Treaty of Pontotoc Creek
[1] The treaty followed an earlier agreement to move west of the Mississippi in 1830 which the Chickasaw refused to honor after discovering the poor nature of the land they received.
Pressured by the aggression of the State of Mississippi to establish its jurisdiction over the Indians, Chickasaw Chiefs relented in 1832 to President Andrew Jackson's and his representatives offer of relocation in the west.
The treaty was part of the greater Indian Removal policy, originally proposed by President Thomas Jefferson, by which the Five Civilized Tribes were to allow for white settlement in the south by ceding their territory and relocating west of the Mississippi River.
It was one of several removal treaties signed by the Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee in the 1830s relocating them to the new territories in present-day Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The Chickasaw were essentially doomed to removal with the others when, in 1806, Jefferson promised the southern states that the Federal Government would encourage the migration of all Indians to land west of the Mississippi.
The trio of Andrew Jackson, John Coffee and James Jackson (unrelated), were each land speculators, militiamen and politicians who worked the cessions of huge tracts of Indians lands, the defeat of Indian resistance and eventually the complete removal of the Chickasaw, as well as the rest of the Five Civilized Tribes, to make way for white settlers –often at great personal profit.
After the act, Jackson received strong legal and judicial resistance from the more law-savvy Creeks and Cherokees, and the Choctaw Chief Greenwood LeFlore furiously refused any meeting with the president.
Rather than submit to this great evil, they prefer to seek a home in the west, where they may live and be governed by their own laws.
The President has heard the complaints of the Chickasaws and like them believes they cannot be happy, and prosper as a nation, in their present situation and condition, and being desirous to relieve them from the great calamity that seems to await them, if they remain as they are - He has sent his Commissioner General John Coffee, who has met the whole Chickasaw nation in Council, and after mature deliberation, they have entered into the following articles...[11]Although further complications had to be resolved, Arrell M. Gibson writes that the Pontotoc Creek Treaty "was the basic Chickasaw removal document providing for the cession of all tribal land east of the Mississippi River.
The Chickasaw decided to buy a part of the Choctaw tribe's new western land under what became known as the Treaty of Doaksville for $530,000.
They received over $3 million from the sales of the Mississippi allotments, but with this wealth incurred further external threats from white opportunists coming to the new Chickasaw territory as surveyors and salesmen.
It was achieved with relative success compared to the Choctaw or Cherokee, yet it still had damaging effects on tribal culture and structure which took decades to heal.
