Red Dog Road crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway at milepost 140 in Leake County, and it carries the English name of a Choctaw leader. The National Park Service marker at the crossing says the road, which ran to Canton, was opened in 1834 and named for Ofahoma, or Red Dog, a Choctaw chief who had become a farmer, and that he signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. That treaty, concluded on September 27, 1830, gave up the last Choctaw lands in Mississippi and committed the nation to move west of the Mississippi River.
The name, spelled Offahoomah, appears among the treaty's signers and again among the signers of its supplementary articles the next day, and a man listed as Ofehoma was one of eight Choctaw granted two sections of land each, to include their improvements. In Choctaw the words mean dog and red, so the records carry the name without proving that all three entries are one man. Leake County was created in 1833 on land the treaty opened, and the road was opened the year after.
Not every Choctaw family left. In 1880 Leake County counted 382 Choctaw residents, the second highest number of Native Americans of any county in Mississippi. The name also survives in the community of Ofahoma, west of Carthage near the Yockanookany River.
Getting there
32.7713, -89.6885
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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