At milepost 251.1 of the Natchez Trace Parkway a pull-off and a sign mark where a Chickasaw village called Pontatock once stood to the west along the Old Trace, near the present town of Pontotoc. Its council house became the capital of the Chickasaw Nation in the 1820s. Chiefs and headmen met there to sign treaties and settle tribal law, and each summer two or three thousand people camped nearby to collect the annual payments for land the nation had sold to the United States. Nothing of the building survives. The site is a commemoration, and the sign says the council house disappeared after the last land was surrendered.
That surrender was the treaty of Pontotoc Creek, signed on 20 October 1832 and ratified on 1 March 1833. The Chickasaw ceded their lands in Mississippi and Alabama. Families could sell to white settlers while they waited for removal to Indian Territory, and the nation had to pay for its own removal from the proceeds. Chickasaw people camped near Pontotoc until terms they could accept were worked out. A large party left from Memphis on 4 July 1838, and many died on the way west.
The Chickasaw negotiators included the brothers George and Levi Colbert, and Levi died before removal, still pressing for fair payment. The sign notes that Pontotoc went west with the people, as a county and a village in Oklahoma. The stop takes ten minutes; pair it with the Chickasaw Village Site, eleven miles north.
The closest stops worth working into your route