Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal

12. The Road West

Because the Chickasaw were holding conferences and annuity payment assemblages at various places in the nation deemed suitable by the Chickasaw at the particular times, which gatherings were expensive and troublesome to the Chickasaws living at and near the places selected and, if held at the agency, the agent and his employees, agent Robert C. Nicholas complained to the chiefs and stated that he would no longer pay the annuities at the agency. The chiefs, therefore, decided to build a permanent council house. Nicholas supported the idea and recommended “building the house for a National purpose, when all who went could take their own provisions & thus avoid imposing on the hospitality and goodness of those who were able to feed them.” The chiefs agreed and thereafter chose a site on which they built the council house (Figures 12 and 16). The site chosen was at the settlement of Pontitack on the Natchez Trace. Upon return to the nation with the 1820 annuities, Nicholas found that the house had been built, which he described and complained about: “On my return I found it up . . . [which] resulted in myself, clerk & guard being crowded into a common log cabin, one room alone of which we occupied, in size, 18 by 8 [feet], without ®oor, loft, doors or chimney, one side of it not chinked or daubed.”1 Nicholas thereafter decided that he would pay the 1821 annuities at Chickasaw Bluffs, much to the consternation of the chiefs. They were insulted by rejection of the council house that they asserted to have been built for Nicholas’s “accommodation at their own expense, where he paid the last annuity in.” By February 1824, however, the chiefs and agent Benjamin Fort Smith had af-¤rmed the permanent National Council House. In that month Smith paid Tookpulca for work “done in building a kitchen at [the] Council House.” Alterations and improvements to the council house structure had likely been made by the chiefs prior to that time. In January 1824 Smith had paid the annuities there. Later additions were built under the direction of Smith, which 12 The Road West 16. Drawing of part of an 1834 U.S. Land Of¤ce survey township plat showing the location of the last Chickasaw Council House north of Pontotoc Creek (by author, after copy at Mississippi Department of Archives and History) resulted in the site becoming comparable to the agency complex. In about June 1826 Smith directed the construction of a blacksmith shop at the council house, apparently built by a man named Levi Thomas. In early 1828 Smith paid council house blacksmith A. W. Dew to build not only a new blacksmith shop but also a dwelling house for the blacksmith, a smokehouse, a corncrib, a stable, and possibly a new kitchen. The cost of construction came from the “fund appropriated by the Chickasaws for the support of a Blacksmith Shop at the Council House.” The ¤rst blacksmith, assigned there by Smith in 1827, had been James Watkins, who was expelled by Levi Colbert because of excessive drinking and lack of production.2 Compatible with the government’s “plan of civilization,” conversion of the so-called “heathen” to European brands of religion began to be thrust on the Chickasaw near the turn of the nineteenth century when the missionary society of the New York Presbyterian churches sent the Reverend Joseph Bullen from Vermont to the Chickasaw. Bullen arrived in June 1799, made the purpose of his visit known to the Chickasaw leaders, obtained their cooperation, and presented several sermons. Encouraged by his hospitable reception, he left the nation with a plan to return and Christianize the Chickasaw. Upon returning with his family and another missionary, Ebenezer Rice, Bullen eagerly began to recruit people willing to listen to his explanations of Christian doctrine and principals. His son taught some to write their names and some to read and write on a rudimentary level by tutoring them in their homes through an interpreter . Bullen directed his religious teachings not only to Chickasaws but also to black slaves as well. Despite his good intentions, Bullen’s visitation among the Chickasaw, which ended in 1803, was a general failure, partially because it established no organized religious infrastructure in the form of churches and schools. His work would have been signi¤cant with regard to opening the door for subsequent and consistent missionary work in the nation if any had been forthcoming in...