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Fort Supply, Indian Territory: Frontier Outpost on the Plains

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For this book, published in 1970, Robert Carriker began researching in the 1960s a vast number (he was surprised by the amount) of records housed in the National Archives regarding Fort Supply, located just east of the panhandle of Oklahoma on the North Canadian River. The records indicated to Carriker how important a post the old fort was in the history of the West and encouraged him to write this account.

Fort Supply, established in 1868, played basically three essential roles in its 25-year history: during its first ten years (1868-78) its troops helped protect the Cheyennes and Arapahoes from other Indian tribes (mainly the raiding Kiowas) as well as from the exploitations of whites, especially the whiskey traders from Kansas who used the supply roads to ply their illegal trade in the nearby Indian villages; during the next dozen years when its troops helped protect the cattle business along quickly developing cattle trails (the Chisholm Trail to the east and the Dodge City Road to the west, to name just two); and after 1890, by serving as headquarters for the opening of the Cherokee Outlet to homesteaders.

Carriker is an excellent writer (his biography of Father De Smet, pioneer Jesuit missionary to the northwest Indians, is also superb), and he tells the story of Fort Supply with verve and in detail. The fort officially closed in 1895, though 13 years later the Western State Hospital took up residence there, where it remained into the late 1980s. Fortunately, when the hospital closed the state of Oklahoma took over the site and turned it into a park. Old Fort Supply should thus avoid the usual fate of abandoned historical places: deterioration followed by oblivion. Anyone interested in forts of the old West or in the history of the Plains will find this book useful and entertaining.