The Council Oak and the Lochapoka Creek Band

Sometime in the eighteen thirties, a band of Muscogee Creek people stopped at the fork of two streams in what would become northeastern Oklahoma. They had been walking for months, most of them. The journey had started in Alabama, where the federal government had demanded their land under the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, and finished, if it finished at all, here. The band was the Lochapoka Creek. They built a fire under a large white oak tree near the creek they had found, lit it with coals they had carried from their council fire back home in Alabama, and declared that this place would be their new home.

The Muscogee word talasi means old town. The settlement they named with that word became, in the mouths of later settlers, the name of the city built on top of it. Tulsa.

The Council Oak Tree is still standing. Its exact age is not known, but it was already mature when the Lochapoka band made camp beneath it. The tree stands at Eighteenth and Cheyenne, in a small park that the city long maintained and that returned to the Muscogee Nation in twenty twenty-four.

The Muscogee Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes who were relocated to Indian Territory under federal removal policy, brought with them to Oklahoma their legal traditions, their written language, their newspaper, their constitution, and their fire. The removal killed thousands. It is called by historians the Trail of Tears, though the Muscogee experience is sometimes distinguished from the better-known Cherokee Trail as a separate, earlier ordeal.

What the Lochapoka Creek built here after the removal was a functioning community. What was built on top of that community, without their full consent, in the decades after Oklahoma statehood in nineteen oh seven, is a longer and more contested story. The Council Oak tree remembers all of it. It is the oldest living thing in Tulsa.