In 1830 LeFlore led other chiefs in signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded the remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi to the US government and agreed to removal to Indian Territory.

It also provided that Choctaw who chose to stay in Mississippi would have reserved lands, but the United States government failed to follow through on this provision.

Ousted by the tribal council in a coup, he stayed in Mississippi, where he settled in Carroll County and accepted United States citizenship.

[1] [2] Because the Choctaw had a matrilineal system for property and hereditary leadership, LeFlore gained elite status from his mother's family and clan.

Choctaw chiefs recognized the advantage of using such mixed-race elite men as "trailblazers into an unprecedented universe of capitalist accumulation and renewable wealth.

[2] At age 17, LeFlore married Rosa Donley in Nashville, whom he met there and brought back with him to the Choctaw Nation when he returned in 1817.

[5] While LeFlore was not said to be popular among the full-blood tribal men, he became powerful and influential within the tribe at an early age, largely because of his mother's clan and maternal uncle's position[2] and his own skills.

With other leaders, he struggled to resist European-American encroachment while adapting to some of the new ways and the increasing pressure from the United States government in support of removal.

Particularly after Andrew Jackson's election as president in 1828, he encouraged the Choctaw to make permanent residences, cultivate the land in agriculture, convert to Christianity, and send their children to United States schools for education.

[7] United States representatives came out to the Choctaw for a treaty council, where LeFlore used his formidable personal political capital and position as head of a unified tribe to secure the largest and most desirable areas of what would later be called Indian Territory.

If they reside upon said lands intending to become citizens of the States for five years after the ratification of this Treaty, in that case a grant in fee simple shall issue; said reservation shall include the present improvement of the head of the family, or a portion of it.

[8] William Ward, who was the U.S. agent for the Indians, "refused to enroll the Choctaw claimants' reserves" in Mississippi, which undermined LeFlore's objectives for the treaty and led him to consider it a failure.

The Western Division council led a movement to depose LeFlore, and in a successful coup, they elected his nephew George W. Harkins in his place.

He considers LeFlore and leaders like him to have been a new Creole generation, raised as Choctaw but absorbing what they could of the changing world to make a place for their peoples.

[12] When federal troops approached his property, he offered them assistance and said he was happy to see "the old flag again carried by United States Soldiers.

The drawing room set was of 30 pieces of solid mahogany, finished in genuine gold and upholstered in silk damask.

The house held mirrors, tables, large four-poster beds of rosewood with silken and satin canopies, and four tapestry curtains depicting the four palaces of Napoleon and Josephine: Versailles, Malmaison, Saint Cloud and Fontainebleau.

He owned slaves which became freedmen, read and wrote, and prayed at camp meetings, but he also presided over a political hierarchy of pipe lighters and captains, provided food, shelter, and educational opportunities for his followers, and promulgated his vision of the Choctaw future at the foot of the mound [Nanih Waiya] that had given his people life.