The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

CANTONMENT.

Never officially named, “Cantonment” was an army post constructed on the North Canadian River northwest of present Canton, in Blaine County. (“Cantonment” is a general term used to identify temporary military fortifications.) In September 1878 a band of Northern Cheyenne had fled northward from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation, causing panic among the residents of western Kansas and Nebraska. With orders to police the reservation, Lt. Col. Richard I. Dodge and four companies of the Twenty-third Infantry from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, established Cantonment midway between Forts Reno and Supply in March 1879. The troop quarters at Cantonment remained primitive, the post comprised a commissary, hospital, and officers’ barracks constructed of stone. Once it was decided the Northern Cheyenne would be removed from Indian Territory, Cantonment was no longer needed, and the military abandoned it in June 1882.

That year, the Department of the Interior gained control of Cantonment and allowed Mennonite missionaries to operate the station as an on-reservation boarding school for Cheyenne and Arapaho children. Rodolphe Petter, a linguist as well as missionary, published the English-Cheyenne Dictionary while at Cantonment. With assistance from his wives, Marie Petter (died 1910) and Bertha Kinginger Petter (married 1911), he also completed translations of the entire New Testament and of John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1687).

In 1903 the Interior Department designated the facility a subagency of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency at Darlington. In 1927 the Cantonment subagency was consolidated and the boarding school closed. Canton Lake has since inundated much of the site. A stone building associated with the army post, also known as “New Cantonment” and “Cantonment on the North Fork of the Canadian River,” is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (NR 70000527).

Jon D. May