Here is the story of the Choctaws, a proud and gifted tribe among the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. It is the record of a people whose forced migration from their ancestral homes in the South to what is now Oklahoma and whose subsequent efforts from the Civil War to the close of the century to maintain an autonomous government and institutions form a distinctive and arresting chapter in the history of the West.

While the political, social, and economic customs of the Choctaws were closely circumscribed, the thread of Choctaw history was at all times closely interwoven witht he larger fabric of American history as a whole. Choctaw law was a curious combination of ancient tribal custom and Anglo-American legal practice; Choctaw churches and schools were copied almost wholly from the white man's society; and Choctaw economic institutions represented an attempt to adjust the customs of tribal control of the land to the white system of individual ownership.