It had a post office called Childer's Station from 1873 to 1888, when the name was changed to Sallisaw. The site of present-day Sallisaw fell within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation after the tribe was forced to emigrate from its former home in the Southeastern U.S. Several post offices had existed in the area nearby, even before there was a named community. Modern Sallisaw's beginning as a permanent community began in 1887–1888, when Argyle Quesenbury, a white man, and Will Watie Wheeler, a collateral relative of noted Cherokee leader Stand Watie, laid out lots for a town. In the 1840s and 1850s, Sallisaw had been the name of one of the 22 Arkansas River steamboat landings between Fort Smith and Fort Gibson. Sallisaw is part of the Fort Smith, Arkansas–Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area.įrench explorers and traders had travelled through this part of North America in the seventeenth century, and were the people who attached the name Sallisaw to several geographic features. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 8,880, an 11.2 percent increase over the figure of 7,891 recorded in 2000. Sallisaw is a city and county seat in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, United States.
