Fort Gibson began as Cantonment Gibson, part of a north-south chain of forts designed to maintain order on the frontier of the American West and protect the southwestern border of the Louisiana Purchase. When Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the cantonment took on a grim new mission: managing the arrival of tribes forcibly removed from their eastern homelands. The Army redesignated it as Fort Gibson in 1832, reflecting its shift from temporary outpost to semi-permanent garrison. Soldiers increasingly dealt with newcomers who complained about hostility from the Osage Nation and other Plains tribes indigenous to the region. Montfort Stokes, the former governor of North Carolina, convened a commission at the fort to mediate these tensions.

Fort Gibson attracted some of the most famous Americans of the era. In 1832, the author Washington Irving accompanied troops exploring the southern Plains west of the fort. Though the expedition failed to locate significant nomadic tribes, Irving transformed his experiences into A Tour of the Prairies, published in 1835. Two years later, General Henry Leavenworth led the First Dragoon Expedition westward on a peace mission. The artist George Catlin rode with the dragoons, producing numerous studies of the landscape and its people. Leavenworth died during the march; Colonel Henry Dodge assumed command and finally negotiated the first treaty with the nomadic Indian tribes. The expedition's greatest enemy was not warriors but disease -- debilitating fevers killed many soldiers along the route.

By the 1850s, the Cherokee Nation had grown weary of Fort Gibson's side effects. Liquor and brothels proliferated around the post, and the Cherokee fought to prevent the sale of alcohol to their people. They ultimately petitioned Congress to close the fort. The War Department agreed, and on May 7, 1857, General Winfield Scott issued orders to abandon the post for the first time. The Cherokee received the deed to the property and established the village of Kee-too-wah on the site. But abandonment was temporary -- after the Civil War, the Army returned. Fort Gibson served until forts farther west took over its peacekeeping duties, and the post was finally decommissioned in 1890.

In 1960, the National Park Service designated Fort Gibson a National Historic Landmark. Today the Oklahoma Historical Society operates the site at Lee and Ash Streets in the town of Fort Gibson, Muskogee County. Visitors can walk through a reconstruction of the early log fort, explore original stone buildings dating from the 1840s through the 1870s, and visit the Commissary Visitor Center with its museum exhibits on frontier life. Living history programs bring the fort's complex past to life -- a story of peacekeeping, displacement, disease, and the unlikely cultural encounters that shaped the American West. Fort Gibson National Cemetery lies a few miles away, holding the remains of soldiers from wars spanning more than a century.