Colbert's Ferry
Oklahoma
Where the Red River marks the Texas-Oklahoma line, there has been a crossing since long before any highway or bridge. For nearly half a century, the most important of those crossings was Colbert's Ferry, and the man who ran it was one of the most interesting entrepreneurs on the frontier.
Benjamin Franklin Colbert was a Chickasaw citizen, born in eighteen twenty-six in the Chickasaw Nation's Mississippi homeland and removed west with his people in the eighteen thirties. By the early eighteen fifties, he recognized that the traffic along the Texas Road, the main north-south route through Indian Territory, had to cross the Red River, and whoever controlled that crossing would do very well. In eighteen fifty-three, the Chickasaw Nation granted him permission to operate a ferry at the spot three miles southeast of the present town of Colbert, Oklahoma.
The crossing became critical when the Butterfield Overland Mail launched its transcontinental stagecoach service in eighteen fifty-eight, running from Saint Louis to San Francisco on a route that swung through Indian Territory. Colbert's was the last Indian Territory station before the stage entered Texas on the southbound run. He maintained the road approaches on both sides of the river and transported the coaches and their passengers across free of charge, compensated instead by the steady flow of commercial traffic the stage attracted.
The Civil War disrupted the mail route, but the ferry kept operating. Confederate troops crossed here regularly moving between Texas and Indian Territory. After the war, the great cattle drives up from Texas made Colbert's crossing busier than it had ever been. When the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad built a bridge a half mile upriver in eighteen seventy-two, the ferry's dominance faded. Colbert won federal permission to build a toll bridge in eighteen seventy-four, but a flood destroyed it about a year later, and the ferry ran on until about eighteen ninety-nine.
Today's US Route Sixty-Nine bridge crosses the Red River almost exactly where Colbert's passengers once waited on the muddy bank for the next flat-bottomed crossing.
