Westerly on the Natchez Trace stood an Indian village, Pontatock, with its council house, which in the 1820's became the Capitol of the Chickasaw Nation. The chiefs and headmen met there to sign treaties or to establish tribal laws and policies. Each summer two or three thousand Indians camped nearby to receive the annual payments for lands they had sold to the Federal Government. After the treaty of 1832, the last land was surrendered. The Council House disappeared, but its memory remains in the names of a Mississippi county and town and went west with the Chickasaws as a county and village in Oklahoma.
