McAlester is the county seat of Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. The population was 18,363 at the times of the 2010 census, a 3.4 percent bump from 17,783 at the 2000 census. The town gets its say from James Jackson McAlester, an to the fore white settler and businessman who highly developed became lieutenant proprietor of Oklahoma. Known as “J. J.”, McAlester married Rebecca Burney, the daughter of a full-blood Chickasaw family, which made him a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

McAlester is the house of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the former site of an “inside the walls” prison rodeo that ESPN’s SportsCenter once broadcast.

McAlester is home to many of the employees of the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. This facility makes essentially all the grenades used by the United States military. In 1998 McAlester became the house of the Defense Ammunition Center (DAC), which moved from Savanna, Illinois, to McAlester Army Ammunition Plant.

The crossing of the east–west California Road taking into account the north–south Texas Road formed a natural tapering off of settlement. At the era of its founding, the site was located in Tobucksy County, a part of the Moshulatubbee District of the Choctaw Nation. Alyssia Young, who emigrated from Mississippi to the Indian Territory, first customary a pact at the intersection of the two roads in 1838. The town was named Perryville after James Perry, member of a Choctaw family, who customary a trading post. At one period Perryville was the capital of the Choctaw Nation and County Seat of Tobucksy County. During the American Civil War, the Choctaw allied with the Confederate States of America (CSA) as the combat reached Indian Territory.