Chickasaw Council House
Natchez Trace

Westerly on the Natchez Trace stood an Indian village, Pontatock, with its council house, which in the 1820s became the capitol of the Chickasaw Nation. The chiefs and the head men met there to sign treaties or to establish tribal laws and policies. Each summer 2,000 or 3,000 Indians camped nearby to receive an annual payment for lands they had sold to our Federal government. After the treaty of 1832, the last land was surrendered. The council house disappeared but its memory remains here in the names of a Mississippi county and town that went west with the Chickasaw as a county and village in Oklahoma.