Chickasaw Cession

This strip was only the beginning. Treaties in 1805 and 1816 took Chickasaw land along the Tennessee River, and Andrew Jackson pressed for the whole nation's removal. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Chickasaw National Council signed the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek on October 20, 1832, ceding 6,283,804 acres in Mississippi in exchange for land west of the Mississippi River. The nation paid for its own migration out of land sales to white settlers. Removal began in 1837, and 4,914 Chickasaws left, together with 1,156 enslaved people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 21 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Chickasaw Council House — 22 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 23 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 24 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

More markers nearby

• Amory, Mississippi: Blues from a Railroad Town — 0.8 mi
• Cotton Gin Port — 2.7 mi
• Bienville's Fort — 3.8 mi
• Gaines Trace — 7.4 mi