Propinquity and the charm of the Cherokee maidens accounted for many unions between them and the soldiers and officers at the post. Fort Gibson was the center of society and gaiety for a large section of the country that included the Cherokee Nation. The young women of that tribe were much sought by the officers and were welcome guests at the parties given at the post, where many romances budded and bloomed during the seventy years the old fort existed. The result was that in that part of Oklahoma which formerly constituted the Cherokee Nation, many families descended from unions between the soldiers and Indians. Frequently, when their terms of enlistment expired, soldiers remained in the neighborhood, married Indian girls, reared Indian families, and become prosperous from the land holdings these alliances brought them. For want of diversions of greater interest, numbers of soldiers at Fort Gibson sought such excitement as they could find in the doggeries maintained by mixed-blood Cherokee Indians on tribal lands just off the reservation, where drinking and gambling were indulged in. Violations of the rule forbidding a soldier to remain outside the garrison after retreat had sounded were frequent, and iron bars were employed on the windows in the outer walls of the houses to enforce the regulations. These precautionary measures, said an observer, gave the barracks the appearance of a dilapidated Arkansas jail: the enclosure, he said, was made to hold five companies of troops—officers and men, laundresses and servants herded together in a climate where the temperature ranged in summer from eighty to one hundred degrees. These remarks truly painted a picture that explained much of the resistance to discipline and violation of regulations. As an instance of punishment, an offender was sentenced to “stand on the head of a barrel with an empty bottle in each hand, in front of the dragoon guardhouse every alternate two hours from reveille until retreat for eight days with a board around his neck marked ‘Whiskey Seller,’ to carry a pack on his back weighing fifty pounds every alternate two hours for eight days, from reveille until retreat; to work at hard labor in charge of the guard for fourteen days, and to have seven days of his pay stopped.” Another culprit was sentenced “to be drummed around the garrison immediately in the rear of Corporal Charles Kelloun of H Company, First Dragoons, carrying a keg in his arms, to have a plank hanging on his back marked ‘Whiskey Runner,’ and to serve fifteen days at hard labor in charge of the guard, making good all time lost by sickness.”