The Honey Creek canyon at Turner Falls seen from above, with the falls and pools among wooded Arbuckle hills.
MARELBU / CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Oklahoma · Region

The Arbuckles & Chickasaw Country

The Chickasaw Cultural Center and the Tishomingo capitol, Sulphur's springs and CCC stonework, Turner Falls on Honey Creek and Lake Murray's Tucker Tower.

5 places to explore

The Chickasaw Nation paid for its own removal. Its leaders sold the Mississippi homelands on good terms, and most Chickasaws came west between 1837 and 1851, choosing their own seasons to travel, by the Nation's account, onto land bought from the Choctaw Nation under the 1837 Treaty of Doaksville. About six thousand came, the Oklahoma Historical Society counts, eleven hundred of them enslaved African Americans. In 1856 the Chickasaws separated from the Choctaws and wrote their own constitution at Good Spring, which became Tishomingo, their capital until 1907. The Nation has been headquartered at Ada since 1975, and its own places anchor the region: the cultural center at Sulphur, the granite capitol at Tishomingo and Governor Douglas H. Johnston's house at Emet.

The ground is the Arbuckle Mountains, worn down to hills from a core of granite 1.3 billion years old under limestone and dolomite laid down by ancient seas, and I-35 cuts straight through them between Davis and Ardmore. Water comes up through the rock: the mineral springs of Chickasaw National Recreation Area, once Platt National Park, and Honey Creek, which drops over Turner Falls. South toward the Red River lie Lake Murray, the first state park, and Lake Texoma behind Denison Dam.

What to See in The Arbuckles & Chickasaw Country

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Water spilling over travertine ledges on a wooded creek in the Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

Chickasaw National Recreation Area

Sulphur

Springs the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations sold to the government in 1902 rather than lose them to developers, later Platt National Park, now the Travertine district's creeks, CCC stonework and bison pasture.

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Turner Falls pouring over a rock face into the pool on Honey Creek.

Turner Falls Park

Davis

Honey Creek dropping 77 feet over Arbuckle rock into a swimming hole off I-35, in a 1,500-acre city park named for the man who settled here with his Chickasaw wife.

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Hikes & Trails

Tucker Tower standing on a rocky cliff above Lake Murray.

Lake Murray State Park

Ardmore

Oklahoma's first and largest state park, built by New Deal crews on former Chickasaw Nation land south of Ardmore, with Tucker Tower, a governors' retreat never finished, on a point above the lake.

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Historic Sites

The red granite Chickasaw National Capitol in Tishomingo with its white cupola.

Chickasaw National Capitol

Tishomingo

The red granite capitol the Chickasaw Nation finished at Tishomingo in 1898, forced out of at statehood, used as the county courthouse for most of a century and reclaimed by the Nation in 1992.

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Towns & Gateways

The timber-framed entrance of the exhibit building at the Chickasaw Cultural Center.

Chickasaw Cultural Center

Sulphur

The Chickasaw Nation's 184-acre campus at Sulphur, opened in 2010, with an exhibit hall on the Nation's history, a recreated 1700s town with daily stomp dance, and a bridge into the national recreation area.

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Stories from The Arbuckles & Chickasaw Country

Geology

The Water Under the Arbuckles

The springs at Sulphur and the city of Ada's water come out of one block of folded limestone, and a 2002 plan to pipe that water to Canadian County made the state measure it first.

3 min read

The Arbuckles & Chickasaw Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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