Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek: The Choctaw Lose Their Homeland

On September twenty-seventh, eighteen thirty, a group of Choctaw leaders gathered at a place called Dancing Rabbit Creek in Mississippi and signed a document they had not chosen to sign. It was called the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and it was the first major removal treaty executed under Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, passed earlier that year. The Choctaw Nation had occupied this land for centuries. The Natchez Trace ran through the heart of their territory, and Choctaw towns had served as the rest points and trading centers that made long-distance travel on the Trace possible for anyone.

What happened at Dancing Rabbit Creek was documented at the time in terms that do not leave much ambiguity. Choctaw leaders signed under a combination of military pressure, manipulation of internal tribal politics, and documented distribution of alcohol. The United States promised specific protections for Choctaw individuals who wished to remain in Mississippi. Most of those promises were not kept.

The removal took place in three waves between eighteen thirty-one and eighteen thirty-three. Approximately fifteen thousand Choctaw were forced west to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. An estimated two thousand five hundred died along the way, from disease, exposure, and the physical conditions of forced march in winter. A French observer named Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed one of the removal parties crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of eighteen thirty-one. He described it as one of the most terrible things he had ever seen.

Approximately five thousand to six thousand Choctaw refused to go or managed to remain by hiding in the swamps and forests of Mississippi. They are the ancestors of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a federally recognized nation whose government is still here. Their presence in Mississippi is not a remnant. It is an act of resistance that lasted two centuries.

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, formed by those who were removed, and the Mississippi Band, formed by those who stayed, both maintain archives of what happened at Dancing Rabbit Creek. Their accounts are the primary record.