FORT SILL – Many people know that the famous Chiricahua Apache leader and medicine man Geronimo is buried at Fort Sill. Also, feared Comanche war leader Quanah Parker surrendered at Fort Sill and lived on the west range, north of Cache.
But how many people know that one future President of the United States (Harry S Truman) trained near Fort Sill, another future President (William Howard Taft) visited the post, and a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) lived on the post?
The fort was initially staked out by Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan and then-Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.
The first commander of Fort Sill was Col. Benjamin Grierson, who led a famous raid through the heart of the Confederacy during the Civil War, a raid that was immortalized in a film.
William Tecumseh Sherman, who commanded the famous “march to the sea” through Georgia and subsequently was appointed General of the Army, visited Fort Sill and was the target of an assassination attempt on Grierson’s porch.
Henry Flipper, the first Black man to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, served at Fort Sill.
So did four future superintendents of West Point, seven future Army chiefs of staff, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a future Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and a Lawton draftee who became a four-star general.
William Westmoreland, a future commander of U.S. military forces in the Vietnam War, served at Fort Sill. Maxwell Taylor, who commanded U.S. forces in the Korean War, graduated from the Field Artillery School at the post. So did the Army’s first female cannoneer, Katherine Beatty.
Tommy Franks, the general who led U.S. forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and oversaw the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, served at Fort Sill three times.
In addition, Evelyn Urich Einfeldt, who assisted in assembly of the “Enigma” machine that was used to decode German and Japanese transmissions during World War II, is buried at the Fort Sill National Cemetery near Elgin.
HISTORY OF FORT SILL
“Fort Sill’s history is so broad and long,” said retired Army Col. Frank J. Siltman, Director of Museums and Military History for the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill. The post itself is a national historic landmark and is the nation’s most complete original fort from the Indian Wars period.
“Probably that’s because Fort Sill has been occupied continuously since 1869,” said Siltman, who was commissioned as a field artillery officer in 1983 and served as an assistant professor of American History at West Point.
After expeditions in 1832 and 1833 had failed to contact Plains Indians, Brig. Gen. Henry Leavenworth, commander of the Southwestern Military Department, and Col. Henry Dodge and his recently established First Dragoon Regiment, were assigned to Fort Gibson (in present-day Muskogee County). They were instructed to explore the region and negotiate with southern Plains Indian tribes who endangered Santa Fe traders and frustrated government efforts to move tribes from the eastern U.S. to the west.
Among those on the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition was a young 1st Lt. Jefferson Davis, who graduated from West Point in 1828 and later served as President of the Confederate States of America (1861-65). One of Dodge’s captains was Nathan Boone, youngest son of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone.
Delaware scout Black Beaver accompanied the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War (1846-48) as a captain of Indian volunteers. Prior to the Civil War, Black Beaver farmed in present-day Caddo County; he died in 1880 and was buried near Anadarko, but his remains were reinterred at Fort Sill in 1975.
Randolph Barnes Marcy was a U.S. Army officer noted primarily for his frontier guidebook, The Prairie Traveler, which was based on Marcy’s extensive experience as an explorer of the American West. His publication became a key handbook for thousands of Americans yearning to cross the continent.
In 1852 Marcy led an expedition in search of the source of the Red River. His party crossed previously unexplored Texas and Oklahoma territory and discovered the sources of both forks of the Red River. The expedition also encountered and documented the Wichita Indians. On this mission Marcy also recommended establishment of what was to become Fort Sill (During the Civil War, Marcy became chief of staff to his son-in-law, Gen. George B. McClellan, who served as general-in-chief of the Union Army. Marcy later was appointed Inspector General of the U.S. Army.)
Fort Sill was staked out on January 8, 1869, by Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan and then-Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer (who later led the 7th Cavalry into the disastrous Battle of the Little Bighorn, a/k/a Custer’s Last Stand, in Montana in 1876). The fort was intended to provide support for tribal pacification policies enacted by President Grant in response to increasing raids just after the Civil War.
First named Camp Wichita, it was known among the indigenous tribesmen as “The soldier house at Medicine Bluffs.” Sheridan later renamed the installation in honor of his friend, Brig. Gen. Joshua Sill, who was killed in 1862 during the Battle of Stones River, Tennessee.
The first commander of Fort Sill was Benjamin H. Grierson (1869-72), a pre-war music teacher. During the Civil War he commanded an 1863 expedition that started at LaGrange, Tennessee, went through Mississippi and ended at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Union cavalry traveled 600 miles in 17 days, repeatedly engaged Rebel forces, destroyed Confederate telegraph lines and railroads, two trains, and Confederate businesses that contributed to the war effort. The film The Horse Soldiers starring John Wayne was loosely based on Grierson’s Raid.
After the war Grierson organized and led the African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 10th Cavalry Regiment (1866-1890), and supervised their construction of Camp Wichita.
OTHER FAMOUS FORT SILL FIGURES
In 1871 William Tecumseh Sherman, who succeeded Ulysses S. Grant as General of the Army after Grant was elected President of the United States, arrived at
Fort Sill while on a tour of Army posts throughout the nation. During a meeting with several Kiowa chiefs on Grierson’s porch, two of the chiefs tried unsuccessfully to kill Sherman.
With their food source depleted, and under constant pressure from the U.S. Army, the Quahadi Comanches led by Quanah Parker surrendered in 1875. He helped settle the tribe on the Kiowa Comanche Apache Reservation in southwestern Indian Territory.
Henry Ossian Flipper became the first black man to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in 1877. He also was the first non-white man to lead the Buffalo Soldiers. What came to be known as Flipper’s Ditch was one of his many engineering achievements and is now a part of Fort Sill’s Historic Landmark and National Register Historic District. It was created after many troops and even Flipper himself found themselves plagued by malaria because of pools of stagnant water on the fort. An engineering officer trained at Heidelberg University in Germany had failed to devise a system that would remedy this problem. However, Lieutenant Flipper, after assigned the project, created a system that allowed for proper drainage and eliminated malaria at Fort Sill. This system became known as Flipper’s Ditch and is still in place today; it helps to control floods and erosion in the area.
Hugh Lenox Scott, a West Point graduate, was stationed at Fort Sill with the 7th Cavalry in about 1889. He commanded a detachment of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache Indian scouts from 1891 until it was mustered out in 1897. Scott later served as superintendent of West Point and was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army in 1914-17.
After fighting for 30 years to protect his tribe’s homeland, Chiricahua Apache medicine man Geronimo surrendered in 1886 to U.S. government troops. He was detained as a prisoner of war and ended up at the Kiowa Comanche Apache Reservation near Fort Sill in 1894. Geronimo became a farmer and converted to Christianity. He attended the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904; rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration parade in 1905 along with Quanah Parker; and performed in Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show. Geronimo died at Fort Sill in 1909 and was buried on the Army post.
William Howard Taft was Secretary of War under President Theodore Roosevelt and visited Fort Sill. Then, as President (1909-13), Taft moved the Field Artillery School to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, from Fort Monroe, Virginia. Taft later became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
Harry S Truman organized a Missouri artillery battery in 1917, author David McCullough wrote in his biography of the future President. In September
1917 Truman was stationed at Camp Doniphan, a 2,000-acre tent encampment adjacent to Fort Sill that was activated for use in World War I for artillery training. He was promoted from lieutenant to captain in the 35th Infantry Division, which included field artillery regiments from Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas. In March 1918 Truman and 7,000 other U.S. troops sailed for France aboard the George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner.
Leslie James McNair graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1904 as a second lieutenant of artillery. After attending the U.S. Army War College in 1928 he served as assistant commandant of the Field Artillery Center and School at Fort Sill in 1929-33. General McNair was killed by an errant American bomb in 1944 near Saint-Lô, France, during the battle of Normandy. McNair Hall at Fort Sill is named for him.
Maxwell Taylor graduated fourth in his West Point class in 1922 and entered the Army, spending the next several years as an engineer and artillery specialist. He graduated from the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill in 1933. In World War II Taylor participated in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. He served as superintendent of West Point for four years, commanded U.S. forces in the Korean War, was chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1955- 59, served President John F. Kennedy as a special adviser, served President Lyndon B. Johnson as ambassador to South Vietnam for a year and a special adviser for three years, and finally retired from public life in 1969.
After his graduation from West Point in 1936, William Westmoreland became an artillery officer and served in several assignments with the 18th Field Artillery at Fort Sill, where he met his future wife. During World War II Westmoreland saw combat with the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, 9th Infantry Division, in Tunisia, Sicily, France and Germany, and he commanded an airborne regimental combat team in Korea in 1952-53. He was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy in 1960-63. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1964- 68, and afterward he served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army in 1968-72. He died in 2005 at the age of 91 and is buried at the West Point Cemetery.
John William Vessey Jr. joined a field artillery brigade in the Minnesota Army National Guard in 1939 and arrived at Fort Sill as a private in 1940, when the Army still had horse-drawn artillery. He served in the North African and Italian campaigns in World War II and later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
Jack N. Merritt was born in Lawton in 1930 and rose through the ranks of the military from a draftee to a four-star general and U.S. Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He entered the Army at Fort Sill as a private and was commissioned from the Field Artillery Officer Candidate School as a second lieutenant in 1953. Merritt was the top graduate in the Artillery Advanced Course, a distinguished graduate of the Air Command and Staff College, and a distinguished graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. During his military career he commanded at every level in field artillery; he was the commanding general of Fort Sill from October 1977 to July 1980. Merritt died in 2018 at age 87.
John Malchase David Shalikashvili was a Polish immigrant who rose through the ranks to become Supreme Allied Commander Europe (1992-93) and chairman of the JCS (1993-97). His maternal grandfather was a general in the Tsarist Russian army and his father was an officer in the Polish army until its defeat by the German Wehrmacht in 1939. Shalikashvili and his mother fled Germany in 1944 to escape advancing Soviet troops, and he immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 16. He learned English in part by watching John Wayne movies. Shalikashvili was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private in 1958, attended Artillery Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1959. During his career he served in every level of unit command from platoon to division.
After graduating from West Point in 1962, Oklahoma native Dennis Joe Reimer attended the Field Artillery Officer Orientation Course at Fort Sill and served as executive officer of the 20th Artillery, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in 1963-64. Reimer returned to Fort Sill and attended the Artillery Officer Advanced CaDVASdsourse at Fort Sill and Fort Bliss in 1965-66. He commanded an artillery unit in Vietnam in 1968-70, then returned to Fort Sill in 1970 as an instructor at the Field Artillery School. Reimer returned to Fort Sill yet again, as deputy assistant commander of the Field Artillery Center and School, in 1983-84. He received his fourth star in 1991 and served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army in 1995-99, when he retired from active duty.
Raymond Thomas “Ray” Odierno, a retired four-star general of the U.S. Army who served as the 38th Chief of Staff of the Army, learned to be a field artilleryman at Fort Sill. He was Commanding General, III Corps, from May 2006 through May 2008, and served as Commanding General, United States Forces-Iraq and its predecessor, Multi-National Force-Iraq, from September 2008 through September 2010.
Allen Bernard West is an American political commentator, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, an author, and a Republican former member of the U.S. Congress. West entered active duty in 1983 at Fort Sill, where he completed the Field Artillery Officer’s Basic Course. He served in the field artillery during his two decades in the Army, and was the third of four consecutive generations in his family to serve in the armed forces.
Carl Edward Vuono began his career as a field artillery officer after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at Fort Sill. He saw three tours of duty in Vietnam as an artillery battalion executive officer, served as deputy commanding general of the Training and Doctrine Command, and commanded the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center until 1985. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army in 1987-91, when he retired from active duty.
Retired Gen. Tommy Franks was born in Wynnewood, lives in Roosevelt and established a museum in Hobart. Franks was the U.S. general who led the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and he also oversaw the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Franks enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1965. Pfc. Franks was selected to attend the Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1967. Later he returned to Fort Sill to command a cannon battery in the Artillery Training Center, and in 1991 he served as Assistant Commandant of the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill. The career field artilleryman retired in 2003.