Submitted by Sandi Carter & Marlene Clark
Historians often have pointed out that Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy deserved no little criticism, and that his record as chief executive followed rather closely the old shoot-and-then-look pattern of his career as a soldier. It was only natural that, with a man in the White House whom they looked upon as an "Injun hater", the southerners who had been waiting since 1802 for the Government to do something about the Indians among whom they were living would being manufacturing all sorts of incidents to stir things up - leaving the problem of arranging for the Indians with Uncle Sam.
So the Government, in character, "started the wagon before the traces were hitched" and hurried up the bungled removal of the five Civilized Tribes to Indian Territory without checking up on what the Plains tribes out here intended to do about it.
True, the Osages had signed up to leave in 1825, and had withdrawn from the lower reaches of the Grand and Verdigris following the arrival of the first Creek immigrants, but they hadn’t withdrawn very far. Their villages still were along the upper parts of these rivers and their hunting trails all up and down the Arkansas still carried a fairly heavy traffic of hunters into the southwestern buffalo country. They still were enjoying their desultory warfare with the Old Settler Cherokees along the lower Arkansas and east of the Grand, and were in no hurry to give up the role of problem children, in which they seemed to take a certain amount of pride.
Thus the "bold Wah-Sha-See," by their businesslike but faintly arrogant comings and going across the Arkansas at a dozen points, kept the disheartened Creeks pretty well bottled up for several years.
The first Creeks were content to huddle around Fort Gibson, draw rations and look bewildered, but as a few of their mixed-blood leaders began to arrive, the Army, with their help, was able to induce them to start settling in the fertile lands west of the Verdigris. In a year or so the Creek families were settled so thickly for twelve or fifteen miles up the Arkansas that their improvements joined, but that was as far as it went. From there on northwest it still was Osage country.
An old report says the "Tal-l-se" (Tulwa-ahassee) were settled at the mouth of the Verdigris, and Loomis places them there in his Scenes in the Indian Country. Then, in 1850, the Bureau of Topographical Engineers showing a settlement called "Talassee" far up the Arkansas at the present site of Tulsa, something for which the establishment of Old Fort Arbuckle can be thanked. Its establishment came about this way:
In 1831, the government, seeing that something had to be done, sent the Rev. Isaac McCoy out into the plains country to inspect it for the immigrant Indians and to find out the attitude of the plains tribes. If it was not so good he was to smooth things over as best he could until the Army could take proper steps to make them see the light. His escort was under Lt. James L. Dawson, whose men blazed a road along the north side of the Arkansas to near the mouth of the Cimarron, where he crossed to go on west. This road was followed in the main by Commissioner Ellsworth in 1832, when he was accompanied by Washington Irving, and the country is described in Irving’s "A Tour on the Prairies."
The next year, Gen. Henry Leavenworth, commander of the Southwestern Department with headquarters at Ft. Gibson, sent Lt. Dawson out again to make a survey for three advanced posts to be scattered from the Cimarron down to Little River, hoping by these remote pinpoints of power to overawe the cunning and resourceful people who had been getting along nicely out there for hundreds of years.
Dawson came back and made his recommendations, and the following June Brevet Major George Birch took two companies of the Seventh Infantry and set out for the location, which Dawson had suggested for a post at the mouth of the Cimarron. His column followed the "Dawson Road" to a point tow and a half miles southeast of the Cimarron’s mouth where he chose a nice dry ridge in a fairly open spot, which afforded a good view of the surrounding terrain.
It was beside one of the old Osage hunting trails which came down from the northeast and crossed the Arkansas at a point south of the site, and was not far from a good stand of cedar, which works into house logs and pickets much easier than oak or hickory.
While the men were getting things set up the word came that they had an extra chore to do. The steamboat "William Parsons," a craft of 116 tons, had started from Ft. Gibson loaded with supplies for the new post. No such boat had ever ascended the Arkansas past the mouth of the Verdigris before, so the skipper didn’t know just what was up there. Of course it was high water, or he would never have attempted it, but without the steady contribution of the Grand the Arkansas is liable to fall very far and very fast and that is what it did. The captain saw the danger signs and unloaded his cargo for a quick dash back to Gibson before being grounded.
Birch’s people had to go back and lug the stuff to camp before it was appropriated for non-military purposes, and then resumed the digging of a well and the cutting of cedar poles.
Like the commanders of several other details working out of Ft. Gibson, Maj. Birch flattered his "Old Man" by calling the new post Camp Arbuckle. There had been some other camps around Ft. Gibson called Arbuckle, but they were overnight affairs, and the apparent permanency of the post near the Cimarron caused it to acquire the name of Fort Arbuckle. Then after the big post of later years was named Fort Arbuckle the long dead camp on the Arkansas was called Old Fort Arbuckle.
A carefully drawn and neatly lettered ground plan, obtained from the office of the Chief of Engineers, U. S. A., and probably made by Major Birch, reveals that the post was composed of a picket stockade with one blockhouse at the northeast corner. This blockhouse was 25 feet square, the lower half setting square with the fort and the upper half at an angle of 45 degrees. Inside were five log buildings, arranged around three sides of a parade sixty yards square.
On the north side was a double officers’ quarters, each room 22 feet square with a six foot open space between. It was joined on the east by a kitchen of round logs which was connected to the quarters by a heavy stone chimney of the double-mouth variety.
On the East was a similar building for officers with the same type chimney, but the kitchen was not built. On the west the company quarters were of two 22 by 22 rooms of hewed logs connected by a double-mouth chimney. The round-log kitchen was separate, and had a stick-and-mud chimney.
As this would not house the two companies, to say nothing of a third company which was added later, it is evident that there were other huts outside the stockade, for there was no great danger outside and that embellishment soon proved itself to be nothing more than such.
At the southeast corner of the parade was a covered well, and beyond these few facts the old ground plan sayeth not, but it must have served its purpose well, for by November 11 of that same year it had done whatever it was going to do and its book was closed.
The garrison must have spent the entire time from June to November swinging the spade, trowel, hammer, broadax and adz, while the C. O. smoked out some profitable sessions with the kihekaha of the surrounding Osage bands, for it was not long before the Indians were leisurely pulling out toward the north and the encouraged Creeks were extending clearings farther up the Arkansas.
One wonders what was in some of the "letters home" when the men got word they were to pull out and leave all that work before it had had time to collect even one tiny mushroom, or a friendly centipede or two. One thing can be said of the Army in the early Indian Territory, it certainly kept itself busy.
In Vol. XI of the Chronicles of Oklahoma, Dr. James H. Gardner of Tulsa tells of a visit he made to the site of Old Fort Arbuckle some years ago. Its exact location was something that had slipped quietly out of the memories of all the old timers of the vicinity, but luckily he had learned that a very old Creek, Lincoln Postoak, living some miles to the south, had been raised near the place. After Dr. Gardner and Dr. Grant Foreman had interviewed the aged Indian and established the accuracy of his memory concerning other events and conditions, Dr. Gardner and some other gentlemen took him to where he said the fort had been.
There, in the field of Bud Anderson, were the piles of stones and rubble that marked the location of the old chimneys, all arranged in a pattern which proved beyond doubt that it was the fort site.
The quarter section, range and township were carefully noted, and thus was a pin put in the historical map of Oklahoma to mark a place which, up to that time, the historians had only been able to point out with an "right about here" and a jab of the finger.
Postoak was able to point out the spot only because of the old buildings had been used for many years after their abandonment as a military post. It seems that at one time there was a sort of trading post there, and without a doubt it was preserved for a while as a camping place of the wagoners who almost made a highway of the old Osage hunting trail as they passed on their way to California and other points west.
It is entertaining, at least, to imagine that some parts of Old Fort Arbuckle withstood the elements and time until after the Osages were brought back down here in 1872, and that some wrinkled old warrior from Black Dog’s village might have seen the crumbling chimneys in the little green clearing and, remembering them from his youth, raised his hand with a friendly, "How!"
Submitted by Sandi Carter and Marlene Clark
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