Choctaw County, one of Alabama's largest counties by area at 909 square miles, is one of the smallest in population. It was established on December 29, 1847, by taking land from Sumter and Washington Counties. The county seat was named Butler after Col. Pierce Mason Butler, who had been killed several months earlier during the Battle of Churubusco. Today, Choctaw County is a recognized leader in the pulpwood industry and renowned for its hunting and fishing. Cattle farming and agriculture also play a large role in daily life and economics. Residents take pride in having the first producing oil well in the state of Alabama, the remains of the historic healing waters of the Bladon Springs Hotel, and even a connection with the basilosaurus cetoides, a prehistoric sea mammal found near Melvin, currently on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Budget report for 1929/31 deals also with the operations of the fiscal year ended June 30, 1928 and the estimates for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1929.

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states' rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation's support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.