Two Army prisoners sentenced to hard labor were assigned to dig a well at Fort Gibson in 1837. They began work and reported their progress daily. The summer of 1838 passed, and when the fort’s commander asked his aide to add the figures from 18 months of daily reports, the aide determined the well was supposedly 465 feet, 9 inches deep. An officer lowered himself into the well to investigate. At 15 feet he reached bottom and found the two prisoners playing cards. They had hit rock months earlier but, according to one report, found the well “cool in summer, and moderate and free from the winds of winter, and as they always brought their dinners and a jug of water with them, it was quite an agreeable snug place to pass the day.”
The two prisoners were lucky to find several months of relative comfort. Life was hard at frontier forts. It was hard and deadly at Fort Gibson, dubbed the “Graveyard of the Army.”
The Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) fort was established in 1824 near the newly established Arkansas Territory border on the Neosho (or Grand) River, in what is now Muskogee County, to keep peace between Osage Indians and incoming Cherokees. It became an important frontier post, at times housing nearly as many troops as all other Western posts combined.
The Army forcibly relocated some 60,000 Indians from the Southeast, beginning in the 1820s. That often-harsh process now known as the “Trail of Tears” ended at Fort Gibson for many Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles. At one time, a line of 14,000 emigrating Creeks stretched about 230 miles, from Little Rock, Ark., to Fort Gibson. In the 1830s, the government signed five treaties with the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles and Osages at Fort Gibson. Noted individuals assigned to or associated with the fort included three future presidents. Zachary Taylor commanded the area in 1841 but quickly moved his headquarters downriver to Fort Smith, Ark. Sam Houston lived with the Cherokees and frequented Fort Gibson before moving south, where he became the first president of the Republic of Texas. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a dragoon lieutenant at Fort Gibson until he resigned after a court-martial in 1835.
The War Department’s view of Fort Gibson’s importance was at odds with a parsimonious Congress with a finger to the political winds. Congress did not succeed in closing the fort but managed to stall improvements for decades. With little chance seen for relief, many soldiers saw desertion or death from fever as their most likely means of escape. In the 1830s, the Army’s desertion rate exceeded 20 percent. Add to this the labor needed to maintain an isolated fort, and the result was what one officer called “this most infernal of all military posts.” As the two conniving Army prisoners figured out, if one had to be in hell, it was best to be down a well.
As early as 1822, Colonel Matthew Arbuckle suggested that the garrison at Fort Smith move farther up the Arkansas River near Three Forks, an important trading settlement, where the Verdigris and Neosho rivers joined the Arkansas. In March 1824, the Army ordered the Fort Smith garrison to “establish itself in a new position, at or near the mouth of the Verdigris River.” By the end of April, Arbuckle and five companies of the 7th Infantry were clearing land and building a new post on the Neosho, three miles above its confluence with the Arkansas. Newspapers reported the new post was called Cantonment Gibson, in honor of Colonel George Gibson, commissary general of subsistence.
Surveyors ran a new western boundary for Arkansas Territory in 1825, placing the markers three miles west of the new fort. However, three years later, the earlier line was restored, approximating the modern Oklahoma-Arkansas state line, and Arkansans began a campaign to move the garrison back downriver to the Fort Smith location.
Nevertheless, Gibson not only stayed put but also grew. The strength of the post increased from 174 men in early 1829 to 691 men in late 1832, when Henry Leavitt Ellsworth arrived there. Ellsworth, a member of a commission to oversee relocation of emigrant Indians on new lands, wrote that the fort’s “numerous little log buildings” were “constructed of materials not durable when exposed to the weather….The sides of the buildings are hewed logs, plasterd [sic] with mud in the interstices.” The only amenities were small windows and nails driven into the whitewashed walls from which to hang clothes.
In December 1833, five companies of the newly formed Regiment of Dragoons arrived at Fort Gibson after a 27-day, 453-mile march from Jefferson Barracks, just south of St. Louis. However, there were no quarters or even space for them at the fort, and they soon established Camp Jackson, 1¼ miles west of Fort Gibson on Cherokee land. First Lieutenant Philip St. George Cooke wrote that the dragoons passed a severe winter in tents, “the thermometer standing more than one day at 8 degrees below zero.”
Those at Fort Gibson fared little better. A letter in the July 1834 issue of Military and Naval Magazine said log forts such as Gibson required constant repairs in addition to the tasks of gardening and supplying fuel. “Every man,” the letter writer insisted, “is frequently called out on fatigue; and yet our fort is rotting down.” Another writer complained in the 1835 Army and Navy Chronicle, “Our quarters are truly rotting over our heads,” and added that space was insufficient to house even a fraction of the officers, let alone the enlisted men. For the hard but monotonous labor, salt pork and bean diets and often uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, those enlisted men received $5 a month. Malaria and other fevers were the primary killers at the Graveyard of the Army. In Fort Gibson’s first dozen years, about 570 men died.
While Fort Gibson continued to crumble, and men continued to die and desert, politicians argued over the future of the post. Some in Congress questioned a $25,000 expense to build the barracks at the same time there was a bill pending to relocate the fort. Representative James Knox Polk, though, noted that the War Department considered Gibson one of the most important Western posts, primarily because of Indian removal, and that the decayed structures risked the health of personnel. The Arkansas Territory Delegate Ambrose Hundley Sevier said the garrison “might as well be in Cuba” as its present unsuitable location and that as long as it was there, he was “not in favor of appropriating a cent” for it. Congress compromised and appropriated $5,000 for repairs in 1834.
The War Department had a dual role often overlooked by both legislators and civilians, who believed the Army’s main purpose in the West was to protect settlers. The department was responsible for both the Army and the Office of Indian Affairs, including treaty commitments to Indian tribes. Maj. Gen. Alexander C. Macomb, head of the Army, opposed removing all troops from Fort Gibson. He wrote Sevier in 1835 that the War Department chose that location “on account of the Indian affairs” and “to preserve peace among them as well as to afford protection to the frontier generally.”
That obligation increased during the 1830s as the Army moved more Indians west of the Mississippi. It had relocated Choctaws south of the nearby South Canadian and Arkansas rivers by 1833, and Creeks to lands just west of Fort Gibson.
Arbuckle, entering his 13th year of command at Fort Gibson, wrote the adjutant general that among the “tribes or nations of Indians now removing to this quarter,” many would “arrive here with feelings not of the most friendly character toward our government.” He repeated requests for better accommodations and security for his troops. He and his men were not alone in their concern. The New York American reported that the quarters at Fort Gibson were “the most wretched tenements ever used for human habitations.” The aging log huts quickly decomposed, “thus adding to other poisonous exhalations those from decaying wood.”
“Poisonous exhalations” were not an imaginary problem. The fort sat near a wide rock ledge on the riverbank, which made a natural boat landing. Though convenient, one officer described the location as “the bottom of a sinkhole.” Prevailing summer winds passed over flood-prone bottomland and stagnant pools before reaching the garrison. Although it was not understood at the time, standing water attracted insects that contributed to illness, including a variety of fevers.
Assistant Surgeon Joseph J.B. Wright arrived at Fort Gibson in 1834, and noted its reputation as “the charnel house” of the Army. “No term can be found in any language which would do injustice to its character for insalubrity,” he wrote. Among other adversities he noted, Wright said that while he was at Gibson, temperatures ranged from 11 below zero to 116 degrees.
A surgeon general’s report that year stated that the mean strength of the post was 485, and there were 103 deaths— a mortality rate of 21.2 percent. Details were lacking, the report continued, because two post surgeons were among the dead. In some cases, consumption of bad liquor proved deadly and perhaps the harsh punishments for drunkenness were on occasion a contributing factor to illness and even death. More than a few deaths occurred among the dragoons who were ill when they returned to Gibson after an expedition to the Washita country west of the fort.
The sick included George Catlin. The painter had obtained permission to accompany the dragoons’ 1834 summer campaign and was among those who contracted a fever. Catlin was so weakened that he made part of the return journey to Fort Gibson lying in a baggage wagon with equally ill soldiers. From his bed at the post hospital, the painter heard the sound of muffled drums passing by his window, which overlooked the cemetery, as many as eight times a day. “I can lay in my bed and see every poor fellow lowered down into his silent and peaceful habitation,” he wrote. Weeks later, although the post surgeon believed Catlin too sick to travel, the painter eagerly left Gibson, turning his horse around “on the top of a prairie bluff at a mile distance to take the last look upon it and thank God, as I did audibly, that I was not to be buried within its enclosure.”
Leonard C. McPhail, an assistant surgeon ordered to Fort Gibson in 1835, blamed some deaths on the overuse of calomel, a mercury-containing purgative that severely damaged patients’ mouth and jaw tissue. McPhail referred to those who survived as “deformed monuments of medical error.”
McPhail described various ailments common to Fort Gibson in a series of articles in The American Medical Intelligencer. Fevers predominated, but there was also dysentery, as well as urticaria, a severe rash McPhail himself contracted that swelled his eyes nearly shut and his lips so that he could hardly speak. A captain who suffered along with McPhail convulsed and turned purple, “his whole surface resembling greatly the cut of a bologna sausage.”
Treatment for the rash included ipecac, cool drinks and small amounts of calomel and opium, followed with castor oil and “arseniate of quinine.” Fever treatments were often limited to teas and herbal preparations, including rhubarb and bark extracts. Mild forms of bleeding were employed in some cases, including cupping and applying leeches.
Quinine assumed more importance over time, its value proven after a shipment of the antipyretic sank with a supply boat in the Arkansas River. Without quinine, fever patients died, and the post hospital needed twice as many beds. The assistant surgeon wrote, “After a full supply of quinine had been received, the extra beds were no longer required.”
In a 20-year (1819–39) summary of Army medical statistics, the surgeon general wrote that while Fort Gibson’s “unhealthfulness has been somewhat exaggerated,” it remained “the most insalubrious post now permanently occupied.”
Meanwhile, political arguments continued over the fort’s future. In May 1836, Congress appropriated $50,000 to move troops from Fort Gibson to a post closer to the Arkansas Territory border, but the troops could not move until a new fort was established. A board of three officers, including Colonel Stephen W. Kearny and Captain Nathan Boone, youngest son of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone, recommended the site of Fort Coffee, about seven miles west of the Arkansas line. However, they considered Fort Gibson “the key of the country around it” and recommended new barracks be built on elevated ground about a half mile from the existing fort. “The presence of a military force near Fort Gibson is indispensable for the preservation of peace amongst the Indians themselves,” they wrote.
The political stalemate left Fort Gibson as it was, except for a $500 Congressional appropriation in 1837 to build “a plain substantial fence around the burying ground.” In early 1838, Secretary of War Joel Roberts Poinsett presented plans for Western frontier defense. At the time, the entire Army numbered 7,000 men, with some 600 posted at Fort Gibson. Consistent with the War Department’s twin duties, Poinsett favored keeping posts in Indian Territory to “protect the emigrant and feebler tribes against the stronger and more warlike nations that surround them.” To withdraw “would be to violate our faith” and “would be the signal of war.”
Congress continued to pressure Poinsett to relocate Gibson. He responded with reports on possible sites but repeated his belief that Gibson or a new post nearby was necessary to protect the tribes from each other and from the intrusions of white settlers. Poinsett continued to resist through 1840, saying that Fort Gibson was “by far the most important point on that frontier.”
Meanwhile, an anonymous officer wrote to the Army and Navy Chronicle, “Humanity recoils at the idea of still occupying it as a military station.” He suggested that savings on “coffins and powder and the drum-heads and brass instruments worn out in burying” Gibson’s dead would offset the cost of moving the fort.
Those who did not die literally may have felt practically worked to death. An infantry captain at Fort Gibson said soldiers were at “incessant labor,” drawing water, building and repairing barracks and the like. Unlike at other posts, soldiers at Gibson even had to cut their own firewood. It appeared to him soldiers were there not to perform military duty, but to become “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” He added, “We are losing our best men here, in consequence of this incessant labor, who go off to other stations and enlist, to avoid these toilsome duties.”
Some who soldiered on at Fort Gibson sought to assuage their discomfort with alcohol. It 1832 the Army had eliminated its traditional liquor ration, but intemperance persisted at the post. A period letter claimed local Indians sold whiskey to the soldiers. Additionally, observed the writer, nearby Arkansans “bring in large quantities of the baneful poison and leave it with the Indians to sell on commission.” The writer reiterated the post’s reputation as the “Graveyard of the Army” and said three surgeons who served at Gibson attributed most sickness and mortality to intemperance. A temperance society formed at the fort with mixed results. An 1843 letter noted that the “sorry fellow” then serving as post chaplain “found a soldier with a bottle of rum, ordered him to deliver it and, on refusal, drew a pistol on him.”
Punishments for infractions were both severe and imaginative. The stocks were in frequent use, and more than one offender was sentenced to carry a 50-pound pack of stones on his back every alternate two hours for anywhere from eight to 30 days. One winter another miscreant was “immersed for 10 successive mornings in the river.” A Fort Gibson dragoon said deserters “received 50 lashes with a rawhide upon their naked backs, after having for several months dragged a cannonball after them chained to their legs.” They also forfeited all past and future pay while completing their service.
In 1843 Sevier, now a U.S. senator, ceased nine years of opposition to improvements at Fort Gibson and added to an appropriations bill $15,000 for barracks repair. “If no danger was apprehended on that frontier,” he asked, “why was it that a whole regiment of troops had been placed there without adequate barracks to protect them?” An additional $15,000 followed the next year. An officer voiced his hope this would be “enough to build a healthy set of quarters, instead of the rotten pigsties the troops have lived in for 20 years!”
Finally, in 1845, construction began on higher ground a quarter mile from the old fort. The buildings were to be of locally quarried stone, and the troops were to do the work themselves.
By the 1850s, Fort Gibson, no longer on the frontier, had diminished in importance, and neighboring Cherokees, wanting access to the boat landing, pushed for its removal. The order to abandon the fort came on June 8, 1857. The Army reoccupied the post during the Civil War, and Fort Gibson housed elements of the 10th Cavalry on and off from 1868 through 1890.
Today, Fort Gibson is a National Historic Landmark, comprising original buildings from the 1840s and reconstructions of earlier log structures. In 1868 the Army set aside seven acres east of the fort as a national cemetery. The expanded Fort Gibson National Cemetery now covers 48 acres and holds more than 19,000 graves, the oldest of which bear witness to the severe conditions soldiers faced on the American frontier.
Kevin L. Cook was a librarian for 14 years before settling in his native Oklahoma to write historical articles. Suggested for further reading: Advancing the Frontier, 1830–1860 and Indians and Pioneers: The Story of the American Southwest Before 1830, both by Grant Foreman; and Sam Houston with the Cherokees, 1829–1833, by Jack Gregory and Rennard Strickland.
Originally published in the August 2010 issue of Wild West.
