Pushmataha was "The Greatest and Bravest Warrior I Have Ever Known." Andrew Jackson

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 27, 1830, on the banks of a small stream in present day Noxubee County, Mississippi, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed which resulted in the transfer of all remaining Choctaw land east of the Mississippi to the United States. Within two years, removal of the Choctaws to their new home in Oklahoma began. Of the sixteen thousand men, women, and children who made the six-hundred-mile journey, almost twenty-five hundred died of exposure and starvation on this, the first "Trail of Tears and Death." The Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokees would follow later.

THE LIFE OF CHIEF PUSHMATAHA parallels the tumultuous times which led up to the removal as he dealt not only with Andrew Jackson but with other greats-Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Shawnee Chief Tecumseh-to try to save the lands of his ancestors. From his humble beginning as an orphan, to his reputation as a vicious warrior, and later a master of oratory and diplomacy, Pushmataha led his people through a time of marginal contact with the white man into an era of submission and despair-and along the way helped ensure a victory for the United States in its Second War of Independence, the War of 1812. Sadly, in the two centuries since his rise to greatness, his name, like the struggles of his nation, has faded from the memory of the American public.

PUSHMATAHA-THE FORGOTTEN WARRIOR tells the story of Chief Pushmataha, the Choctaw Nation, and early Mississippi.

Thomas L. Wiley is a Retired Physician and lives with his wife in Jackson, Mississippi.