Greenwood LeFlore

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Greenwood LeFlore (June 3, 1800-August 31, 1865) was an American Indian of the Choctaw tribe. A wealthy and regionally influential trader with many connections in state and federal government, he was elected chief of the entire Choctaw tribe shortly before the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, becoming the first Principal Chief of a Choctaw Nation that had previously been governed by regional chiefs. In treaty negotiations, LeFlore used his formidable personal political capital and position as head of a unified tribe not to oppose removal (which he regarded as inevitable), but to secure the largest and most desirable section of Indian Territory land possible.

In the event, the Choctaw were awarded the largest territory of any removed tribe, located in the fertile, forested southeast corner of what is now Oklahoma. LeFlore received one thousand acres (4 km²) of land in Mississippi for his part in the negotiations on the treaty, and he did not move to Indian territory with other Choctaws. LeFlore's accomplishments in unifying and strengthening the Choctaw people are still honored, but his pragmatic, bottom-line response to their removal from their ancestral lands was and remains controversial. Some Choctaws felt LeFlore wronged them because he was one of the leading chiefs involved in the treaty.

In later years, LeFlore was a Mississippi representative and senator, a fixture of Mississippi high society, and a personal friend of Jefferson Davis. Greenwood and Leflore County in Mississippi and Le Flore County, Oklahoma are named for him. His magnificent Carroll County home, Malmaison, burned in 1942. The novelist James Street modeled two characters in his Dabney family saga on LeFlore.

LeFlore was a son of Louis LeFleur, a French trader and explorer from French Canada.

[edit] External links

• Greenwood LeFlore portrait and other images