Webbers Falls: Walter Webber's Trading Post on the Arkansas River

The name comes from a seven-foot waterfall in the Arkansas River and from the Cherokee leader who built a trading post here in eighteen eighteen. Walter Webber was a leader among the Western Cherokee, the group that had voluntarily relocated west of the Mississippi years before the Trail of Tears, and he recognized that this bend in the river was a natural commercial hub.

Webber also ran a portage service and built salt works, leasing land from the Cherokee Nation government. His establishment became one of the first significant trading centers in what would become Oklahoma.

When thousands of Cherokee from the Southeast were forcibly removed here in the late eighteen thirties under Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, they arrived in a place that already had Cherokee infrastructure. During the Civil War, Cherokee Confederate General Stand Watie set up a headquarters at Webbers Falls. The town has changed hands and fortunes many times since, but it carries its original name, a remembrance of the Cherokee leader who chose this place two centuries ago.