[1] The granite rocks of the Arbuckles date back to the Precambrian Eon some 1.4 billion years ago which were overlain by rhyolites during the Cambrian Period.

Atop the rhyolite is about 15,000 feet (4,600 m) of folded and faulted limestones, dolomites, sandstones, and shales deposited in shallow seas from Late Cambrian through Pennsylvanian time (515 - 290 million years ago).

[2] They were named indirectly for Gen. Matthew Arbuckle (1778–1851), a career soldier from Virginia who was active in the Indian Territory for the last thirty years of his life.

Shortly before his death at Fort Smith, Arkansas, from cholera, several detachments of troops under his command had established an outpost to protect the California road, on Wildhorse Creek in present-day Garvin County, Oklahoma.

As a result of the karst topography, standing water is rarely found atop the Arbuckle Mountains, the water seeps through fractures and planes of separation in the limestone bedrock, dissolving the rock to produce a network of caves and solution conduits throughout the limestone formations.