There were several small cemeteries around Fort Gibson in which the dead were buried from the earliest days of the fort. The number of interments was increased to such an extent during the Civil War that more space was required, and in 1869 the National Cemetery was established on land that was originally part of the military reservation of Fort Gibson. After the abandonment of the fort, the reservation was transferred to the Department of the Interior on February 11, 1891, a parcel of seven acres being reserved for cemeterial purposes. On August 6, 1872, William W. Belknap, Secretary of War, gave instructions to have the remains of his father, General William Goldsmith Belknap, removed from Fort Washita, where they were interred in 1851, to the cemetery at Keokuk, Iowa, the home of the Secretary. At the same time he directed the quartermaster general to arrange for the removal of the remains of other soldiers and their families found at Fort Washita, Fort Towson and Fort Arbuckle, to the National Cemetery at Fort Gibson. Bids were advertised for, and a contract was let to P. J. Byrne of Fort Gibson, who succeeded in removing the remains of forty-six persons in 1872; only two of them, however, were definitely known to be soldiers. Owing to the careless manner in which the men who served at these remote posts had been buried, and the fact that fires had been permitted to run through the cemeteries and burn off all wooden headboards, and the difficulty of finding other marks of identification in the graves, or indeed, of finding the remains and the boxes containing them in such condition that they could be removed at all, instructions were given to abandon further removal. However, information was later acquired of forty-six additional graves at Fort Washita: fifty-four at Fort Arbuckle, and eighteen at Big Sandy Creek on the Fort Smith and Fort Arbuckle road. Efforts were then renewed, and another contractor undertook to remove the remains to the Fort Gibson National Cemetery but this effort proved abortive also. In 1873 it was reported to the office of the Adjutant General at Washington that the bodies of one hundred and twenty-five soldiers killed in the Battle of the Washita were buried on that battlefield. This again stimulated interest in the subject of removal, and the visitor will see in the Officers’ Circle in the National Cemetery the grave of Major Joel H. Elliott of the Seventh Infantry, killed on November 27, 1868, at the Battle of the Washita.