Eupora Rotarians learned about the life and times of David Folsom, a highly respected leader of the Choctaws, during a program last month.
Lavelle McAlpin, who teaches U.S. history at East Webster High School and is a Mathiston alderman, was the Rotary Club’s speaker on June 19. He traveled to Oklahoma earlier this summer to conduct research on Folsom, who McAlpin said lived to see a cultural change take place for the Choctaws.
Folsom was born in 1791 in present-day Noxubee County. His father was a white trader named Nathaniel Folsom and his mother was a Choctaw Indian. Nathaniel Folsom later moved his family to Pigeon Roost, which was about a mile south of Mathiston on the original Natchez Trace in present-day Choctaw County. McAlpin said their home was off what is now LaGrange Road.
David Folsom lived with one of his sisters and her husband for a few years, returned to Pigeon Roost and raised a crop. He later went to school in Tennessee, where he received about six months of formal education. Although Folsom did not understand English until he was 12, McAlpin said he was extremely intelligent and self-educated himself. Folsom also served with the U.S. Army to fight against the British and Creek Indians in the War of 1812, where he was commissioned a colonel.
McAlpin said Folsom hoped to spark a change in Choctaw culture. He contacted Presbyterian missionaries and invited them to establish missions/schools with the Choctaws. At some point, McAlpin said Folsom made a genuine conversion to Christianity. A school was opened near Pigeon Roost called Ai-ik-hunna and the Bible was first translated into the Choctaw language by missionaries with Folsom’s help, according to McAlpin.
Folsom was later elected the first chief of Choctaw Indian Nation, and was sent to Washington to meet with President James Monroe and the secretary of war. Eventually came the forced removal of American Indians from the South because of an incessant demand for Indian lands. The Choctaws accepted removal with the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830.
The treaty provided that the Choctaws would receive land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi. Folsom led the first group of Choctaw immigrants to the Indian nations in modern-day Oklahoma, where they settled in an area called Doaksville (which was located in what is now Choctaw County in that state).
The government gave Folsom 640 acres for his efforts in moving Indians west. McAlpin said he owned a hotel and a salt works business, and had many acres of cotton. Folsom, who wrote the first Choctaw constitution, died at his home at the age of 56. A partial inscription on his marker reads, “He being dead yet speaketh.”
