that is our almost our annual visitation on that day alone. And so we’ll have 3,000 kids. We have a grant that we were able to to write, the heritage grant, the Oklahoma Preservation Grant that we were able to write that pays for all of the schools to be able to bring their kids out for this important, you know, event that we have going. And so, yeah, 300 kids for our education day. We’re already booked up, and we have more people coming out the next day that couldn’t make it to the to the 19th.
Thompson: So, everybody mark your calendars. April 20, 2024, is going to be a big day at Fort Gibson, not only for the fort itself, but the whole town is involved in this commemoration. The town is planning its own activities, but we’re going to have living history. We’re going to have programming. And of course, you’ll be able to visit some of the historic buildings at the fort and the WPA stockade that was built in the 1930s. So everybody come visit us. I’ll be out there as well. A lot of our OHS staff from other sites will be there helping out, and so we all want you to come. Calista, talk to us a little bit about the 200th anniversary of Fort Towson.
Stephens: Well, we’ve already kicked off a couple of our programs. We’ve had our Education Day already in March. And, our historical interpreter, David Reed, has been working on “Towson Tales,” and that’s about three-minutes episodes on YouTube that we share on Facebook as well. And the thing about David is he goes back to primary sources, so everything that gets put out from our site has been interpreted from cursive scrawl. I don’t know how he does it, my eyes would cross. Our big event is going to be May 18, and I’m proud of the well-rounded event we’re going to have. Our 10 o’clock event will be a wagon that will bring supplies to the sutler store, unload in the sutler store, and our sutler will receive the goods, and he and the teamsters will be talking about the goods that are going to be received. And those goods will actually be, some of them, sold throughout the day. So anything that’s historically appropriate, guests can actually come in and buy. We’ll have, of course, artillery, which is a staple there at our site. We’ll be firing our Mountain Howitzer. Kenny Sivard, he’s a local historian.
Thompson: Also one of our board members.
Stephens: Yes. He’ll be coming in and talking about the connection with the Choctaw and Chickasaw people, because Fort Towson was one of the receiving stations for the Choctaw and Chickasaw people when they came to Indian Territory. And then part of our program that I’m particularly excited about, Kimberly Prack from Nash Farms will be coming in, and she’ll have women’s clothing from different eras. When the fort was active, 1824 to ’54, and then even some Civil War clothing. So our whole program kind of spans that time period. But I’m excited to see the differences in the women’s clothing. You know, typically when we think about forts, we think about men, we think about the artillery. But we have some different parts of our program that’s going to appeal to a wider audience. And then, of course, we have our Doaksville program in October, and David is keeping the topic of that under wraps. (laughing)
Thompson: It’s a secret!
Stephens: Yes, he likes to have all of his research done before he lets us know. But, you know, last year it was, articles from the Choctaw Intelligencer newspaper. So people went through, and things that actually happened in Doaksville during, I believe it was 1847—I may be wrong there. People actually got to see things that happened in Doaksville. So, of course, you know, it was our narration of it, but it was a lot of fun that those things actually happened there that year.
Thompson: And, folks, you need to know, how do you get to Fort Towson? Drive to Hugo, then drive east. If you hit Idabel, you’ve gone too far.
(laughter)
Thompson: Okay? It is down in the far southeastern corner of the state. Beautiful, beautiful piece of property down there with the tall pine trees, and it’s green and lush, and it’s a great piece of property. Both of these events are going to be so family-friendly, and if you want, bring your kids, bring your grandkids, come. This is where a lot of people develop their first passions for history when they get to see it come alive in these kinds of living history demonstrations. And Bob, I know this is something that the OHS has made a priority to do for a long, long time is to bring history to life for people.
Blackburn: Yeah. You know, adding the living history, of course, we have to remember Whit Edwards on our staff for many years, who is deceased now, but Whit brought with him a talent for living history and respect within the living history community. And a lot of people always need to be reminded that these most of the reenactors we have, if they’re not on our staff, are volunteers for Civil War era or even Mexican War era, or a dragoon. They are spending a couple of thousand dollars a person just outfit themselves, and they’ll come out. We started encouraging that, in the really, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was when that grew here. Missouri had always had the reputation of the state that did the most with living history, and Texas, of course, but I think it grew to where we were on an equal par with Missouri. And so we pulled reenactors from Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, surrounding states, and living history just brings it all to life, and especially for people who are not history buffs, who have read a lot and understand the background the museum can give them an experience. But to see it and to hear it, with these educators is really something special.
Stephens: So with the living history and with our 200th events, Jennifer mentioned recommitting to teaching history. You know, I’m glad she mentioned that, because that’s something that we’ve talked about at our site. These events are really, the 200 years is a milestone, but the events are causing us new excitement and inspiration for moving forward, building on these events and having that great living history education well into the future and making it bigger and better than ever, reaching more people and broader audiences.
Frazee: And one of the great things about that is that the way that we have been able to do it, starting with Whit Edwards, is people are able to see themselves in that history and make those connections because like for our, our 200th, for example, we’re going to have women demonstrators out there demonstrating different aspects of women who were the first people who had commissions with the military to run sutler stores or who were first employed by the United States military. We’ll have demonstrations by our First Kansas Colored Volunteer Regiment out there as well. So we’re going to be able to do this recommitment to a history, and we’re doing it in a way that we’re able to tell all these amazing stories that we didn’t have time to tell, you know, in the last couple of decades that we’ve been doing this.
Thompson: Absolutely. Well, we’re going to look forward to that for quite a bit. Well, let’s get into talking about, you know, these two, we call it, they are forts. They were called forts. But when they were first established, they were actually cantonments, Cantonment Towson and Cantonment Gibson, established in 1824 within about, you know, a couple of weeks of each other in that April time frame of 1824. Bob, I think it’d be great to get into talking about what’s going on in American history, what’s going on in this region at the time that causes the United States government to want to establish both of these cantonments?
Blackburn: Well, really, history starts going downhill from terms of both of these forts in 1803, Louisiana Purchase. At that point, the American frontier was the Mississippi River with forts along the Mississippi River. Vicksburg would be a good example. And then, to the west would have been Mexico or the New Spain. And so you had Spanish control kind of reverted back and forth between Mexico and France for a while, but largely just a distant frontier, trappers and traders, the Indian tribes that would have been dominant from 1803 to 1824 would have been the Osages coming in from the north Missouri, parts of Kansas, you had from the west, the Kiowa and the Comanche. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were beginning to move south on the Great Plains. So you had the nomadic tribes following the buffalo on this western frontier beyond the Cross Timbers. And then the national government, Thomas Jefferson buys Louisiana Territory, and suddenly we have this new territory. And at the same time, you have this evolving policy on Indian removal, removing tribes from the far East to the West. Thomas Jefferson, who really cared about American Indians, thought well, this will give them a chance to change and adapt and acculturate, give them 200 years to change that far out onto the frontier. So they started moving tribes out from the northeast to the Great Lakes region, the Mid-Atlantic to the Ohio River Valley. In the south, from the Deep South, Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Alabama, to Oklahoma. And so with this policy, new land, we need to protect this frontier. If we’re really going to control this, we need to have our own forts. And the closest fort at the time would have been Fort Smith on the Arkansas River, which is the Gibraltar of the time and a huge fort, almost year-round navigation up to that point from the Mississippi River. But they needed to move farther west to kind of provide a buffer zone between those nomadic Plains Indians who are hunting the buffalo, and part of their culture was to raid and to barter as well and to trade, but somehow that needed to be controlled. If you’re going to move the Indians out of the east, you need to protect them. You need to be able to serve them. You need to be able to get the provisions to them so they can establish their towns and their villages and transplant and start agriculture and trade and all of this. So the forts were there at a time in American history when things are changing very rapidly with the Louisiana Purchase, and it was a way for the federal government to exert their own control. Fort Towson would have been on the international border. South of that would have would have been Mexico.
Thompson: You know, when I talk about Fort Towson and when I tell them that, you know, of course, you have to remind people because we’re so used to, oh, that’s the border with Texas. Well, you have to remind them in 1824, that’s the border with Mexico. And of course, that is, you know, there was some political unrest because just a few years before, that had been the border with Spain. And so, people don’t, I think, put that together in their heads that Towson was five miles from the Red River, and this was a fort on an international boundary line.
Blackburn: And most of the Choctaws who were coming out that needed the protection and the services of Fort Towson would have been along the Red River. The acculturated Choctaws, Robert M. Jones is the best example. He had several plantations, a couple of hundred slaves by the time he passed away. The richest man west of Natchez, he was a little bit farther west, where the Kiamichi flows into the Red River. And so Fort Towson was there, and then across the the local creek would have been the little community of Doaksville, which is where you would have had a trading post. You would have had a little small hotel. You would have, for a while, that the capital of the Choctaw Nation. Well, Fort Towson, was there working with civilians across the creek to try to keep those troopers who tended to get in a little trouble if they had the chance, and to keep a little bit of separation. But we now treat it as a complex, and Calista can talk more about that in a minute. And then Fort Gibson, of course, was at the critical junction of Three Rivers. So the Three Forks, and with those three rivers coming in, and a river would have been the mode of transportation at the time, cross-country was prohibitive in cost. Of course, there was no steam engine, no railroads at the time. And so controlling the Three Rivers area, which is near present-day Muskogee, just across the river, Fort Gibson, of course, was established there to control this critical area where the Osages, they had already been there for 25 years in their own communities and were still trading in the area, and even the Comanches and Kiowas.
This is part of this changing landscape with these two forts. And it really brought the American authorities here to try to keep alcohol out of the territories. That was part of their duty, which they never succeeded in doing, but they tried. It was a way to try to protect the Indians from the east. It was a way to kind of deal with trade. And you go a few years into the future, as some rebels in Texas decide they don’t want to be part of Mexico, including Davy Crockett, would come through Fort Towson on the way to the Alamo. He came through and wrote one of his last letters when he was there. And he said some very favorable things to his wife in some letters. Oh, this is beautiful country, this Choctaw country. So I might come back and try this out. So Davy Crockett and others, and then you get to the Mexican War. It would have been a critical junction to send American troops south during that war, 1846–48, and almost every military expedition into the Wild West of the south, really south of Fort Leavenworth, would have come through Fort Gibson. And so Fort Gibson is where George Catlin joins a group going west. It’s where, Washington Irving comes in and goes to the present-day Oklahoma County. And so both of them are these jumping off spots to the Wild Wild West and trying to bring this federal authority to the Louisiana Purchase in the South.
Stephens: So in regard to Texas and Arkansas and the different areas, that surrounded Fort Towson, one of the things that we do is interpret that history of the way they interacted with one another, how they affected one another. So in modern times, you know, we’ll have a guest from Texas to come in, and we’ll say, did you know our histories are connected? When the Alamo was happening down in Texas, that affected our fort because we had to get reinforcements here because there was a real threat of fighting spilling over that Red River, because we were so close to that international border with Mexico. And when our friends from Arkansas, would come in, we say, did you know that Miller County, Arkansas, that boundary was floating? The United States government didn’t know where it was, and the average person certainly didn’t know where it was. There was one time where about 200 Miller County, Arkansas, residents got together and were going to attack our fort. Voss, he was fort commander for the longest time for seven years, from 1832 to ’39. He had real problems with keeping Miller County, Arkansas, residents from bringing alcohol over and selling to the Native Americans. So our history is all intertwined, and our most obvious is Texas and Arkansas. But when you look at trade, you know, coming down the Mississippi River and with the steamboat, our interaction is even more broad in the United States.
Thompson: Jennifer, I want to bring you into the conversation here because you’ve done a lot of research into some of the original documents about why Fort Gibson was established, and I’d love for you to share that with us, because we’ve had this conversation before, and I would encourage people to go back and listen to our podcast called “Two Worldviews in Conflict,” where we talk about Cherokee removal, and that’ll give you an in-depth look at why some of this was happening. But, you know, United States government at the policy regarding our American Indian tribes was kind of a muddled mess. And it was, let’s throw them over across the Mississippi River. We’re not going to be out there for a long, long time. So they’ll be out there, and it’ll be okay. But westward settlement happened much faster. And so you have settlers and you have Native American tribes that are interacting with each other. And it’s kind of a powder keg. And, not only that, you have the Cherokee and the Osage that were just kind of thrown in the mix together. And Colonel Arbuckle, who was the founder, the commanding officer at Fort Gibson, that was one of the main things that he did for probably the first 10, 12 years of the fort, is trying to keep the Cherokees and the Osage and other tribes from starting a larger Indian war. So can you kind of get into some of that history a little bit?
Frazee: Sure. So according to the US Army headquarter records, the purpose of establishing Fort Gibson and Fort Towson were to further westward expansion and to ensure the success of Indian removal policies. Right? And whenever the fort was established, there were already settlers or European-American squatters that had already, you know, settled there in the area. And there was a little bit of shenanigans going on with determining the the border of the Arkansas or Arkansas, for them to be able to kind of figure out where the white settlers who came out here were supposed to be removed to and whose land was what. There was also, so Arbuckle was just an amazing person to be able to handle all of this stuff because one of the things, it’s not only that they were they were moving people out here. There was the removal that was going on. A total of 64 nations were removed out here during that period. But it was also, they were dealing with different cultures and different understandings of what a treaty actually was and where the parameters of that were. And the Osage and the Cherokee fights was a really great illustration of that because it was a treaty. I used to think that it was a misdone treaty, or maybe the United States really wasn’t looking into the whole system for whatever reason, until I realized that it was that they had no understanding of what Osage culture was in regards to some of those treaties. So when the Osage said, “yeah, you can, people can live on the land, that’s fine. You know, they can move out here. We’ll trade it for you.” They didn’t do separate negotiation on hunting grounds. And so whenever they saw Cherokee people coming in here hunting on the land that was assigned to them through this treaty, they were upset because they thought we didn’t give you permission to do that. What are you here for? And so you see all those different kind of fights and battles that they were having to go on to be able to handle that. But, yeah.
So they were shifting from a factory system because, and I just read a book, I reviewed for OHS, it was the great, Forts of the Great Plains, I think. And the author of that book pointed out that the forts at the beginning were like trading posts. They were factory systems, you know. Of course, that was to get the Natives in debt, you know, so they could get land and everything. But at this point in this area, at least, they were shifting over to a way to be able to, like I said, further westward expansion and everything. So they were shifting away from that factory system over to a “let’s protect this,” and then let’s kind of have this, I consider it the pop culture of the 19th century because they were having people come out, and they were getting that spirit of adventure and excitement and encouraging more people to move west, which was causing that to kind of steamroll faster.
Thompson: And I want to point out too, at these forts, I think we have a picture of what a fort is based on watching John Ford westerns, maybe. You know, the forts trilogy with John Wayne and Fort Apache and, you know, some of those movies, but we picture cavalry troops. Both Fort Gibson and Fort Towson, there was not cavalry troops. They were infantry troops, which meant that their range was very small, and they were not able to cover a lot of territory. They were not able to go out. And also they were very understaffed as well. So I want everyone to take out of their head this idea that, you know, it’s the cavalry charging out of the fort gates and all of those kinds of things, because one of the things that surprised me the most, Bob, was just that, Arbuckle was tasked with being as much of a diplomat as a soldier, something that I’m not sure that they got the training for at West Point or not.
Blackburn: Well, a lot of people forget too, he was dealing with a sovereign nation. The Cherokees had bought their land. The Muscogee (Creeks) had bought their land. The Choctaws had bought their land. So they owned a fee title. In 21st-century Oklahoma, it’s now tribal sovereignty, and other issues have been created. But these were tribal governments. The Cherokees had their own language, their own newspapers. So they have their own executive branch, their legislative branch, their judicial branch. And so you have a soldier at one of these forts dealing with these tribal leaders who have their own military, the Lighthorsemen, who were these militia groups that they can pull together at the last minute and chase down runaway slaves, or to deal with an outbreak of alcohol importation. And then you have their court systems. And so they had to be diplomats within almost a foreign country.
It wasn’t as if they’re in this wild frontier where it’s just nothing but trees and open space and blue sky. There were villages, there were settlers, there was trade, there was government, there was education. And then exploitation of American Indians, almost all the Americans around Indian Territory, no matter what time period, saw the Indians as a natural resource to exploit. There’s even a bit of that even today. You see that in politics. Sometimes people misunderstand tribal sovereignty. And those frontiersmen around the borders thought nothing of going into the Choctaw Nation or the Cherokee Nation and cutting timber and hauling it off to a mill, or going in and exploiting the natural resources, whether, whatever it might be, and stealing horses. And they thought, well, these are not really people. These are Indians. The racism of the time. We’ll just steal their stock. And so, the military was there in a very difficult position, as you said, with few resources, disease. A lot more soldiers died of disease in the west and they ever did from fighting anybody, and it was just a tough place to be. And most of these soldiers would have been poor people from the east who had very few other options. Why go west and live in these unhealthy conditions, putting your life at risk? You did it out of desperation. So, typically, they’re uneducated. A lot of them are immigrants coming out speaking different languages. And you have this officer class that may have gone through West Point. And so you get this diversity of the soldiers themselves living in a very diverse environment.
Thompson: I want to pick up on what Bob said about the sickness at the fort, because Fort Gibson was called a charnel house because so many soldiers died there. In fact, Arbuckle himself suffered from numerous maladies like malaria and things like that. And so, Jennifer, can you can you weigh in on that?
Frazee: Yeah. So, Fort Gibson definitely was known as “the Charnel House of the West.” It seemed for a long period of time that people were posted there just to die. So they were either dying of illness, disease or just outright boredom. These guys were so bored out of their mind sometimes, and people would come out there. We were on the river. Right? We were on the Neosho Grand, and so you have all the cholera epidemics that are breaking out there. You have malaria that’s going on at the time. And of course people don’t understand what germ theory is at this point. They really didn’t start getting into germ theory until after the Civil War. So at this time, they thought that there were just bad humors in the air that was getting people sick, which was a whole powder keg of its own. And so, yeah, so they’re just coming out here and just being sickly, and it doesn’t make for a great safety on the border for our nation whenever all the soldiers are really ill and and sick from all these different endemic diseases that are going on at the time.
Blackburn: And Trait, at Fort Gibson especially, I’ve always had a challenge of leading tours there because you really have two forts, you have the early fort, which, and we’ll talk about the reproduction a little bit, but then moving up on top. Well, the reason they moved out of the river bottom up on the hill was because of disease. They thought, well, we’ll get up there and be healthier. You’ll have more wind, and it didn’t work quite as they thought. But one of the new developments that hopefully Jennifer will talk about in a minute is the hospital. They finally did build a hospital there, and it’s now serving a new purpose. But disease was very much a part of both of these forts and life in the West.
Thompson: Calista, I have in my notes here in 1827, Major Cummings, who was the commander at Fort Towson, he lamented the lack of troops, and he talked about how it would be better to have no post at all than one that was so inadequately manned that it couldn’t fulfill its mission. And that talks about, you know, the resources that they have and that he made the suggestion that his investigations reveal, because there was this going back and forth. Of course the white people called the natives “savages,” and, you know, all of this back and forth. He said his investigations revealed that “the Indians are more sinned against than sinning.” And that’s a quote from him.
Stephens: So, it’s interesting about the number of people that were out there. I was just looking at the post returns between 1824 and ’29, and you start out with very few people, of course, 50, 60 people out there, and you get up to about 100, and then you take another dive, and then toward the end, I thought it was pretty interesting. There was a little uptick in the amount of troops that were out there. The interaction with the Native Americans there during that time, there was one particular raid from the Tawehash Indians, and the soldiers there proved themselves pretty inept at going out and defending their fort. So I thought that was pretty interesting. They just weren’t doing a very good job of defending their own people. You know, there was there was this raid by the Tawehash, and they couldn’t even go out and abduct these people who had done this.
Thompson: What would have been some of the daily tasks? If you were, you know, just a soldier in the army. You wake up in the morning, what do you do? What does your day look like? And some of the things that you were tasked with as you are stationed out in the middle of nowhere?
Stephens: At Towson, it would have been pretty mundane. There was some supplementing of rations with the wildlife around there, a little bit of foraging that was happening.
Blackburn: And gardens?
Stephens: Yes, definitely gardens. There were three different types of gardens. There were the soldiers’ gardens, which is how, you know, we interpret agriculture at our site. You know, these guys were really the models of sustainability. They had to take care of themselves. So they had the soldiers’ gardens, which had the things that would have kept for a long time. They had the officers’ gardens with the delicacies like the cucumbers and the tomatoes, and then they had the hospital gardens with the herbs and the medicinal plants, and you know, we’ve lost so much of that knowledge. I think it’s interesting. We’re attempting to go back and learn as a society. But we’ve had very, very good results with having a naturalist come in and just teach about some of those remedies that those soldiers would have used then. So that’s something that people can come and learn about the life of the soldier there at the site, some of the things that they would have done to heal themselves. There really wasn’t much of an issue of discipline at Fort Towson. There are some very small instances, but we’ve found very few on record. And, Dr. Bob, have you found any records of discipline there that Fort Towson?
Blackburn: I have not.
Stephens: Yeah. They were really a pretty well-behaved group.
Thompson: So Jennifer, a soldier is going to have to get up. They’re going to, they have their rations for the day. You know, one of the things that we do at the Fort Gibson is we have Bake Day, where you could come get bread that’s made in the oven there. So you can you talk about a little bit of the food. Also, in 1818, the War Department required posts to cultivate vegetable gardens, and it said that Cantonment Gibson’s gardens were usually bumper crops because they’re there in the river bottomland.
Frazee: I’ve always been jealous of Fort Gibson. So I came from Hunter’s Home. That’s the historic site that I was at before I took the position of director. And it was awful because my boss, David Fowler, would always, like, show me pictures of how great Fort Gibson’s gardens were doing. And I’m struggling to grow rocks over at Hunter’s Home garden. But, yeah. So food was a very obviously, it’s a huge thing for culture. It’s a huge thing for people to be able to survive out there. And so they had their supplement crops that they used to supplement their rations and everything. They also had the bakehouse out there. Fort Gibson was huge. They had a kiln, stables, and things like that, but they had a couple of different bakehouses. We have one of them that’s partially still remaining. It’s been rebuilt several times, and we cook twice a year out of it. We make, we do a couple of runs of bread on a Saturday in our spring, and then we do gingerbread in the Christmas season and for people to come out and decorate. And so whenever the soldiers would, have part of their rations, some of that would be the bread that was baked in the bakehouse. And so you’d have different people that were on different duties. So soldiers could be put on guard duty. They could be put on patrol duty. You’d be put on KP duty. So they’re working in the kitchens, operating the mess halls to feed everybody. And you weren’t special, you know. Everybody had to do it, right? I think the bakehouse, bake duty, you would have apprentices to the baker, and you would have helpers and things. But I think probably the baker was, they were just there because you don’t want to mess up a good thing. Right? And so they would have to keep those bakehouses going continuously. And with that bake oven, like all of us sitting at this table could fit into the bread oven like where the bread is baked. It’s huge, and they could make about 90 loaves for each run. And it was putting out constantly. And so that was one of the ways they were able to feed their soldiers.
But it was crazy too because they had an idea about bread that soldiers couldn’t eat fresh bread. It would make them sick. And so they would hold on to it for a couple of days to keep them, I guess to, like, let it settle, maybe. And then they would give that bread to their soldiers in their rations to be able to eat so they wouldn’t get sick because, my God, it’s Fort Gibson, you know, people are going to die. We don’t want to give them any other reason to get sick. Yeah. So the bakehouse was a pretty big aspect of that.
Blackburn: Trait, one issue here too that you’re dealing with daily life is transportation. What’s their connection with the rest of the world? There are really two ways at the time. Most of the provisions would have come by water. It was like pennies on the dollar compared to overland trade at the time, and so you’d be getting very few resources over land. And there were roads. The military established the first roads in what is now Oklahoma. And, in fact, Bill Corbett, a historian that used to be on our board, good friend of mine, did an article in The Chronicles about the military roads, connecting largely out of Fort Smith and going west to Gibson and south to Towson, and then later going off to other forts— Fort Cobb, Fort Supply, and others. But those would have been where it would’ve been for communication, largely over land. For provisions coming in, they would have been coming by water.
And we know because we found the steamboat Heroine that’s interpreted there at Fort Towson. An incredible find. We spent over a million dollars on the archaeology on the site, aa working with the archaeologists down in Texas, Texas A&M. But by looking at what was on that manifest, you know what those soldiers needed out here in the west. They needed flour because there was not much wheat being grown. If you know Fort Towson as you said earlier, pine trees. So you’re not getting much wheat. You don’t have the, you know, the granaries like you would have up at Fort Gibson. And so it was wheat, I mean, flour coming in. Soap was one of the big things. And one of them, one of my real joys one day when we were looking at things coming out of the river, and these archaeologists in their diving gear were bringing things up, it was a it was a box that had a “P” on it and a diamond. We later found out it was Procter & Gamble in like its first year out of Cincinnati, taking the lard from the “hog-opolis,” as they called it at the time, converting it into soap. And they were bringing this in, and so we have one of the oldest soap boxes in the world at Fort Towson that came up. It actually may be here. I don’t know, if it may be in the collections here in the exhibit at the History Center, but we learned a lot about provisioning these forts because they filed an insurance claim.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: When the boat went down. So we know exactly at least approximately, hogs, there were barrels full of pork. And we know that the vendors were cheating the government because they had all of these bones in with, it was supposed to be pure lard and pork, and it was about half skeletal remains that we found, and I was there the day they pulled up some of that lard, and it was putrid. The smell was awful.
Thompson: I guess if you’re at Fort Towson, and you get a barrel full of bones, who you’re going to complain to? You know, it’s going to be three months for a letter to get anywhere. So, sorry about your luck, right?
(laughter)
Blackburn: Yeah. Check’s already in the mail. So, but transportation would have been very important to these soldiers and commanders.
Thompson: I was really surprised to learn that one of the main duties of soldiers at both of the forts was road building. And, can you imagine, you know, middle of July, having to go cut timber and build a road in eastern Oklahoma? It just sounds like one of the worst possible things. I don’t know, maybe in your, Calista mentioned that there were very few discipline issues. Did we have issues with soldiers going AWOL?
Frazee: We did. We had, so, Fort Gibson seems like, out of the two, it was the problem child, I think. So we get all sorts of information on the different soldiers that got in trouble, mostly for going AWOL because they were dying of boredom at the outpost. And so they would definitely leave, and some of their punishments just soldiers, they were sassy, and some of their punishments that they were getting just kind of entertained me because we had one where these two guys got in trouble. I don’t recall what for. And so they were put on well-digging, as opposed to road crew work, right? And so their job was to dig this well. And so they were digging the well for days. They should have been able to dig to China, you know, for as long as they were digging. But what happened was they came to a rock in their well, and they dug around it and underneath it just far enough to be able to set up poker games.
(laughter) And so they were going down there every day, and every so often they would bring up a bucket of dirt so that they would then say, “oh, it’s real rocky down here, you know,” but then go back to their game. And, I think they said they could have dug a well, I think 78 feet, I think, deep by the by the time, you know, in the time they spent just kind of hanging out there. So yeah, they would get into a lot of trouble. And they got back at their superior officers too. One of my favorite finds was in the latrines when they were doing the archaeology out there, they’re coming up with like gold-plated teapots and things, and they’re thinking, we thought we were on latrines, what is going on here? It turns out that whenever the soldiers would get mad at their commanding officers for punishing them for things like this, they would just dump their things in the latrines because nobody is not going after that.
Thompson: Not going after that!
Frazee: But yeah, it was, it was a big thing for them over there.
Stephens: So Trait, brought up the differences in forts. And as far as the men that were stationed there, but a big difference is the way they looked. When I think of a fort, I think of Fort Gibson, you know, that palisade, that enclosed square. At Fort Towson, you know the earlier fort, well at first, it was a cantonment, 1824 to ’29. And then when it was rebuilt, 1831 and ’32, it was in a square fashion. But then in 1834 when Loomis came in and found it in such disrepair, he rebuilt it, and that’s when he put in the limestone foundations. But they were chastised a couple of times for it being so nice, for it being more like an interior country palace than a place of defense. So I thought that was really interesting. That sky blue, beautiful color of the fort. We have that inside our museum at our bunkhouse exhibit. It really was that pretty. Mary Marcy, when she came, described the trees that were growing there, and just paints this beautiful picture of what it looked like. I found, I’m really interested in trees. I’m growing two little foresters in my house. So I always key on to the trees. And I found two accounts of the description of the trees that were growing there and, you know, fruit trees, oaks, walnuts. Just absolutely gorgeous.
Thompson: Jennifer, it says that in May of 1824, three sides of the Fort Gibson stockade were completed. And this is basically, you know, this log fort that you put together. And, but by 1827, the fourth side had still not been completed. And finally, in April 1827, they did get the fourth side of the stockade fort completed. And so, I’m glad Calista brought this up, because I did want to talk about the evolution of the structures at the fort and how this came about. You know, we just got a grant to restore the barracks building at Fort Gibson. And this is one of the buildings that Bob was talking about that’s farther up on the hill. That was started, what, in the 1840s? And so we just got a grant from the National Park Service to do some restoration work to that, which we’re excited about. But can you get into the evolution of Fort Gibson and how it would have looked through the years?
Frazee: So, for Fort Gibson, it started out as tent city, and I guess most of your forts will start out as tent city. The soldiers are just throwing up tents, and they’re able to kind of operate off of that until their structures are built. And then after that point, they were building the walls around the area. But the entire fort itself wasn’t all behind walls. So, whenever they were able to finally get those walls put up, it was just in one portion of it. Because you also have like all the area, I guess the river was a defense line as well. So that was considered, I guess, a wall, and then they were taking advantage of the terrain out there. So, as you’re going on to the property, you start at the bottom end of the fort, which is, the northwest or the southwest side, I guess, of the fort. And then you drive up to the top of the hill, we call it Garrison Hill. And that’s where your stone buildings are at, and those are the later-built places. And if you go just past that boundary there, it just kind of falls away into more land and like swampy areas. It would have been really swampy back then before the dam and everything were put in. But they were able to use the terrain of the property to be able to kind of defend themselves as they were going through there. And so I guess that’s probably why they were able to take so long to get the rest of the fort built was because of that. And then, plus, so I guess we could talk a little bit about the ineptitude of some of the people who were constructing the fort because they were using a lot of green timber to build some of it, so it would rot just about as fast as they were able to put it up.
Blackburn: Trait, I’ll never forget when we had the Oklahoma Anthropological Society take on Fort Gibson as a summer project. This must have been about ten years ago, may have been longer, but they went out, and they were determined to find the original foundation stones because what you see now is a reproduction done by the WPA during the 1930s. And I once interviewed the man who got the grant, Q. B. Boydston, was still alive when I started here in 1979, but they had to move it because the railroad had been built in the river and went right across the site of the original fort.
Thompson: Yeah, that’s one thing we’re still upset about that.
Blackburn: Yeah. Me too. But when these archaeologists came out, they found the foundations that went on either side of the railroad tracks, and it was like the Roman soldiers had built this foundation, and it was red rock sandstone that they quarried locally. And they had a surveying skill at the time. It’s just, you could get down there and look, and it didn’t vary a quarter inch from one end to the other, and the beautiful construction of that stone is still there. Now, we had to cover it back up because it couldn’t protect it, but it was an amazing find when we found that original, because we knew where the forts had been. In fact, one of my projects at OSU in the early ’70s was working with the Archaeological Survey is to try to determine where the original fort was. And we guessed, and it was within a few feet of where we thought it was because the army kept such good records. That’s another thing about the advantage they have. The army is the greatest bureaucracy in the world. They kept everything, the floor plans for these forts are still there in the archives. And, Keith Tolson, I think was his name. One of our staff members went back and found all the records on Fort Towson at one point in the National Archives. I remember when that happened in the ’80s. But the construction was done, and one reason they were not in a hurry is that a lot of people think, well, they’re in this hostile country, and they’re going to be attacked any day. They really weren’t. I don’t think they were ever attacked by armed forces. You know, people stealing a horse might have been the greatest threat. But they’re among people who are settled, who are friendly. And even the Plains tribes would not dare to come that far with an armed group, because there was no way they could attack these soldiers with their firepower at the time. And so, you know, yeah, we’ll get that fort done eventually. (laughing)
Blackburn: But it was no big urgency.
Stephens: You brought up about not being in a hostile environment. You know, because Fort Towson was such a remote location, they really had to be self-sufficient. And, of course, they did occasionally get a steamboat in and got a wagon load of supplies, but they really did have to trade with the Choctaw people there at Doaksville. Doaksville was quite the hub, quite the trading center. They had a number of mercantiles throughout that settlement. The Choctaw were business people, and they took advantage of that and traded with the soldiers there at the fort.
Thompson: I’d like to get into, well, one thing I do want to get into, because, I think Calista, you mentioned this before, and we we talk about forts in the military. We tend to just talk about the men, and I want to highlight the role of women at the fort, because there were some soldiers who were able to bring their wives with them. I think that was probably few and far between, but also there were women who were employed there as laundresses and helping out in the sutlers area. And so I’d love for, this is up for grabs for either of you, if we can get into talking about how the women helped maintain the mission of the fort.
Frazee: So my big thing with the women of the military at the time was I had no idea that women were actually employed by the Army until I started working for Fort Gibson and started learning about the Sanitation Commission, the laundress quarters out there, and they were held in pretty high regard, and it kind of gave way to some of the, kind of the falsehoods that were being bandied about, about women as camp followers as well. And I think that kind of was the officers’ wives that played a lot into that. But yeah, so women were there as the laundresses, and they were washing the laundry and everything because, you know, you had to have your clothes, you know, hygiene kept up with at the time. And so they would be able to do all the laundry and everything. If the soldiers needed patches sewn on, that kind of stuff. So they would take out work as well, that they were doing, and they were basically able to be paid so well that they were a part of a two-family income. And so laundresses were in very high demand as marriage material out there. And then you also had the women who were laundresses, but they didn’t take in work from soldiers on like sewing and seamstress work. They helped in the hospitals as nurses and things. And that gave rise to a lot of the women that were working in the Sanitation Commission that actually developed the hygiene practices for the United States military and got people to stop, you know, cutting off wounds and touching them with unwashed hands, that kind of thing. And then you had the women that were also helping out in the kitchens and such too. So they were out there working. So they were a benefit to the military.
Whereas the soldiers’ wives, the officers’ wives were few and far between, as the officers’ wives were, because they were kind of seen as a burden, and that caused some ill feelings between the women that were employed by the military and the women who were out there who just wanted to be with their husbands. And that kind of got that to where eventually, later on down the road, women were kind of barred from the military after that point.
Stephens: I think that social divide is really interesting and oddly enough, you know, it’s the hoity-toity officers’ wives who were not welcome at the fort, but the laundresses were very welcome. And, you know, they’d sit down there with the paymaster, and the soldier would come up to get his pay, and he’d look at the laundress and say, okay, how much does he owe you? And she would get paid first on top of her regular salary. A couple of women that we know about, in particular at our fort, Voss brought his family, and his daughter was there. And sometimes in history, you look and you can say, okay, we have definitive evidence of how she died, but logically, she died, just oh, six-to-nine months after she got married. So we think Voss’ daughter died at a pretty young age at the age of about 25 or so. So we’ve got records of her being there, and then one of my favorite accounts of a woman at Fort Towson was at the end of the fort. And in Withenbury’s book, he talks about Godwin the sutler, and he was there for just a blink of an eye. And he was, I think, a drunkard and didn’t last very long. But, the same month that the fort got shut down, a tornado came through, and Godwin the sutler’s widow was there, and she ended up making that her home, and she stayed there for about 17 years in totality. So she was there long after the fort closed down, and I enjoy just sitting at the sutler store and thinking about this woman who felt so at home there.
Thompson: Bob, I want to talk about the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition. And when Fort Gibson was established, it was the farthest western fort. And we’ve talked about, you know, obviously, we had Cherokee, we had Osage, we had Choctaw, we had Chickasaw, we had all the tribes that were coming from the east. But one of the big missions that Arbuckle had to deal with is trying to make contact with the Plains tribes and trying to start establishing peaceful relations with the Plains tribes. And so in 1834, we get an expedition, and this is Henry Dodge and, I’m sorry, Henry Dodge and Henry Leavenworth, I guess Fort Leavenworth is named for Henry Leavenworth. So, putting that two and two together. But we get this expedition where they’re going to ride out into parts unknown, far away from home base. And I believe they made it as far as the Wichita Mountains, which was quite a fair piece back in those days, and they made contact with the Comanches and with the Wichitas and a couple of other Plains tribes as well. But this is very, this is significant. This is the first time that the US military is making contact with the Plains tribes. And, Bob, can you get into that a little bit? And of course, Jennifer would love to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Blackburn: Of course, those Indians knew about American trade. They knew about trade with the French and the Spanish and the Mexicans. So the trade networks in the American West were much more developed than a lot of people imagine. And so, when that expedition went west, it was really to establish trade, natural resources. And starting in 1807 with Zebulon Pike and James Wilkinson, Pike left and went out through Kansas, sent Wilkinson down the Arkansas River. So we had troopers here as early as 1807, 1808, doing that, trying to contact the tribes, saying, we are now going to be your primary traders, because American merchants wanted the trade from those tribes because they were capturing horses. There was a big slave trade. Even then, natural resources, pelts, of course, buffalo hides. There was a big market. And so these American soldiers were out there, kind of the spearhead on American business, subsidizing the way to pull that into the American nation. And also saying, you got to quit warring on each other, that’s not good for business. Of course they didn’t listen to that. But those Indians wanted to trade. The Comanches and the Kiowas didn’t trust a lot of those Americans. But the Wichita were the middlemen on this whole trade. The Wichitas had been trading with the French by that time for 100 years. And so they had these traditions of trading with these European Americans. And so the Wichitas were there, the Caddos, the Comanches, Kiowas, and George Catlin, of course, accompanied that expedition. And some of the great images of the American West come out of Fort Gibson. And then continuing all the way through the 1850s, American expeditions were still launched out onto the Plains until the Civil War, of course. We get to that point, and everything changes, all of a sudden with the Civil War. But yeah, Gibson especially was this place that is a leap out into the American frontier to contact these Indians beyond the Cross Timbers.
Thompson: Jennifer, this is a dragoon expedition, and this is a big leap forward in military technology and the way we’re going. These are mounted soldiers, and if you look at their uniforms, I’m not sure how they managed to survive on the plains, because these are very ornamental military uniforms. And, of course, I’m sure they’re all wool, and but, their weapons are more suited for being out on the Plains in terms of how they’re outfitted. So this is a lot better than what Arbuckle had to start out with. Correct?
Frazee: Yeah, they definitely had a lot better systems by the time they got to this point, and it resulted in several great treaties for the United States. So they were able to have the benefit of employing people that could lead them into places that they weren’t going to have so much trouble. Because one of the big things that I recall from whenever I was teaching my Oklahoma history class a couple of years ago was one of the the sources that we use, and I don’t remember if it was the Bean and Boone Expedition or the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition, but one thing that sticks out in my mind is the ticks, like they were coming out of some of those areas and they were just covered with seed ticks, which, of course, probably was kind of contributing to that illness that they were having to deal with as they were going through those places. But they were having people who were able to kind of lead them through areas where they’re not going to have to trudge through some of those areas. So that’s one thing, they’ve got scouts and people that they’re able to utilize to kind of lead them on a good path. And then for their weaponry and their uniforms and such, since a lot of them were the dragoons that were going through there, it the First Dragoon Expedition that the srmy launched, but they were also people on foot. A lot of them were on foot. And then they had, you know, a lot of wagons and things because they’re having to haul their items with them as they go. And they’re also having to haul all of the gift items with them too, because whenever you go to visit, you know, a nation, a sovereign nation, you’re not just showing up and saying, hey, let’s sign a treaty. You have to bring all of the paraphernalia that goes into that ceremony and all that stuff that they had with them too. So, it was pretty interesting.
Blackburn: Trait, you know, one of the famous quotes from the American frontier, a book that has this name, but twenty miles a day on beans and hay. And the idea there, you could get about 20 miles with the dragoon expedition, but you had to have the hay, especially depending on the time of year. They like to go out in the spring when the grass is coming up and the horses and mules are getting enough nutrition. But if not, you have to have the hay. And for the men, you have to have the beans, because you might send out hunting expeditions and then, one thing that Jennifer mentioned—the scouts— this is where Jesse Chisholm and Black Beaver really become part of Oklahoma history. One is Delaware: Black Beaver, and then Jesse Chisholm, Cherokee Scots. And these men know how to trade with the Comanches, they know where they’re going to be camped at a certain time of the year. They know they can go to Council Grove, which is now in the western part of Oklahoma County, and that’s where the Indians will be at this time of year. And so the army is actually hiring the Jesse Chisholms and the Black Beavers to say, yeah, we want to go out and find these men. Yeah. Come on, I’ll show you where they are. And the Osages would later become scouts. When George Armstrong Custer was looking for the for the Cheyenne bands after the Civil War, the Osages were the scouts. So it was very typical to have these scouts among these Indians who have been traveling through this territory for centuries.
Thompson: Yeah. So over 500 men went with the dragoon expedition, and about half of them got sick along the way. And Leavenworth died on the expedition July 21, 1834. So it was a costly expedition. It was not an easy walk in the park for them. But as you mentioned, it did result in an 1835 treaty between the Comanches, the Wichitas, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Osages, Senecas, and Quawpaws that pledged peace and tranquility with the United States. So it wasn’t a fruitless mission. It did have a lot of gain to it for the United States of being able to make those initial contacts. I’d like to fast-forward a little bit. Fort Towson is closed down in 1854. Can you get into that a little bit, Calista?
Stephens: So Fort Towson really was vital for westward expansion. It’s amazing sitting there at that site thinking this was the western frontier. If you look at the roads, they made a kind of a wagon wheel. And in the early years, the wagon wheel was wide and it spread out, and it came to Fort Towson. And then in the later years, you know, the road had already been cut to Fort Washita, and that had opened up in 1842. We’ve got Fort Supply, Fort Sill, all these forts out west that are opening up. So Fort Towson kind of became obsolete. It wasn’t unanimous that it needed to be closed down, but it was pretty obvious that it needed to be closed down. So then you see that wagon wheel expanding from Fort Towson and widening out to those other forts. So it really was, you know, a transportation hub throughout its life. One of the common themes that you see is road construction. First, it was roads coming to Fort Towson to increase communication and transportation, and then later on it was roads coming from Fort Towson to other forts to increase their communication and transportation.
Thompson: Well, and Jennifer Fort Gibson is decommissioned in 1857. And, once again, I think it’s probably, it’s the same scenario. We’re moving west. We have other westward forts at that particular time. But both of these forts get new life in the Civil War. Can you talk about Fort Gibson in the Civil War?
Frazee: Sure. So during the Civil War, Fort Gibson, they had already abandoned the fort by 1857, and it became the town of Keetoowah. Right? So it’s a Cherokee town called Keetoowah. And then all of a sudden, this thing in a completely different country kicks off, and it just kind of draws them back into the United States, you know, fights. And so for a skinny minute, the Confederacy came out there, I think maybe three months total. And then as soon as the United States Army came back out, they left. And it’s one of the things that Dr. Blackburn kind of touched upon that the Fort Gibson never had a battle. It’s because the position of it. They were able to see trouble coming, and they went out to meet it. So trouble never came to them. They always went out to trouble.
And so whenever the Civil War came, you know, the United States moved back into it, and it was one of the places that General Blunt came out to, and they renamed it Fort Blunt there for a short amount of time as well. And so that was the launching point where Blunt took a lot of soldiers, the First Kansas, the Third Indian Home Guard, and a couple of other groups down to Honey Springs to kind of break the Confederacy down there. And so that’s one of the the kind of events that happened during that time period. And it’s a really interesting occurrence too, because that’s whenever we start seeing some of the records that point towards that intersection of a little bit more history that’s going on, because we have one, two gentlemen, two brothers that were, they were enslaved people. One of them managed to be freed, and he joined the First Kansas. And his family was gone, like he hadn’t seen them once they were sold away from each other. And so they came down to Honey Springs to fight in that battle down there. And then whenever he was coming back, I guess a lot of other refugees had been coming out to Fort Gibson, Fort Blunt at this time, to kind of take refuge. And there was his brother, like as soon as he came up to the front gates coming in, there’s his little brother there. So that was a really nice interview that we’re hoping to be able to highlight in some of our social media posts coming up. But yes, the Civil War kind of helped inject a little bit more activity going on in that time. And Fort Gibson became more of a place of refuge for people, so people were going there to kind of stay safe during that time.
Thompson: And, oh, go ahead, Bob.
Blackburn: One thing about the role of the fort during those years is that the Three Forks area is very rich in natural resources. So both the Confederacy and and the Union wanted control of that river valley. And of course, farther down river was Fort Smith, which was a critical fort to take. But you couldn’t take Fort Smith unless you had Fort Gibson. And so about a third of all the Cherokees were Confederate sympathizers, including members of my family that ended up in east Texas, down the Sherman–Denison area until the 20th century. But about two-thirds were not— you can’t say they’re loyal to the Union, but they’re they want to be left alone. And so depending on which army controlled the fort, then people would come back and start farms again. And so if you’re a Union sympathizer, part of the Ross faction, you’d come back when the when the Union controlled it. If they were out, and here would come the Confederate sympathizers back in. And after July of 1863, most of the Confederate Cherokees had already moved south into either the Choctaw Nation or into north Texas, where there were refugee camps. But it was no man’s land. There was there was more death, destruction, and loss of life per capita in the Indian Territory than in the state of Virginia from 1861 to ’63. So it was a devastated area. And Fort Gibson was this little outpost where people would huddle around it for a little protection. But even then, you know, guerrilla fighters like Stand Watie would constantly attack. And especially the supply lines coming down from Fort Scott, which connected from the north in Kansas down to Fort Gibson. They were always trying to get those supplies because that would keep people alive. And so that was a big part of the role of Fort Gibson, this little outpost within this no man’s land.
Frazee: And another thing to touch on that was Cherokee Nation had just finished their own Civil War about ten years prior to the American Civil War kicking off. And so there were people in those different factions, either the Ross party or the Watie party, whichever side you fall on that, because people are still fighting that today, depending upon which one you landed on, that were having to decide whether or not they were going to stay in that area or if they had the protections pulled from them, that they were going to have vengeance taken on them for things that they had done ten years prior, too. So there were a lot of moving parts in the Civil War of that area.
Thompson: Calista, General Samuel Bell Maxey Confederate forces made Fort Towson the headquarters of the Confederate forces and Indian Territory during the war. How did he use the fort, and how was it used during the Civil War?
Stephens: He was there for a pretty short amount of time. There weren’t many structures there at that time. He didn’t change the landscape a whole lot. One of the things I found interesting about Maxey when he was there: he’s an attorney. And he was an attorney before the Civil War, and then he went back to the Paris area and was an attorney afterward. But his business efficiency really shows in that he had a printing press there at the fort. And so all of his bulletins that he sent out to his soldiers were done on a printing press. So that’s been great inspiration for us in some of our programs is Maxey did this during the Civil War right here at this site. So we think that’s pretty cool. And then Confederate veterans were paroled after the Civil War there at that site.
Thompson: Okay.
Stephens: And then we have Stand Watie.
Thompson: Yes, yeah. Get into that because this is a big thing that we talk about of Stand Waite being in his kind of inscrutable place in American/Confederate history.
Stephens: We have Robert M. Jones, who was a prominent Choctaw businessman. He had a business over in Doaksville, and his family owned the Rose Hill plantation. It was supposed to be a beautiful plantation. He had a number of slaves there. He built it for his wife. But when Waite was getting ready to surrender, he came, and we know that he went to Rose Hill and spent some time with Jones. And then he went over to Doaksville and surrendered a full 75 days after Appomattox. So, you know, the Civil War wasn’t fully put to bed until he surrendered there at Doaksville.
Thompson: Last Confederate general to surrender. So that’s something you can certainly learn about more when you go visit the site as well.
Blackburn: I was just going to say during the Civil War, Fort Washita, which is another OHS site, although it doesn’t date to 1824.
Thompson: It used to be. The Chickasaws own and operate it now.
Blackburn: I still claim it.
(laughter)
Blackburn: We developed it. But most of the programs we developed as well. But during the Civil War, that’s when General Cooper, the Confederate commander, made Fort Washita his headquarters. But he would have known about Towson, and the resources in that area would have been useful. It was a place for soldiers, and the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations were united behind the Confederacy during the war. And so, like Maxey was a Texan. Texans saw that as a buffer. So those, you know, “damn Yankees” couldn’t come down and raid on north Texas. So they were very willing to support those troops at Fort Towson, Washita, in the southern part of the nation.
Thompson: As we get ready to close our conversation here, and I know there’s so much that we haven’t been able to get to. We haven’t even got to the Dawes Commission. And we’ll have to save that for another podcast, Jennifer. But I really want to talk about the legacy of each of these forts. And why do we still preserve them from a historical standpoint? Why do we still tell its story? I think one of the reasons for me is despite limited resources, despite being on the far edge of the Plains, despite doing things like having these diplomatic missions that most soldiers aren’t prepared to take on, I think they were very successful in the mission that they were given. In other words, there was no large-scale Indian war. There was no large-scale clashes between settlers and Indians out there, and they did a really good job of trying to keep the peace on the frontier. And of course, as Jennifer mentioned, one of the goals was westward expansion. So in that that arena, which we can have that conversation about whether that was a good or a bad thing, but they were successful in furthering westward expansion as well. And so both of these forts succeeded in implementing their missions, and they did it well, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons why these forts aren’t kind of up there at high notoriety with maybe some other sites is because there was not large-scale violence associated with them, but nevertheless, they tell an important story about a very important time in our young country’s history. So I’d love for you all, and Bob too, I’m throwing this open to everybody to talk about what you think the historic legacy of these forts are.
Stephens: One of the things that I appreciate, personally, the most about our site is that we get to interpret life. You know, no battles did happen there. So what we’re interpreting is the daily life of the soldiers, or the officers’ wives, or the laundresses, or people who lived there at Fort Towson. The parade grounds, when you walk out on there, you’re walking on the grounds that those soldiers walked on. For me, I enjoy spending time in the woods. I enjoy learning about plants and animals. And when I go out there and look at those plants and animals, you know, those are the same types of plants and animals, basically the same ecosystem that those soldiers went out in and added to their diet from. They would have certainly foraged those things. And that’s when I feel that deep personal connection with those people who stood there before me. I mean, really, you know, Fort Towson and southeast Oklahoma, that was the beginning of the Choctaw and Chickasaw relationship, with the white people that were moving in. Those relationships still stand today. Um, this is not the end. This is a new beginning. We are building on this, and we’re continuing to strengthen our relationships. This is where we come from. This is who we are.
Thompson: Jennifer?
Frazee: I think, um, to piggyback a little bit off of what Calista said, our legacy are the stories of the individuals who created the history. So we talk a lot about the big things that happened. The Civil War happened in this time. These major battles happened. You know, removal happened. But we don’t talk about the people who made that history happen, and I think our legacy is telling the stories that haven’t been told yet, getting that information out there for people to be able to see their reflection and what happened in the past and to kind of determine how they’re going to move forward from that.
Blackburn: And as a historian, Trait, I’d say from a 30,000-foot elevation, looking down on the big patterns of history, it’s their role in American Indian history, in the Louisiana Territory, and how these tribes are surviving and changing and adapting and trading and fighting. And these forts have a very prominent role in all of that between the trade and movement. To me, it reflects a story of the Five Tribes, of course, but also as you mentioned, with the expeditions, with the western tribes of Comanche and Kiowa, Cheyenne-Arapaho, these forts are there at a critical time, when all of that is changing. So American Indian history is changing totally in these years. And before you get to the end of Fort Gibson, you already have the General Allotment Act in 1887, you have the Curtis Act in 1898, and things are changing rapidly. And so these forts are there as almost as witnesses to this change, and a part of this American policy on helping make all of these things move forward. If we don’t understand that, even if we don’t like the story, of course we don’t like the story of enslavement. We don’t like the story of exploitation of American Indians, the assault on tribal sovereignty. But we can’t deal with those issues like race today or with tribal sovereignty unless we understand what was happening from 1824 to 1907. And so these forts help us pull back the curtain a little bit to see what was really happening, how it would affect the lives of these American Indian people.
Frazee: Here, here.
Thompson: I couldn’t agree more, Bob. Calista, tell us, if people want to come see you at Fort Towson. When are you open?
Stephens: We are open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Thompson: And, Jennifer, where can they come see you at Fort Gibson? And when are you open?
Frazee: They can come, start at the commissary on Garrison Hill there in Fort Gibson. And we’re open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
Thompson: Well, folks, it’s been great talking to all of you today. Such a great conversation we’ve been able to have. And of course, we know we didn’t scratch the surface of these forts. It’s hard to do that in a little over an hour of a conversation, but we hope it’s spurred your interest. And you’ll go look these forts up some more and learn a little bit more about why they’re so significant, and we hope you’ll come out and visit them at both of these sites because they do such a good job of interpreting the history there. And they would love—you’ll go out there, you’ll see Calista, you’ll see Jennifer, and they would love to talk to you some more about these particular sites. So with that, we will talk to you next time. You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
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