The Treaty of Pontotoc Creek was a treaty signed on October 20, 1832 by representatives of the United States and the Chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation assembled at the National Council House on Pontotoc Creek in Pontotoc, Mississippi. The treaty ceded the 6,283,804 million acres of the remaining Chickasaw homeland in Mississippi in return for Chickasaw relocation on an equal amount of land west of the Mississippi River.
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 land was ceded to the U.S. with the understanding that the proceeds made in the sale of the land to white settlers would go to the Chickasaw. The treaty led to the Chickasaw Trail of Tears, by which the entire Chickasaw Nation emigrated to new territory in present-day Oklahoma in 1837-1838.
Background
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 other factor underlying the removal of the Indians was land speculation, one of the primary sources of money for the landed aristocracy of the South since the early days of the Virginia colony. 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.
First attempts at removal: Treaties of 1805, 1816 and 1818
A series of land cessions preceded this final cession of Chickasaw land at Pontotoc Creek. The Chickasaws made two significant cessions in 1805 and 1816, ceding their land in Alabama and Tennessee along the Tennessee River, the highly valued land along the Muscle Shoals rapids of the river. The cessions had made a great profit to Jackson, Coffee and James Jackson, the latter of whom built his magnificent Forks of Cypress Plantation on the ceded land in Florence, Alabama. In 1818 Jackson began his attempt to totally remove the Chickasaw in a treaty that ceded everything between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi. John C. Calhoun, President Monroe's Secretary of War, had told Jackson that "The President is very anxious to remove the Indians on this side to the west of the Mississippi, and if the Chickasaws could be brought to an exchange of territory, it would be preferred." This land was very valuable on account of its fertile land and salt licks, and the Chickasaw were aware of this value. Jackson persuaded James Colbert and other Chickasaw chiefs to meet him at the Chickasaw Old Town (now Tupelo, Mississippi) to talk about the proposed cession. The Chickasaw were greatly influenced by the powerful chiefs James, George and Levi Colbert, landholding Chickasaw who had adopted some of the trappings of plantation society like owning slaves, and who supported removal to the west. With great difficulty, Jackson finally got the Chickasaw chiefs to give in with the promise of $20,000 paid annually to the chiefs for fifteen years. A deed was drawn up in the name of James Jackson, revealing the corrupt nature of these cessions later pointed out by Andrew Jackson's adversaries, and the Chickasaw lost everything north of the Mississippi border with Tennessee. Andrew Jackson achieved a massive land cession but not the total western removal that was wanted. The Chickasaw carefully guarded their remaining land until Jackson became President.