In September 1830, President Andrew Jackson dispatched commissioners Gen. John Coffee and Secretary of War John Eaton to Mississippi to negotiate a treaty with the Choctaw Indians, whereby the Choctaws would sell their homeland and move west of the Mississippi River.
Jackson instructed Coffee and Eaton to, “fail not to make a treaty.” The commissioners met the Choctaw leaders at Dancing Rabbit Creek in present day Noxubee County on Sept. 18, 1830 and opened negotiations.
The tone of the negotiations was set when the U.S. commissioners did not allow Christian missionaries or clergy on the treaty grounds. It was the belief of the commissioners that Christian religious influences would be an impediment to successful negotiations. However, the commissioners allowed gamblers and whiskey sellers to openly set up shop there.
The United States and the Choctaw Nation had a long history of a close and peaceful relationship. Beginning with the Treaty of Hopewell in 1786, the Choctaw had peacefully entered eight treaties with the United States prior to Dancing Rabbit Creek. One of those was the Choctaw Treaty of 1816. That treaty ceded Choctaw lands east of the Tombigbee and opened the future site of Columbus to settlement.
One of the signers of that treaty was Moshulitubbee (his name has various spellings this is one from 1822), who as medal chief of the Northeast District would also sign the treaty at Dancing Rabbit Creek 14 years later.
From as early as 1794, the Choctaws had been military allies of the United States. In that year Gen. Hummingbird, a Choctaw chief who received a military commission from George Washington, led about 60 Choctaw warriors serving as scouts for U.S. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne before the Battle of Fallen Timbers. In the Creek Indian War of 1813, more than 700 Choctaws under medal chief Pushmataha (Jackson commissioned him a colonel but issued him a general’s uniform) joined with Jackson to protect the Tombigbee and Alabama River settlements and defeat the Creeks.
At the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, Choctaws again fought beside Jackson, this time against the British. The Choctaw were longtime friends and allies of the U.S., but they possessed millions of acres of land prime for development.
In the treaties prior to Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Choctaws had relinquished title to several sizable blocks of land but were steadfast in keeping their homeland. During the 1820s, divisions began to arise within the Choctaw leadership as to their future. Then in January 1829, Mississippi claimed legal jurisdiction over all land, including Choctaw lands, within the state’s boundaries. Western District Chief Greenwood LeFlore (or Le Fleur), in the spring of 1830, floated his own idea about a possible treaty conveying most, if not all, of the Choctaw homeland in exchange for land in the west and a very large payment to the Choctaw Nation. President Jackson learned of the opening and appointed commissioners to meet with the Choctaws and negotiate a treaty.
The meeting place was at Dancing Rabbit Creek and was attended by the three Choctaw district chiefs — Greenwood Leflore of the Western District, Moshulitubbee of the Northeastern District, Nittakechi of the Southeastern District — their captains and thousands of other Choctaws. Leflore arrived attired in a “suit of citizen clothes,” Moshulitubbee in a military uniform given him by Jackson, and Nittakechi in Choctaw dress of a fringed hunting jacket, crescent silver gorgets hanging from his neck and with a shawl and silver band around his head.
The Choctaw leaders expressed their longstanding and close friendship with the United States and its people but did not wish to leave their homeland. Secretary of War and commissioner Eaton was quoted by Judge Dillard as responding, “Major Eaton with brutal roughness said that the Choctaws had no choice in the matter, but were bound to sell their lands and remove to the other side of the Mississippi River. If they refused to enter into a treaty to that effect, the President in twenty days would march an army into their country … (and) extend the authority and laws of the United States over the Choctaw territory.”
The Choctaw chiefs and leaders cut the best deal they thought they could get in order to avoid conflict. The treaty, signed on Sept. 27, 1830, did allow for Choctaws with houses and farms to remain, but they were to be subject to U.S. and Mississippi laws.
The removal of the Choctaws from their homeland began in 1831, making their exodus the first Trail of Tears. The Cherokee Trail of Tears was not until 1838. A branch of that first Trail of Tears, which was called the Indian Immigration Road, left from the Hebron Mission north of Starkville.
As the Choctaws were departing Mississippi, an unusually severe winter storm struck with horrible effects. Many Choctaw died. They became the first of some 2,500 Choctaw men, women and children to die of disease, malnutrition and exposure during removal.
Maxine Barker, a descendant of Moshulatubbee (her spelling), wrote a description of the horrendous conditions of the journey west in The Third Arrow A Story of Moshulatubbee.
She described sleet and ice clinging to the Choctaws’ clothing and many walking barefoot through the ice. She told of how many people died and were buried in shallow graves along the trail. Her most vivid description though was of imagining “the anguish and hopeless grief of a young Choctaw mother, chopping out a place in the cold, hard earth in which to place her child, who had just died in her arms.”
The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek 189 years ago opened tens of millions of acres to Euro-American settlement but at what a horrible price.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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