Chickasaw Council House

The council house of the Chickasaw Nation stood near Pontotoc Creek, south-east of the present town of Pontotoc, and there on 20 October 1832 the nation's leaders signed the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, ceding all that remained of their homeland in Mississippi, about 6.3 million acres. In the 1820s the village of Pontatock and its council house served as the capital of the Chickasaw Nation, where chiefs and headmen met to make treaties and set tribal laws. Each summer two or three thousand Chickasaw camped nearby to receive the annual payments for lands already sold to the United States. The treaty was made with General John Coffee, sent by President Andrew Jackson, in a general council of the whole nation.

Its preamble says the Chickasaw found themselves oppressed by being made subject to the laws of the states in which they lived: Mississippi had extended its laws over Chickasaw country, and intruders were settling on it. The ceded land was to be surveyed and sold like other public land, and the Chickasaw were to pay for their own removal out of the proceeds, while families kept temporary homesteads until they left. Further treaties in Washington in 1834 and at Doaksville in 1837 settled the terms and the destination, and the removal to the Chickasaw District of the Choctaw Nation, in present Oklahoma, began in 1837. The council house did not survive the cession. Its name went west: Pontotoc is a county and a town in Mississippi, and a county in Oklahoma. Where it stood is uncertain to within about a mile: the state marker for the treaty on Mississippi Highway 342 puts it a mile to the south-east, a county history citing an 1834 survey plat puts it half a mile, and the federal Geographic Names Information System records it closer still.