Chickasaw and Choctaw: The Trail of Tears Begins Here

The bluffs above the Mississippi River where Memphis now stands were Chickasaw territory for centuries before European contact. The Chickasaw people, whose homeland stretched across northern Mississippi, western Tennessee, and parts of Alabama and Kentucky, called this high ground home. Their communities, trade networks, and political confederacy shaped the geography of the interior South long before the first Spanish expedition crossed the river here in fifteen forty-one.

The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, signed by President Andrew Jackson, changed everything. The Chickasaw negotiated their removal terms through the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in eighteen thirty-two; they ceded their homeland in exchange for land in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma and a cash payment that was never fully honored. The Choctaw, whose territory covered central and southern Mississippi, had already signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in eighteen thirty, under conditions that historians describe as coercive: federal negotiators withheld food from the treaty council until Choctaw leaders signed.

Alexis de Tocqueville was traveling through the American South in December eighteen thirty-one when he witnessed Choctaw families crossing the Mississippi River near Memphis on their way west. He wrote about it in "Democracy in America," describing the elders, children, and dogs crossing a wide river in the middle of winter, escorted by soldiers. He wrote that it was orderly and silent, with no cries, no protest, and that the stillness of it was more disturbing than any disturbance could have been.

The Choctaw removal occurred in three waves between eighteen thirty-one and eighteen thirty-three. Historians estimate that between two thousand five hundred and six thousand Choctaw people died of disease, exposure, and starvation on the march and in the immediate aftermath. The Chickasaw removal, completed by eighteen thirty-seven, was less immediately lethal but dispossessed a people of their entire homeland in exchange for money and promises that the United States government partially and sometimes entirely failed to keep.

The cotton economy built on that dispossessed land produced the blues. The connection runs directly through the geography you are driving through.