Pontatock: Capital of the Chickasaw Nation

A short distance west on the Natchez Trace, an ancient path that connected Nashville to Natchez, stood the Chickasaw village of Pontatock. The Chickasaw people had long held this part of northern Mississippi as their homeland, and Pontatock was one of their principal towns. By the eighteen twenties, the village council house had become the capitol of the Chickasaw Nation, the center of a sovereign government that maintained its own laws, its own leaders, and its own diplomatic relationships with the United States.

That sovereignty was erased in eighteen thirty-two, when the Chickasaw signed the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek under pressure, ceding their Mississippi lands in exchange for territory west of the Mississippi River. By eighteen thirty-eight, most of the Chickasaw had been removed to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Pontatock vanished from the map.

The Natchez Trace remains. The Chickasaw Nation, headquartered today in Sulphur, Oklahoma, also remains.