The Great Salt Plains have been the scene of many Indian Councils, both of war and peace. In drafting the treaty which defined the territory to become the so-called permanent home of the Cherokees in 1828, the United States Government withheld the Salt Plains area with the provision that, "The right is reserved to the United States to allow other tribes of red men to get salt on the Great Salt Plains in common with the Cherokee Tribe." The value of the Plains lay not in its salt alone, but in the rich hunting afforded by the animals migrating there for the salt supply. Possession of this area is said to have been the cause of many Indian battles.  The refuge was established March 26, 1930 by executive order of President Herbert Hoover and contains over 32,000 acres (50 km²) of protected land as habitat to approximately 312 species of birds and 30 species of mammals. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in June 1983. 

In the earliest of the settlement of the Indian Territory, Western Kansas and Texas cattlemen sent wagons to the Plains to haul away great loads of salt. A local legend of interest concerns a cache of gold that was reportedly buried in the vicinity of the dam. In 1850, five men were returning to Missouri from California with fourteen hundred pounds of gold. In the vicinity of the present dam, they were attacked by Cheyenne-Arapaho Indians, three of the men being killed. The two remaining men wrapped the gold in a buffalo skin and buried it, marking the spot with an end-gate rod from their wagon.

In 1901 Carl Sheldon, a homesteader and part time piano tuner from Fort Cobb, arrived in the area with a map showing the location of the buried gold. Two years later he found the end gate rod, and the general location of the gold. The men went to work digging but after only a few feet, struck water and quick sand. They made a core-drilling rig and drilled to what they thought was bedrock. One of the men took a sample core to Wichita for analysis. Chemical analysis had revealed buffalo hide and gold in the core. While he was gone, a fellow worker blundered and pulled the drill out of the ground.

Sheldon worked through the winter of 1904 trying to pump the water and sand out of the hole with a pump powered by a steam engine, only to have it fill with sand and mud again and again. The other men gave up the effort in despair but Sheldon worked relentlessly on, sinking shaft after shaft in the tricky quicksand, but the gold was never found. He purchased 20 acres of land for the next 35 years searched in vain for the elusive treasure. The Oklahoma Planning and Resources Board paid Sheldon $350 for his land in 1940 when construction was begun on the dam....fifty dollars less than he had paid for it.  The Great Salt Plains Dam and Lake located on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River is the oldest Corps of Engineers' project in the Tulsa District, authorized by Congress in the Flood Control Act of 1936. Construction was started by the Little Rock District in September of 1938. When the Tulsa District was organized in July of 1939, the project was placed under their jurisdiction and was completed in July of 1941 at a total cost of $4,626,270.  To accomplish its authorized purpose of flood control, Great Salt Plains Lake has two types of storage: conservation and flood control. The conservation storage provides 31,420 acre feet of storage used primarily for the propagation and protection of fish and wildlife.