The Chickasaw and the Cherokee Treaties

Before John Hunt arrived in eighteen oh five, before LeRoy Pope platted his town, and before the constitutional convention that made Alabama a state, the land around the Big Spring belonged to two nations. The Chickasaw people had territory that extended through northern Alabama. The Cherokee had claims that overlapped from the east. The spring itself had a name, given by one or both of those nations, before any European saw it.

The dispossession was formal and documented. The United States negotiated a treaty with the Chickasaw in eighteen oh five that secured a cession of their northern Alabama territory. A separate treaty with the Cherokee in eighteen oh six achieved the same purpose on the Cherokee side. The cessions opened the land to settlement, and settlement moved quickly. Within a decade, Huntsville was a substantial town. Within fourteen years, it was hosting a state constitutional convention.

What happened after the treaties is also documented. The removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States came in the eighteen thirties, forced by the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty and implemented through a series of marches that killed thousands. The Chickasaw, the Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw, and the Seminole were driven west to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The trails they traveled have been named, in retrospect, by the suffering they carried.

The land that the treaties opened remains what it was made into: a city of more than two hundred thousand people, built beside the spring.