Submitted by Sandi Carter & Marlene Clark
Out on the western frontier that was to become southern Oklahoma a matter of eight or ten years was a long, long time, and between the years of 1842 and 1850 staunch old Ft. Washita had seen its role change from that of a wilderness outpost to a sort of law-and-order center in the midst of a fairly well settled Choctaw-Chickasaw farming section.
Most of the Chickasaws had moved out into their "district" and were well to the west, and the place where shooting soldiers were needed was out where the Comanches were pestering the newer Chickasaw settlements.
So Capt. R. B. Marcy and his D company of the fifth infantry was sent out to establish a new post, late in 1850, and picked a site a little south of the Canadian. The men spent the winter there, erecting a long log barracks and four officers’ huts, buy by spring it was evident that the place wouldn’t do.
A new site chosen near Wild Horse creek, a few miles west of the Washita River, and a permanent post was started. It was named Arbuckle for Gen. Matthew Arbuckle, long the commander of troops in this section, who recently had died in line of duty. This was the fourth camp or post to have been named for him.
In June of 1852, Maj. George Anderson brought some troops of the seventh infantry and assumed command, while Marcy went back to Washita to prepare for his expedition up the Arkansas the next year.
When Marcy returned he told of a southern route to the west which he had found, and many parties of California-bound people came by Ft. Arbuckle during the following years. When Ft. Towson was abandoned in 1854, the troops came out to augment the garrison of Ft. Arbuckle.
For the next four years the troops there mixed carpentering with soldiering and the post grew and grew. Sturdy log barracks and all sorts of auxiliary buildings went up all over the place, its detachment ranged far and wide, and the Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas and Caddos saw all this and began to behave like little gentlemen. But not for long.
Way out in the valley of the Great Salt Lake the folks had wanted a "State of Desert," open to Mormons only, but had got a "Territory of Utah," open to everybody, and the "gentiles" were pouring in. Tempers flared, and a lot of shooting resulted.
The seventh infantry was pulled out of its Indian Territory posts and sent out there, leaving Washita and Arbuckle practically empty. Lots of fort and no garrison. The accompanying picture of Arbuckle was developed from a ground plan and ten sketches furnished the writer by the War Department, and shows the place as it looked at that time.
The Comanches complained that they had hunted off their western ranges and asked permission to come farther east into the spaces where the Chickasaws had not settled, so the "Leased District" was obtained for them. The old men behaved, but the young bucks kept up their raids into north Texas and acted up generally. The "District" was a haven to which they could return and look innocent for a few days, and the Texas troops could not follow. On one occasion, however, Capt. John Ford and a company of Texas Rangers followed them up and chastised them severely.
The post was under Capt. W. E. Prince, with one company of infantry as a guard, and the Comanches could count, so they had themselves a picnic, wild Indian style. Thousands of them were all over the place, with no regard to the boundary of their "Leased District."
The military blood of old Col. Douglas Cooper, detached as Indian agent, began to boil. He "returned" himself to "active duty" and got up an "army" of about a hundred Chickasaws and whites and went out to war on the Comanches. But of course he couldn’t find them. Comanches never were dumb people. But as soon as he returned they were right back again, so he asked Ft. Belknap, Texas, for help and up came Lt. James Powell with a company of infantry, of all things.
Col. Cooper was disappointed, to no end. So he kept his hundred mounted men under arms and raised a hundred more. Then he ranged out into the western Chickasaw country to "inspect a site for a new agency." So he said in his reports, but it didn’t fool anybody and he was severely reprimanded for holding his force intact after the emergency and was in the doghouse for some time. Did that have anything to do with his becoming a Confederate general three years later? Could be. Prince called a council with the Comanches at a place near present Rush Springs on August 20, 1858, and lined the old men up beautifully. They promised to return all the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Wichita horses and agreed to make the kids behave.
Old Buffalo Hump (not his real name but the "nice" one they use in books) started the big drove of horses to Ft. Arbuckle to be restored to their owners, but they never got there. Meanwhile Capt. Earl Van Dorn had brought four troops of the Second Dragoons and a company of sixth infantry up from Ft. Belknap and was ranging out toward the north fork of the Red river, entirely ignorant of Capt. Prince’s apparent success at the peace business.
So, when one of his detachments saw all those horses it promptly attacked and stampeded them.
It was not until October 1, when his troops attacked the Wichita Village, where a band of Comanches were visiting after the peace proceedings with Prince, that Van Dorn found out that such peace proceedings had taken place. That is how thick the woods were out there some ninety years ago.
After this blunder which cost the lives of about 60 Indians the frightened Wichitas fled to Ft. Arbuckle, and were the non-paying guests of Capt. Prince’s people for quite a spell, for after Van Dorn was shipped east to recover from a bad wound he got in the fight his men foraged on the Wichita fields and gardens until they were ruined.
So it went, until Ft. Sumpter was fired upon and Col. W. H. Emory, then in command of troops in the Territory, was told to use his own discretion as to what to do with his command. But up in New York the war was being fought in the newspapers long before Ft. Sumpter, and all sorts of wild rumors filled the press.
On page 173 of "Harpers Weekly" of March 16, 1861 there is mention of Ft. Arbuckle, "which is said to have been recently seized by the Texas troops. (It) protects the northern frontier of that state from the forays of the Comanches. It is situated n the Indian Reserve, and is, or was, garrisoned by detachments from the first cavalry and one company of the first infantry.... Captain Prince commands the post; Capt. Sackett, Capt. Real, First Lieutenants Stockton, Crittenden and Powell, and Second Lieutenants Offley and Fish compose the staff."
That was anticipating a bit, for it was not until May 3 that Col. Emory pulled the garrison out and took all his troops north.
Texas troops occupied it as a sort of base for about a year, then part of the Chickasaw battalion, C. S. A. was there a while, but most of the Confederate concentrations were far to the east, as well as all the fighting during the war, and little is written about the goings-on at Arbuckle.
The U. S. Army came back in 1867, to help with the problem of settling the plains tribes on their new reservations, and two companies of the sixth infantry were at Arbuckle under Capt. James Walsh. This outfit was a homey, according to Glissam’s "Journal of Army Life." It seems that they were mostly Irish immigrants from New York’s East Side and might be classed as intemperate at times.
Early in 1869, Gen. Phil Sheridan planned to use Arbuckle as a base for his operations in the northwest and west parts of the Territory, and piled up a lot of supplies there, but bad weather and other items, altered his plans. He sent much of his stock there to be fed, and transported the rest of the stuff over to Ft. Sill when it was set up.
Again the center of the whirlpool was far to the westward, and Ft. Sill was put out there to slow it down. That killed Arbuckle, and in the fall of 1869 the garrison was moved to Sill.
Young Lieut. R. T. Jacobs and a hundred men were left for a while to guard the remaining supplies and the property. Then came four troops of the famous 10th cavalry under Maj. J. E. Yard who took over, but by summer of 1870 old Arbuckle was another one of our dead posts.
At allotment it fell to the Grant family, and for many years was the center of the Grant ranch. The commanding officers house was given a second story, frame, and weatherboarded all over, and the old commissary warehouse became the ranch barn. It, too, was weatherboarded over its sturdy dowel-pinned logs.
The Grant family still lives on the spot, and a few months ago a member helped the writer check the few remaining traces of the fort with the War Department plans. He laughingly told of how he drug the huge barn a hundred feet with a bulldozer, trying to tear it down, before he found that it was of dowel-pinned logs and never would have fallen.
But it is down now, as well as everything else but one old wreck and a chimney or two. And with it died far too much of its colorful story.
Submitted by Sandi Carter & Marlene Clark
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