[3] Sequoyah County is part of the Fort Smith, AR-OK metropolitan statistical area.

Archaeological sites within the borders of the present county date to the Archaic Period (6000 BC to 1 AD).

A slightly smaller number of sites date to the Plains Village period (1000 to 1500 AD).

[3] French traders came to this area in the 1700s, as they had posts in neighboring present-day Arkansas, part of their La Louisiane colony.

But he ceded control by selling the Louisiana in 1803, when the United States purchased all French territory west of the Mississippi River.

The US forced removal of the Western Cherokee from Arkansas in 1829, resettling them in Indian Territory: present-day Sequoyah County, Oklahoma.

They had to trek under Army escort to Indian Territory, a passage they called the Trail of Tears for its high fatalities and sorrows of leaving their homelands.

The Cherokee Nation established its first capital at a place called Tahlonteskee (Tahlontuskey), near the present town of Gore, Oklahoma.

[3] This area, then known as the Sequoyah District, was dominated by Cherokee who were Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, as were the majority of the nation.

Many of the Cherokee were slaveholders; they also had been told that the Confederates would provide them with a Native American state if victorious in the war.

The only combat was on June 15, 1864, when Colonel Stand Watie and his Confederate troops conducted the ambush of the Union steamboat J. R. Williams on the Arkansas River.