When the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole nations were forcibly removed from the Southeast along the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, many brought enslaved Black people with them; by 1861 an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 Black people were enslaved throughout Indian Territory, with the Cherokee alone holding around 4,600. Fort Gibson, established in 1824, sat at the center of this history: Cherokee militia mustered there in 1842 to pursue a group of enslaved people who staged the largest slave revolt in the nation's history, and after the Civil War the fort became the headquarters where the federal Dawes Commission enrolled thousands of Cherokee, Creek, and other tribal Freedmen, formerly enslaved people and their descendants who won citizenship rights under the Reconstruction treaties of 1866. The fort's role in enrolling Freedmen documents a chapter of American slavery and emancipation distinct from, but intertwined with, the plantation South.