Fort Cobb

Established in 1859 within what is today Caddo County, Oklahoma, Fort Cobb served the United States Army as a garrison meant to shield relocated Native Americans from Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne raiding parties. When the Civil War broke out, Maj. William H. Emory gave up the post, and Confederate troops held it from 1861 to 1862. US soldiers eventually returned to the site in 1868, but once Fort Sill came into being, the Army had no further use for Fort Cobb and left it behind for good. Little now survives of the old military installation.

It was Major William H. Emory, who commanded at Forts Washita and Arbuckle, who founded Fort Cobb in October 1859, situating it on the western bank of Pond Creek close to where it joins the Washita River. In choosing a name for the post, the Army honored Howell Cobb, who was serving as Secretary of the Treasury at the time.

Background

By 1854 a handful of smaller groups, among them the Anadarko, Caddo, Tonkawa, and Penateka Comanche, had reached terms of peace with Texas authorities. As part of that arrangement, lawmakers in the Texas Legislature set aside two tracts along the Brazos River for their use. Yet the Comanche bands to the north, a fiercer people holding sway over the country beyond the Red River, kept striking white communities in the northern part of the state. This unrest bred suspicion among settlers, who came to see every Indian presence as a threat and turned their hostility even toward the peaceful groups settled on the Brazos. To head off a broader conflict, federal agents responsible for Indian affairs started relocating these cooperative tribes out of Texas and into Indian Territory along the Washita River. That resettlement effort, escorted by soldiers under Major George H. Thomas, got underway on August 1, 1859.

Prior to this relocation, leaders from nine separate tribes, including those already residing along the Brazos, gathered with the Wichitas, who held an existing reservation in the Territory, for a council with military officers and Indian agents at Fort Arbuckle. There, government officials pledged safety from both hostile Texans and rival tribes if the assembled chiefs agreed to resettle their people close to the Wichita Mountains. A spot near Medicine Bluff had already received endorsement in 1855 and again in 1858 from Agent Douglas H. Cooper as a fitting location for a military post. It fell to Elias Rector, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs based out of Fort Smith, to make the ultimate choice of ground for the new Agency.

Rector himself traveled to Medicine Bluff, reaching it on June 22, 1859, joined by a number of Indian agents along with the Caddo and Wichita chiefs. His findings dismissed the location entirely, since seasonal downpours in spring and summer swelled the creeks beyond crossing, scorching summer winds bred what was then called "miasma," a term for foul air, and past malaria outbreaks had brought serious suffering upon the nearby Wichitas. Pushing his party farther north toward the Washita River, Rector eventually located a suitable spot near Pond Creek, a waterway later known as Cobb Creek.

Fort Cobb in the Civil War

When war broke out between the states, four companies of federal soldiers held Fort Cobb. Colonel Emory sent two of these companies off toward Fort Washita, keeping the remaining pair at Cobb itself. Confederate forces from Texas took possession of Fort Washita on April 17, 1861, and that same day Washington sent word that every federal soldier stationed in Indian Territory ought to march north to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Emory got this instruction while already en route to Fort Cobb. Confederate soldiers under William C. Young, along with Indian Agent Mathew Leeper, subsequently took up positions at the post.

Come May of 1861, Young struck what he called a peace treaty with the tribes living near the fort, assuring them their old protections from the United States government would continue unchanged. This arrangement lacked any official standing, though, until Albert Pike, serving as the Confederacy's Commissioner for Indian Affairs, traveled there to finalize treaties with the chiefs on August 12, 1861. Goodwill did not last, since the Confederate authorities proved unable to honor their commitments. Leeper in particular earned a reputation for cantankerous conduct toward the native peoples, and the chiefs responded with hostility of their own, eventually insisting he be pushed out of his post. Leeper sent his family to Texas for safety. Fearing what might come next, many tribespeople abandoned the region around Fort Cobb altogether, resettling in Kansas until the war's conclusion.

By 1862, roughly thirty men drawn from tribes loyal to the Confederacy had been enlisted and armed to defend the fort, though no regular Confederate troops arrived until that May. Through the following months they gathered up and watched over supplies left behind, only to abandon the fort themselves come August.

Then, on October 23, 1862, natives siding with the Union descended on the Wichita Agency in force. They killed the white workers there, dragged the bodies into the agency building, and set the whole structure ablaze. Leeper managed to escape the assault and made his way to Texas once more.

Post-war activities

The garrison at Fort Cobb pulled out for good on January 6, 1869. Their destination was Medicine Bluffs, and by January 8 they had founded Camp Wichita there. Fort Cobb's abandonment became official on March 29, 1869, while Camp Wichita took on a new identity as Fort Sill. General Hazen subsequently moved the Kiowa and Comanche Agency to this new post.

Listing as National Register of Historic Places

On March 1, 1973, the National Park Service granted Fort Cobb a place on the National Register of Historic Places.