Checotah: Named for a Creek Chief, Spelled by a Mapmaker

In eighteen seventy-two, workers laying track for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway established a railhead on the old Texas Road in the Creek Nation. They named the spot Checote Switch after Samuel Checote, the Principal Chief of the Muscogee Creek Nation. A mapmaker later misspelled it Checotah, and the error stuck.

The Creek Nation chartered the town in eighteen ninety-three, and Checotah became notable that year when the Dawes Commission, the federal body tasked with dissolving tribal land holdings in Indian Territory and allotting land to individual tribal members, held its very first meeting here in Lerblance Hall. That meeting set in motion the legal dismantling of tribal sovereignty across Indian Territory.

Checotah sits at the intersection of the Texas Road and the railroad, a crossroads town in McIntosh County. It is also the hometown of country singer Carrie Underwood, who won American Idol in two thousand five and has mentioned the town by name in at least one song.