History
The area was acquired by the United States through the Louisiana Purchase and became part of the new Arkansas Territory. On April 1, 1820, Arkansas created Miller County which included most of the land that would become Little Dixie. A post office at Miller Courthouse was established on September 7, 1824. Per a treaty signed on January 20, 1825, the land west of a line "one hundred paces east of Fort Smith, and running thence, due south, to Red river" was ceded to the Choctaw Indians. The residents west of the line made a futile attempt to be exempted from the treaty but failed. They burned the courthouse and most of the records before they left.
Some Choctaws had been moving into the region from Mississippi since the Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820. Following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, the federal government began their forced removal. By 1834, nearly 8,000 Choctaws had arrived in their new land over the "trail of tears and death". At Nanih Waiya, near the present Tuskahoma Council House, they established a capital and adopted the first constitution ever written in what is now Oklahoma. The Choctaws actively supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and were allowed to keep most of their land in eastern Indian Territory. In 1898, after pressure from Washington, they agreed to an allotment plan administered by the Dawes Commission. Their excess lands and those of the allied Chickasaw were opened to settlement by non-Indians.
The damage of the Civil War and a long decline in cotton prices meant years of a poor economy in the mostly rural South. Many citizens left the South to seek opportunities in new western lands. When the Indian lands were opened, Southerners flocked to the Indian Nations for a new start, especially to the old Choctaw reserve. So many homesteaded in the area that they markedly influenced the politics and culture of the region. They made much of what is now Oklahoma culturally a southern state. In the decades that followed, this area became known as Little Dixie. The residents of this area sometimes refer to themselves as Southerners.
Read more about this topic: Kiamichi Country
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)