After the Union forces took possession of the fort it was surrounded by several thousand destitute Indian and Negro refugees who remained there for protection and for the food that was issued to them in small quantities. The multitude of people thus congregated presented a problem to the commandant. Some of them put in small crops under the protection of the guns of the fort; they would have gone farther away to their homes but for the fear that they would be raided by predatory bands from both sides, ranging over the country. A detachment of regular troops from the first battalion of the Tenth United States Infantry in command of Major James M. Mulligan, on February 17, 1866, relieved the Sixty-second Illinois Volunteers then constituting the garrison. The post remained garrisoned under the name of Fort Gibson by four companies of the Sixth Infantry until September 30, 1871; it was then vacated by the command under General W. B. Hazen and broken up as a military post; there was left only a guard composed of a small detachment of the Sixth Infantry for the quartermaster’s department, which temporarily occupied the post as a depot for such transportation and other facilities as were necessary to enable paymasters and other officers to communicate with Fort Sill. Beginning with that of 1811, nearly all the classes of the United States Military Academy at West Point were represented among the more than one hundred graduates who were stationed at Fort Gibson from time to time prior to the Civil War. Every class after 1819 had from three to ten graduates who served in later years at that famous post. Many graduates were sent from West Point direct to Fort Gibson to get their first taste of army life and frontier experience. Eight of the class of 1842 came for their frontier service to this fort from whence they were engaged in protecting the Santa Fe traders. Except for short intervals, General Arbuckle commanded at Fort Gibson for 17 years until 1841 when, because of the dilapidated condition of the buildings there, he removed his department headquarters (but not the garrison), to Fort Smith. Soon afterward the command was given to General Zachary Taylor. When Taylor departed for service in Mexico, Arbuckle was returned to the command of Fort Gibson and remained there through the years of trouble and turmoil of his Indian neighbors of the Cherokee Nation, with whom he was more or less involved. Fort Gibson was garrisoned by detachments of the Seventh Infantry from its inception in 1824 to February 7, 1839, when the troops left for service in Florida and were replaced by the Fourth Infantry that had arrived the day before, after a long, weary march from that remote Seminole battleground. For a time three companies of the Third Infantry served at the fort until the spring of 1840. The next year General Arbuckle was relieved of his command and it was transferred for a time to Colonel Alexander Cummings of the Fourth Infantry.