Kiamichi country

"Kiamichi Country" was the Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department's long-time official tourism designation for Southeastern Oklahoma, until the name was changed to Choctaw Country in honor of the Choctaw Nation headquartered there. The Department created the term as one of six designated travel regions within the state. The name of Kiamichi was actually applied by early French explorers who came to the area in the early 18th Century. They discovered, among other things, a very large, noisy woodpecker that they called Kiamichi, their word for "raucous bird." The area also contains the Kiamichi Mountains, a subset of the Ouachita Mountains.

Due to an influx of southerners seeking less expensive frontier lands during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Kiamichi Country is more southern in culture than the rest of the state, and hence the same general area has also been called "Little Dixie".

Lightly populated, heavily mountainous and forested, the region is popular for outdoor recreation like water sports, mountain biking, hiking, hunting, horse back riding, fishing, and national scenic drives. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma covers much of the area.

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.

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