to accomplish his purposes, no wonder that he instituted martial law[438] in a seemingly refractory country, no wonder that he took desperate measures to force Pike to activity. Pike’s leisurely way of attending to business was in itself an annoyance and his leisurely way of moving over the country was a positive offence. He had been ordered to proceed with dispatch to Fort Gibson. The expiration of a month and a half found him still at Fort McCulloch. He really did not move from thence until, having sent in his resignation, he made preparations for handing over his command to Colonel Cooper. That he intended to do at some point on the Canadian and thither he wended his way.[439] By the twenty-first of July, “he had succeeded in getting as far as Boggy Depot, a distance of 25 miles;[440] but then he had not left Fort McCulloch until that very morning.[441]
Pike’s definite break with Hindman was, perhaps, more truly a consummation of Hindman’s wishes than of Pike’s own. On the third of July, as if regretting his previous show of temper, he wrote to Hindman a long letter,[442] conciliatory in tone throughout. He discussed the issues between them in a calm and temperate spirit,
[Footnote 437: In September, Hindman declared he had never had any knowledge of the order creating Pike’s department [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 978].]
[Footnote 438: He instituted martial law, June 30, 1862 and, although he believed he had precedent in Pike’s own procedure, Pike criticized him severely. See Pike to J.S. Murrow, Seminole Agent, October 25, 1862, Ibid., 900-902. Hindman had authorized Pearce, June 17, 1862, to exercise martial law in the cities of Fort Smith and Van Buren and their environs [Ibid., 835].]
[Footnote 439: Pike to Hindman, July 15, 1862.]
[Footnote 440: Hindman’s Report [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 40].]
[Footnote 441: Pike to the Secretary of War, July 20, 1862 [Ibid., 859].]
[Footnote 442:–Ibid., 954-962.]
changing nothing as regarded the facts but showing a willingness to let bygones be bygones. Considering how great had been his chagrin, his indignation, and his poignant sense of ingratitude and wrong, he rose to heights really noble. He seemed desirous, even anxious, that the great cause in which they were both so vitally interested should be uppermost in both their minds always and that their differences, which, after all, were, comparatively speaking, so very petty, should be forgotten forever. It was in the spirit of genuine helpfulness that he wrote and also in the spirit of great magnanimity. Pike was a man who studied the art of war zealously, who knew the rules of European warfare, and a man, who, even in war times, could read Napier’s _Peninsular War_ and succumb to its charm. He was a classicist and a student very much more than a man of action. Could those around him, far meaner souls many of them than he, have only known and remembered that and, remembering it, have made due allowances for his vagaries, all might have been well. His generous letter of the third of July failed utterly of its mission; but not so much, perhaps, because of Hindman’s inability to appreciate it or unwillingness to meet its writer half-way, as because of the very seriousness of Hindman’s own military situation, which made all compromises impossible. The things he felt it incumbent upon him to do must be done his way or not at all. The letter of July 3 could scarcely have been received before the objectionable orders of July 8 had been planned.
The last ten days of July were days of constant scouting on the part of both the Federal and Confederate Indians but nothing of much account resulted. Colonel W.A. Phillips of the Third Indian Home Guard,
whose command had been left by Furnas to scout around Tahlequah and Fort Gibson, came into collision with Stand Watie’s force on the twenty-seventh at Bayou Bernard, seven miles, approximately, from the latter place. The Confederate Cherokees lost considerably in dead and prisoners.[443] Phillips would have followed up his victory by pursuing the foe even to the Verdigris had not Cooper, fearing that his forces might be destroyed in detail, ordered them all south of the Arkansas and thereby circumvented his enemy’s designs. Phillips then moved northward in the direction of Furnas’s main camp on Wolf Creek.[444]
Pike had his own opinion of Cooper and Watie’s daring methods of fighting and most decidedly disapproved of their attempting to meet the enemy in the neighborhood of Fort Gibson. That part of the Indian Territory, according to his view of things, was not capable of supporting an army. He discounted the ability of his men to conquer, their equipment being so meagre. He, therefore, persisted in advising that they should fight only on the defensive. He advised that, notwithstanding he had a depreciatory[445] regard for the Indian Expedition, and, both before and after the retrograde movement of Colonel Salomon, underestimated its size and strength. He Was confident that Cooper would have inevitably to fall back to the Canadian, where, as he said, “the defensible country commences.” Pike objected strenuously to the courting of an open battle and, could he have followed the bent of his own inclinations, “would have sent only
[Footnote 443: Phillips to Furnas, July 27, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 181-182.]
[Footnote 444: Same to same, August 6, 1862, Ibid., 183-184.]
[Footnote 445: Cooper reported that Pike regarded the Indian Expedition as only a “jayhawking party,” and “no credit due” “for arresting its career” [Cooper to Davis, August 8, 1862, Ibid., vol liii, supplement, 821].]
small bodies of mounted Indians and white troops to the Arkansas.”[446]
No doubt it was in repudiation of all responsibility for what Cooper and Watie might eventually do that he chose soon to bring himself, through a mistaken notion of justice and honor, into very disagreeable prominence. Discretion was evidently not Pike’s cardinal virtue. At any rate, he was quite devoid of it when he issued, July 31, his remarkable circular address[447] “to the Chiefs and People of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws.” In that address, he notified them that he had resigned his post as department commander and dilated upon the causes that had moved him to action. He shifted all blame for failure to keep faith with the Indian nations from himself and from the Confederate government to the men upon whom he steadfastly believed it ought to rest. He deprecated the plundering that would bring its own retribution and begged the red men to be patient and to keep themselves true to the noble cause they had espoused.
Remain true, I earnestly advise you, to the Confederate States and yourselves. Do not listen to any men who tell you that the Southern States will abandon you. They will not do it. If the enemy has been able to come into the Cherokee country it has not been the fault of the President; and it is but the fortune of war, and what has happened in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Arkansas. We have not been able to keep the enemy from our frontier anywhere; but in the interior of our country we can defeat them always.
Be not discouraged, and remember, above all things, that you can have nothing to expect from the enemy. They will have no mercy on you, for they are more merciless than wolves and more rapacious. Defend your country with what help you
[Footnote 446: Pike to the Secretary of War, July 20, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 859-860.]
[Footnote 447:–Ibid., 869-871.]
can get until the President can send you troops. If the enemy ever comes to the Canadian he cannot go far beyond that river. The war must soon end since the recent victories near Richmond, and no treaty of peace will be made that will give up any part of your country to the Northern States. If I am not again placed in command of your country some other officer will be in whom you can confide. And whatever may be told you about me, you will soon learn that if I have not defended the whole country it was because I had not the troops with which to do it; that I have cared for your interest alone; that I have never made you a promise that I did not expect, and had not a right to expect, to be able to keep, and that I have never broken one intentionally nor except by the fault of others.
The only fair way to judge Pike’s farewell address to his Indian charges is to consider it in the light of its effect upon them, intended and accomplished.[448] So little reason has the red man had, in the course of his long experience with his white brother, to trust him that his faith in that white brother rests upon a very slender foundation. Pike knew the Indian character amazingly well and knew that he must retain for the Confederacy the Indian’s confidence at all cost. Were he to fail in that, his entire diplomatic work would have been done in vain. To stay the Cherokees in their desertion to the North was of prime necessity. They had already gone over in dangerously large numbers and must be checked before other tribes followed in their wake. Very possibly Pike had been made aware
[Footnote 448: Pike gives this as the effect of his proclamation:
“… it effected what I desired. The Choctaw force was immediately increased to two full regiments; the Creek force to two regiments and two companies; the Seminole force was doubled; the Chickasaws reorganized five companies and a sixth is being made up. The Indians looked to me alone, and for me to vindicate myself was to vindicate the Government. We lost half the Cherokees solely because their moneys and supplies were intercepted…”–Ibid., 904-905. See also Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862. Another effect was, the creation of a prejudice self-confessed in General Holmes’s mind against Pike.]
of Chief Ross’s complaint to Hindman. If so, it was all important that he should vindicate himself. So maligned had he been that his sensitiveness on the score of the discharge of his duties was very natural, very pardonable. After all he had done for the Confederacy and for the Indians, it seemed hardly right that he should be blamed for all that others had failed to do. His motives were pure and could not be honestly impugned by anybody. The address was an error of judgment but it was made with the best of intentions.
And so the authorities at Richmond seem to have regarded it; that is, if the reference in President Davis’s letter[449] to Pike of August 9 is to this affair. Pike wrote to the president on the same day that he started his address upon its rounds, but that letter,[450] in which he rehearsed the wrongs he had been forced to endure, also those more recently inflicted upon him, did not reach Richmond until September 20. His address was transmitted by Colonel D.H. Cooper, who had taken great umbrage at it and who now charged the author with having violated an army regulation, which prohibited publications concerning Confederate troops.[451] Davis took the matter under advisement and wrote to Pike a mild reprimand. It was as follows:
Richmond, Va., August 9, 1862.
Brig. Gen. Albert Pike,
Camp McCulloch, Choctaw Nation:
General: Your communication of July 3 is at hand. I regret the necessity of informing you that it is an impropriety for an officer of the Army to address the President through a printed circular.[452] Under the laws for the government of
[Footnote 449: Official Records, vol. liii, supplement, 822.]
[Footnote 450:–Ibid., vol. xiii, 860-869.]
[Footnote 451:–Ibid., vol. liii, supplement, 820-821.]
[Footnote 452: It is possible that the printed circular here referred to was some other one that was directly addressed to the president but none such has been found.]
the Army the publication of this circular was a grave military offense, and if the purpose was to abate an evil, by making an appeal that would be heeded by me, the mode taken was one of the slowest and worst that could have been adopted.
Very respectfully, yours, Jefferson Davis.
The sympathy of Secretary Randolph was conceivably with Pike; for, on the fourteenth of July, he wrote assuring him that certain general orders had been sent out by the Adjutant and Inspector General’s Office which were “intended to prevent even the major-general commanding the Trans-Mississippi Department from diverting from their legitimate destination (the Department of Indian Territory) munitions of war and supplies procured by ‘him’ for that department.”[453] That did not prevent Hindman’s continuing his pernicious practices, however. On the seventeenth he demanded[454] that Pike deliver to him his best battery and Pike, discouraged and yet thoroughly beside himself with ill-suppressed rage,[455] sent it to him.[456] At the same time he insisted that he be immediately relieved of his command.[457] He could endure the indignities to which he was subjected no longer. The order for his relief arrived in due course and also directions for him to report in person at Hindman’s headquarters.[458] He had not then issued his circular; but, as
[Footnote 453: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 903; Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862, Pike _Papers_, Library of the Supreme Council, 33º. Pike did not receive Randolph’s letter of July fourteenth until some time in August and not until after he had had an interview with Holmes. See Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862.]
[Footnote 454: Official Records, vol. xiii, 970.]
[Footnote 455: This is inferred from the very peculiar _General Orders_ that issued from Fort McCulloch that selfsame day. They were sarcastic in the extreme. No general in his right senses would have issued them. They are to be found, Ibid., 970-973.]
[Footnote 456:–Ibid., 973, 974.]
[Footnote 457:–_Ib id_., 973.]
[Footnote 458: Pike to Hindman, July 31, 1862, Ibid., 973.]
soon as he had, the whole situation changed. He had deliberately put himself in the wrong and into the hands of his enemies. The address was, in some respects, the last act of a desperate[459] man. And there is no doubt that General Pike was desperate. Reports were spreading in Texas that he was a defaulter to the government and, as he himself in great bitterness of spirit said, “The incredible villainy of a slander so monstrous, and so without even any ground for suspicion,” was “enough to warn every honest man not to endeavor to serve his country.”[460]
Not until August 6 did General Pike’s circular address reach Colonel D.H. Cooper, who was then at Cantonment Davis. Cooper wisely suppressed all the copies he could procure and then, believing Pike to be either insane or a traitor, ordered his arrest,[461] sending out an armed force for its accomplishment. Hindman, as soon as notified, “indorsed and approved” his action.[462] This is his own account of what he did:
… I approved his action, and ordered General Pike sent to Little Rock in custody. I also forwarded Colonel Cooper’s letter to Richmond, with an indorsement, asking to withdraw my approval of General Pike’s resignation, that I might bring him before a court-martial on charges of falsehood, cowardice, and treason. He was also liable to the penalties prescribed by section 29 of the act of Congress regulating intercourse with the Indians and to preserve peace on the frontiers, approved April 8, 1862….
But his resignation had been accepted….[463]
[Footnote 459: And yet, August 1, 1862, Pike wrote to Davis one of the sanest papers he ever prepared. It was full of sage advice as to the policy that ought to be pursued in Indian Territory [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 871-874].]
[Footnote 460: Pike to S. Cooper, August 3, 1862, Ibid., 975. See also Pike to Newton, August 3, 1862, Ibid., 976.]
[Footnote 461: D.H. Cooper to Hindman, August 7, 1862, ibid., 977.]
[Footnote 462: Pike to Anderson, October 26, 1862, Ibid., 903.]
[Footnote 463: Hindman’s Report, Ibid., 41.]
VII. ORGANIZATION OF THE ARKANSAS AND RED RIVER SUPERINTENDENCY
The mismanagement of southern Indian affairs of which General Pike so vociferously complained was not solely or even to any great degree attributable to indifference to Indian interests on the part of the Confederate government and certainly not at all to any lack of appreciation of the value of the Indian alliance or of the strategic importance of Indian Territory. The perplexities of the government were unavoidably great and its control over men and measures, removed from the seat of its immediate influence, correspondingly small. It was not to be expected that it would or could give the same earnestness of attention to events on the frontier as to those nearer the seaboard, since it was, after all, east of the Mississippi that the great fight for political separation from the North would have to be made.
The Confederate government had started out well. It had dealt with the Indian nations on a basis of dignity and lofty honor, a fact to be accounted for by the circumstance that Indian affairs were at first under the State Department with Toombs at its head;[464] and, in this connection, let it be recalled that it was under authority of the State Department that Pike had
[Footnote 464: Toombs did not long hold the portfolio. Among the Pickett _Papers_, is a letter from Davis to Toombs, July 24, 1861, accepting with regret his resignation [Package 89].]
entered upon his mission as diplomatic agent to the tribes west of Arkansas.[465] Subsequently, and, indeed, before Pike had nearly completed his work, Indian affairs were transferred[466] to the direction of the Secretary of War and a bureau created in his department for the exclusive consideration of them, Hubbard receiving the post of commissioner.[467]
The Provisional Congress approached the task of dealing with Indian matters as if it already had a big grasp on the subject and intended, at the outset, to give them careful scrutiny and to establish, with regard to them, precedents of extreme good faith. Among the
[Footnote 465: In evidence of this, note, in addition to the material published in Abel, _The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist_, the following letters, the first from Robert Toombs to L.P. Walker, Secretary of War, dated Richmond, August 7, 1861; and the second from William M. Browne, Acting Secretary of State, to Walker, September 4, 1861:
1. “I have the honor to inform you that under a resolution of Congress, authorizing the President to send a Commissioner to the Indian tribes west of Arkansas and south of Kansas, Mr. Albert Pike of Arkansas was appointed such Commissioner under an autograph letter of the President giving him very large discretion as to the expenses of his mission. Subsequent to the adoption of the resolution, above named, Congress passed a law placing the Indian Affairs under the control of your Department and consequently making the expenses of Mr. Pike and all other Indian Agents, properly payable out of the appropriation at your disposal for the service of the Indian Bureau.”–Pickett _Papers_, Package 106, Domestic Letters, Department of State, vol. i, p.86.
2. “The accompanying letters and reports from Commissioner Albert Pike addressed to your Department are respectfully referred to you, the affairs to which they relate being under your supervision and control.”–Ibid., P-93.]
[Footnote 466: A re-transfer to the State Department was proposed as early as the next November [_Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States_, 489].]
[Footnote 467: President Davis recommended the creation of the bureau, March 12, 1861 [Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Confederacy_, vol. i, p. 58: Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States, vol. i, p. 142]. On the sixteenth, he nominated David Hubbard of Alabama for commissioner [Pickett Papers, Package 88]. The bill for the creation of the bureau of Indian Affairs was signed the selfsame day [Journal, vol. i, 151]. S.S. Scott became Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs before the year was out.]
things[468] it considered and in some cases favorably disposed of were, the treaties of amity and alliance negotiated by Albert Pike, the transfer of Indian trust
[Footnote 468: The preliminaries of the negotiations with the Indians have not been enumerated here, although they might well have been. On the twentieth of February, 1861, W.P. Chilton of Alabama offered a resolution to inquire into the expediency of opening negotiations [_Journal_, vol. i, 70]. March 4, Toombs urged that a special agent be sent and offered a resolution to that effect [Ibid., 105]. The day following, Congress passed the resolution [Ibid., 107]: but left the powers and duties of the special agent, or commissioner, undefined. Davis appointed Pike to the position and, after Congress had expressed its wishes regarding the mission in the act of May 21, 1861, had a copy of the act transmitted to him as his instructions [Richardson, vol. i, 149].
The act of May 21, 1861, carried a blanket appropriation of $100,000, which was undoubtedly used freely by Pike for purposes connected with the successful prosecution of his mission. In December, the Provisional Congress appropriated money for carrying into effect the Pike treaties. The following letter is of interest in connection therewith:
Richmond, Va., 9″ December 1861.
Sir: On the 1st or 2nd of August 1861, after I had made Treaties with the Creeks and Seminoles, I authorized James M.C. Smith, a resident citizen of the Creek Nation, to raise and command a company of Creek Volunteers, to be stationed at the North Fork Village, in the Creek country, on the North Fork of the Canadian, where the great road from Missouri to Texas crosses that river, to act as a police force, watch and apprehend disaffected persons, intercept improper communications, and prevent the driving of cattle to Kansas.
The Company was soon after raised, and has remained in the service ever since. At my appointment George W. Stidham acted as Quartermaster and Commissary for it, and without funds from the Government, has supplied it.
By the Treaty with the Seminoles, made on the 1st of August, they agreed to furnish, and I agreed to receive, five companies of mounted volunteers of that Nation. Two companies, and perhaps more, were raised, and have since been received, I understand, by Col. Cooper, and with Captain Smith’s company employed in putting down the disaffected party among the Creeks. Under my appointment, Hugh McDonald has acted as Quartermaster and Commissary for the Seminole companies, and made purchases without funds from the Government. After I had made the Treaties with the Reserve Indians and Comanches, in August 1861, Fort Cobb being about to be abandoned by the Texan Volunteers who had held it, I authorized M. Leeper, the Wichita agent, to enlist a small force, of twenty or twenty-five men, under a Lieutenant, for the security of the Agency. He enlisted, (cont.)]
funds from the United to the Confederate States government,[469] the payment of Indian troops and their pensioning.[470] Its disposition to be grateful and generous came out in the honor which it conferred upon John Jumper, the Seminole chief.[471]
A piece of very fundamental work the Provisional Congress did not have time or opportunity to complete.
[Footnote 468: (cont.) I learn, only some fifteen, and he has had them for some time in the service.
I also appointed a person named McKuska, formerly a soldier, to take charge of what further property remained at Fort Cobb, and employed another person to assist him, agreeing that the former should be paid as Ordnance Sergeant, and the latter as private; and directing the Contractor for the Indians to issue to the former two rations, and to the latter one.
In consequence of the collection of some force of disaffected Creeks and others, and an apprehended attack by them, Col. Douglas H. Cooper called for troops from all the Nations, and I understand that several companies were organized and marched to join his regiment. I think they are still in the service.
I am now empowered to receive all the Indians who offer to enter the service. To induce them to enlist, what is already owing them must be paid; and I earnestly hope that Congress will pass the bill introduced for that purpose. Respectfully your obedient servant
Albert Pike, _Brig. Genl Commd Dept of Ind. Terr’y_. Hon. W. Miles, Chairman Com. on Mil. Affs.
[War Department, Office of the Adjutant-General, Archives Division, _Confederate Records_.]]
[Footnote 469: Journal, vol. i, 650, 743, 761. The Confederate government took, in the main, a just, reasonable, and even charitable view on the subject of the assumption of United States obligations. Pike had exceeded his instructions in promising the Indians that monetary obligations would be so assumed. See his letter to Randolph, June 30, 1862.]
[Footnote 470: This matter went over into the regular Congress, which began its work, February 18, 1862. For details of the bill for pensions see _Journal_, vol. i, 43, 79.]
[Footnote 471: “_The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact_, That the President of the Confederate States be authorized to present to Hemha Micco, or John Jumper, a commission, conferring upon him the honorary title of Lieutenant Colonel of the army of the Confederate States, but without creating or imposing the duties of actual service or command, or pay, as a complimentary mark of honor, and a token of good will and confidence in his friendship, good faith, and loyalty to this government….”–_Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government_, 284.]
That work was, the establishment of a superintendency of Indian Affairs in the west that should be a counterpart, in all essentials, of the old southern superintendency, of which Elias Rector had been the incumbent. Elias Rector and the agents[472] under him, all of whom, with scarcely a single exception, had gone over to the Confederacy, had been retained, not under authority of law, but provisionally. The intention was to organize the superintendency as soon as convenient and give all employees their proper official status. Necessarily, a time came when it was most expedient for army men to exercise the ordinary functions of Indian agents;[473] but even that arrangement was to be only temporary. Without doubt, the enactment of a law for the establishment of a superintendency of Indian affairs was unduly delayed by the prolonged character of Pike’s diplomatic mission. The Confederate government evidently did not anticipate that the tribes with which it sought alliance would be so slow[474] or so wary in accepting the protectorate it offered. Not until January 8, 1862, did the Provisional Congress have before it the proposition for superintendency organization. The measure was introduced by Robert W. Johnson of Arkansas and it
[Footnote 472: Quite early a resolution was submitted that had in view “the appointment of agents to the different tribes of Indians occupying territory adjoining this Confederacy…” [_Journal_, vol. i, 81.]]
[Footnote 473: _Journal_, vol. i, 245.]
[Footnote 474: Pike was not prepared beforehand for so extended a mission. In November, he wrote to Benjamin, notifying him that he was enclosing “an account in blank for my services as commissioner to the Indian nations west of Arkansas.
“It was not my intention to accept any remuneration, but the great length of time during which I found it necessary to remain in the Indian Country caused me such losses and so interfered with my business that I am constrained unwillingly to present this account. I leave it to the President or to Congress to fix the sum that shall be paid me….”–Pike to Benjamin, November 25, 1861, Pickett _Papers_, Package 118.]
went in succession to the Judiciary and Indian Affairs committees; but never managed to get beyond the committee stage.[475]
February 18, 1862, saw the beginning of the first session of the first congress that met under the Confederate constitution. Six days thereafter, Johnson, now senator from Arkansas, again took the initiative in proposing the regular establishment of an Indian superintendency.[476] As Senate Bill No. 3, his measure was referred to the Committee[477] on Indian Affairs and, on March 11, reported back with amendments.[478] Meanwhile, the House was considering a bill of similar import, introduced on the third by Thomas B. Hanly, likewise from Arkansas.[479] On the eighteenth, it received Senate Bill No. 3 and substituted it for its own, passing the same on April Fool’s day. The bill was signed by the president on April 8.[480]
The information conveyed by the journal entries is unusually meagre; nevertheless, from the little that is given, the course of debate on the measure can be inferred to a certain extent. The proposition as a whole carried, of course, its own recommendation, since the Confederacy was most anxious to retain the Indian friendship and it certainly could not be retained were not some system introduced into the service. In matters of detail, local interests, as always in American legislation, had full play. They asserted themselves most prominently, for example, in the endeavor made
[Footnote 475: _Journal_, vol. i, 640, 672, 743.]
[Footnote 476:–Ibid., vol. ii, 19.]
[Footnote 477: The Committee on Indian Affairs, at the time, consisted of Johnson, chairman, Clement C. Clay of Alabama, Williamson S. Oldham of Texas, R.L.Y. Payton of Missouri, and W.E. Simms of Kentucky.]
[Footnote 478: _Journal_, vol. ii, 51-52.]
[Footnote 479: _Journal_, vol. v, 47.]
[Footnote 480:–Ibid., 210.]
to make Fort Smith, although quite a distance from all parts of the Indian Territory except the Cherokee and Choctaw countries, the permanent headquarters, also in that to compel disbursing agents to make payments in no other funds than specie or treasury notes. The amendment of greatest importance among those that passed muster was the one attaching the superintendency temporarily to the western district of Arkansas for judicial purposes. It was a measure that could not fail to be exceedingly obnoxious to the Indians; for they had had a long and disagreeable experience, judicially, with Arkansas. They had their own opinion of the white man’s justice, particularly as that justice was doled out to the red man on the white man’s ground.[481] Taken in connection with regulations[482] made by the War Department for the conduct of Indian affairs, the Act of April 8 most certainly exhibited an honest intention on the part of the Confederate government to carry out the provisions of the Pike treaties. The following constituted its principal features: With headquarters at either Fort Smith or Van Buren, as the president might see fit to direct, the superintendency was to embrace “all the Indian country annexed to the Confederate States, that lies west of Arkansas and Missouri, north of Texas, and east of Texas and New Mexico.” A superintendent and six agents were immediately provided for, individually bonded and obligated to continue resident during the term of office, to engage in no mercantile pursuit or gainful occupation
[Footnote 481: The Confederacy, as a matter of fact, never did keep its promise regarding the establishment of a judiciary in Indian Territory. Note Commissioner Scott’s remarks in criticism, December i, 1864 [_Official Records_, vol. xli, part iv, 1088-1089].]
[Footnote 482: The regulations referred to can be found in _Confederate Records_, chap. 7, no. 48.]
whatsoever, and to prosecute no Indian claims against the government. In the choice of interpreters, preference was to be given to applicants of Indian descent. Indian trade privileges were to be greatly circumscribed and, in the case of the larger nations, the complete control of the trade was to rest with the tribal authorities. In the case, also, of those same larger nations, the restrictions formerly placed upon land alienations were to be removed. Intruders and spirituous liquors were to be rigidly excluded and all payments to Indians were to be carefully safeguarded against fraud and graft. Indian customs of citizenship and adoption were to be respected. No foreign interference was to be permitted. Foreign emissaries were to be dealt with as spies and as such severely punished. The Confederate right of eminent domain over agency sites and buildings, forts, and arsenals was to be recognized, as also the operation of laws against counterfeiting and of the fugitive slave law. In default of regular troops, the Confederacy was to support an armed police for protection and the maintenance of order. The judicial rights of the Indians were to be very greatly extended but the Confederacy reserved to itself the right to apprehend criminals other than Indian.
The intentions of the Confederate government were one thing, its accomplishments another. The act of April 8 was not put into immediate execution, and might have been allowed to become obsolete had it not been for the controversy between Pike and Hindman. On the first of August, while the subject-matter of the address, which he had so imprudently issued to the Indians, was yet fresh in his mind, General Pike wrote a letter of advice, eminently sound advice, to President Davis.[483] Avoiding all captiousness, he set forth a
[Footnote 483: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 871-874.]
programme of what ought to be done for Indian Territory and for the Indians, in order that their friendly alliance might be maintained. He urged many things and one thing very particularly. It was the crux of them all and it was that Indian Territory should be absolutely separated from Arkansas, in a military way, and that no troops from either Arkansas or Texas should be stationed within it. Other suggestions of Pike’s were equally sound. Indeed, the entire letter of the first of August was sound and in no part of it more sound than in that which recommended the immediate appointment of a superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arkansas and Red River Superintendency, also the appointment of Indian agents for all places that had none.[484] It was high time that positions in connection with the conduct of Indian affairs should be something more than sinecures.
Aspirants for the office of superintendent had already made their wants known. Foremost among them was Douglas H. Cooper. It was not in his mind, however, to separate the military command from the civil and he therefore asked that he be made brigadier-general and _ex officio_ superintendent of Indian affairs in the place of Pike removed.[485] His own representations of Pike’s grievous offence had fully prepared him for the circumstance of Pike’s removal and he anticipated it in making his own application for office. Subsequent knowledge of Pike’s activities and of his standing at Richmond must have come to Cooper as a rude awakening.
Nevertheless, Cooper did get his appointment. It
[Footnote 484: In his message of August 18, 1862 [Richardson, vol. i, 238], President Davis remarked upon the vacancies in these offices and said that, in consequence of them, delays had occurred in the payment of annuities and allowances to which the Indians were entitled.]
[Footnote 485: _Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 821.]
came the twenty-ninth of September in the form of special orders from the adjutant-general’s office.[486] Pike was still on the ground, as will be presently shown, and Cooper’s moral unfitness for a position of so much responsibility was yet to be revealed. The moment was one when the Confederacy was taking active steps to keep its most significant promise to the Indian nations, give them a representation in Congress. The Cherokees had lost no time in availing themselves of the privilege of electing a delegate, neither had the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Elias C. Boudinot had proved to be the successful candidate of the former and Robert M. Jones[487] of the latter. Over the credentials of Boudinot, the House of Representatives made some demur; but, as there was no denying his constitutional right, under treaty guarantee, to be present, they were accepted and he was given his seat.[488] Provisions had, however, yet to be determined for regulating Indian elections and fixing the pay and mileage, likewise also, the duties and privileges of Indian delegates.[489] Perhaps it is unfair to intimate that the provisions would have been determined earlier, had congress not preferred to go upon the assumption that they would never be needed, since it was scarcely likely that the Indians would realize the importance of their rights and act upon them.[490]
[Footnote 486: War Department, _Confederate Records, Special Orders of the Adjutant and Inspector General’s Office_, C.S.A., 1862, p. 438; _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 885.]
[Footnote 487: See document of date, October 7, 1861, signed by Douglas H. Cooper, certifying that Robert M. Jones had received the “greatest number of votes cast” as delegate in Congress for the Choctaws and Chickasaws [Pickett _Papers_, Package 118].]
[Footnote 488: _Journal_, vol. v, 513, 514.]
[Footnote 489:–Ibid., vol. ii, 452, 457, 480; vol. v, 514, 523, 561.]
[Footnote 490: Davis had thrown the responsibility of the whole matter upon Congress, when he insisted that the “delegate” clauses in the treaties should (cont.)]
While Congress was debating the question of Indian delegate credentials and their acceptance, a tragedy took place in Indian Territory that more than confirmed General Pike’s worst prognostications and proved his main contention that Indian affairs should be considered primarily upon their own merits, as an end in themselves, and dealt with accordingly. Had the Arkansas and Red River Superintendency been regularly established, the tragedy referred to might never have occurred; but it was not yet established and for many reasons, one of them being that, although Douglas H. Cooper’s appointment had been resolved upon, he had not yet been invested with the office of superintendent.[491] His commission was being withheld because charges of incapacity and drunkenness had been preferred against him.[492]
General Pike’s disclosures had aroused suspicion and grave apprehension in Richmond, so much so, indeed, that the War Department, convinced that conditions in Indian Territory were very far from being what they should be, decided to undertake an investigation of its own through its Indian bureau. Promptly, therefore, S.S. Scott, acting commissioner, departed for the West. General Pike was in Texas.
Now one of the contingencies that Pike had most constantly dreaded was tribal disorder on the Leased
[Footnote 490: (cont.) be so modified as to make the admission of the Indians dependent, not upon the treaty-making power, but upon the legislative. See his message of December 12, 1861, Richardson, vol. i, 149-151.]
[Footnote 491: Elias Rector, who had been retained as superintendent under the Confederate government, seems never to have exercised the functions of the office subsequent to the assumption by Pike of his duties as commander of the Department of Indian Territory. He was probably envious of Pike and resigned rather than serve in a subordinate capacity. He seems to have made some troube for Pike [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 964, 976].]
[Footnote 492:–Ibid., 906, 908, 910-911, 927-928.]
District,[493] a disorder that might at any moment extend itself to Texas and to other parts of the Indian Territory, imperiling the whole Confederate alliance. So long as there was a strong force at Fort McCulloch and at the frontier posts of longer establishment, particularly at Fort Cobb, the Reserve Indians could be held in check with comparative ease. Hindman, ignorant of or indifferent to the situation, no matter how serious it might be for others, had ordered the force to be scattered and most of it withdrawn from the Red River Valley.
The so-called Wichita, or Reserve, Indians, to call them by a collective term only very recently bestowed, had ever constituted a serious problem for the neighboring states as well as for the central government. It was with the Confederacy as with the old Union. The Reserve Indians were a motley horde, fragments of many tribes that had seen better days. They were all more or less related, either geographically or linguistically. Some of them, it is difficult to venture upon what proportion, had been induced to enter into negotiations with Pike and through him had formed an alliance with the Confederacy. Apparently, those who had done this were chiefly Tonkawas. Other Reserve Indians continued true to the North. As time went on hostile feelings, engendered by living in opposite camps, gained in intensity, the more especially because white men, both north and south, encouraged them to go upon the war-path, either against their own associates or others. Reprisals, frequently bloody, were regularly instituted. With Pike’s departure from Fort McCulloch an opportunity for greater vindictiveness offered, notwithstanding the fact that the Choctaw and Chickasaw
[Footnote 493: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 868.]
troops had been left behind and were guarding the near-by country, their own.
Sometime in the latter part of August or the early part of September, Matthew Leeper, the Wichita agent under the Confederate government, a left-over from Buchanan’s days, went from the Leased District,[494] frightened away, some people thought, perhaps afraid of the inevitable results of the mischief his own hands had so largely wrought, and sojourned in Texas, his old home. The sutler left also and a man named Jones was then in sole charge of the agency. The northern sympathizers among the Indians thereupon aroused themselves. They had gained greatly of late in strength and influence and their numbers had been augmented by renegade Seminoles from Jumper’s battalion and by outlawed Cherokees. They warned Jones that Leeper would be wise not to return. If he should return, it would be the worse for him; for they were determined to wreak revenge upon him for all the misery his machinations in favor of the Confederacy and for his own gain had cost them. Presumably, Jones scorned to transmit the warning and, in course of time, Leeper returned.
The twenty-third of October witnessed one of the bloodiest scenes ever enacted on the western plains. The northern Indians of the Reserve together with a lot of wandering Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos, many of them good-for-nothing or vicious, some Seminoles and Cherokees attacked Leeper unawares, killed him,[495] as also three white male employees of the agency.
[Footnote 494: _Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 828.]
[Footnote 495: On the murder of Agent Leeper, see Scott to Holmes, November 2, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 919-921; Holmes to Secretary of War, November 15, 1862, Ibid., 919: F. Johnson to Dole, January 20, 1863, Abel, _American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist_, 329-330, _footnote_; (cont.)]
They then put “the bodies into the agency building and fired it.” The next morning they made an equally brutal attack upon the Tonkawas and with most telling effect. More than half of them were butchered. The survivors, about one hundred fifty, fled to Fort Arbuckle.[496] Their condition was pitiable. The murderers, for they were nothing less than that, fled northward, they and their families, to swell the number of Indian refugees already living upon government bounty in Kansas.
Commissioner Scott then at Fort Washita hurried to the Leased District to examine into the affair. He had made many observations since leaving Richmond, had talked with Pike, now returned from Texas, and had come around pretty much to his way of thinking. His recommendations to the department commander that were intended to reach the Secretary of War as well were in every sense a corroboration of Pike’s complaints in so far as the woeful neglect of the Indians was concerned. Better proof that Hindman’s conduct had been highly reprehensible could scarcely be asked for.
[Footnote 495: (cont.) Moore, _Rebellion Record_, vol. vi, 6; W.F. Cady to Cox, February 16, 1870, Indian Office _Report Book_, no. 19, 186-188; Coffin to Dole, September 24, 1863, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Report_, 1863, 177.]
[Footnote 496: S.S. Scott asked permission of Governor Winchester Colbert, November 10, 1862, to place the fugitive Tonkawas “temporarily on Rocky or Clear Creek, near the road leading from Fort Washita to Arbuckle.” Colbert granted the permission, “provided they are subject to the laws of the Chickasaw Nation, and will furnish guides to the Home Guards and the Chickasaw Battalion, when called upon to do so.”]
VIII. THE RETIREMENT OF GENERAL PIKE
The tragedy at the Wichita agency brought General Pike again to the fore. His resignation had not been accepted at Richmond as Hindman supposed was the case at the time he released him from custody. In fact, as events turned out, it looked as though Hindman were decidedly more in disrepute there than was Pike. His arbitrary procedure in the Trans-Mississippi District had been complained of by many persons besides the one person whom he had so unmercifully badgered. Furthermore, the circumstances of his assignment to command were being inquired into and everything divulged was telling tremendously against him.
The irregularity of Hindman’s assignment to command has been already commented upon in this narrative. Additional details may now be given. Van Dorn had hopes, on the occasion of his own summons to work farther east, that Sterling Price would be the one chosen eventually to succeed him or, at all events, the one to take the chief command of the Confederate forces in the West. He greatly wished that upon him and upon him alone his mantle should fall.[497] The filling of the position by Hindman was to be but tentative, to last only until Price,[498] perhaps also Van Dorn,
[Footnote 497: Van Dorn to President Davis, June 9, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 831-832.]
[Footnote 498: Price was preferred to H.M. Rector; because Van Dorn felt that Rector’s influence with the people of Arkansas had greatly declined. The truth was, Governor Rector had become incensed at the disregard shown for Arkansas by Confederate commanders. In a recent proclamation, he had announced that the state would henceforth look out for herself.]
could discuss matters personally with the president and remove the prejudice believed to be existing in his mind against Price; but the War Department had quite other plans developed, a rumor of which soon reached the ears of Van Dorn. It was then he telegraphed, begging Davis to make no appointment for the present to the command of the Trans-Mississippi District and informing him that Hindman had been sent there temporarily.[499] The request came to Richmond too late. An appointment had already been resolved upon and made. The man chosen was John Bankhead Magruder, a major-general in the Army of Northern Virginia. However, as he was not yet ready to take up his new duties, Hindman was suffered to assume the command in the West; but Magruder’s rights held over. They were held in abeyance, so to speak, temporarily waived.[500]
The controversy between Pike and Hindman would seem to have impelled Secretary Randolph to wish to terminate early Magruder’s delay; but Magruder was loath to depart. His lack of enthusiasm ought to have been enough to convince those sending him that he
[Footnote 499: The orders for Hindman to repair west, issuing from Beauregard’s headquarters, were explicit, not upon the point of the temporary character of his appointment, but upon that of its having been made “at the earnest solicitation of the people of Arkansas.” [_Official Records_, vol. x, part ii, 547].]
[Footnote 500: Price, nothing daunted, continued to seek the position and submitted plans for operations in the West. His importunities finally forced the inquiry from Davis as to whether Magruder’s appointment had ever been rescinded and whether, since he seemed in no hurry to avail himself of it, he really wanted the place. Randolph reported that Magruder had no objection to the service to which he had been ordered but desired to remain near Richmond until the expected battle in the neighborhood should have occurred. Randolph then suggested that Price be tendered the position of second in command [Randolph to Davis, June 23, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 837], an arrangement that met with Magruder’s hearty approval [Magruder to R.E. Lee, June 26, 1862, Ibid., 845].]
was hardly the man for the place. His acquaintance with Trans-Mississippi conditions was very superficial, yet even he found out that they were of a nature to admonish those concerned of their urgency, especially in the matter of lack of arms.[501] By the fourteenth of July his indecision was apparently overcome. At any rate, on that day Randolph wrote Pike that Magruder, the real commander of the Trans-Mississippi District, would soon arrive at Little Rock and that the offences of which Pike had had reason to complain would not be repeated.
Letters travelled slowly in those days and Randolph’s comforting intelligence did not reach Pike in time to avert the catastrophe of his proclamation and consequent arrest. And it was just as well, all things considered, for Magruder never reached Little Rock. He was a man of intemperate habits and, while _en route_, was ordered back to Richmond to answer “charges of drunkenness and disobedience of orders.”[502] His appointment was thereupon rescinded. The man selected in his place, to the total ignoring of Price’s prior claims, was Theophilus H. Holmes, a native of North Carolina.[503] President Davis was still possessed of the notion that frontier affairs could be best conducted by men who had no local attachments there. Late events had all too surely lent weight to his theory. Nevertheless, in holding it, Davis was strictly inconsistent and illogical; for loyalty to the particular home state constituted the strongest asset that the Confederacy had. It was the lode-star that had drawn Lee and
[Footnote 501: Magruder to Randolph, July 5, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 851-852.]
[Footnote 502: Clark to Price, July 17, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 816-817.]
[Footnote 503: Wright, _General Officers of C.S.A_., 15-16.]
many another, who cared not a whit for political principles in and for themselves, from their allegiance to the Union. It was the great bulwark of the South.
Holmes was ordered west July 16;[504] but, as he had the necessary preparations to make and various private matters to attend to, August had almost begun before it proved possible for him to reach Little Rock.[505] The interval had given Hindman a new lease of official life and a further extension of opportunity for oppression, which he had used to good advantage. The new department commander, while yet in Richmond, had discussed the Pike-Hindman controversy with his superior officers and had arrived at a conclusion distinctly favorable to Pike. He frankly confessed as much weeks afterwards. Once in Little Rock, however, he learned from the Hindman coterie of Pike’s Indian proclamation and immediately veered to Hindman’s side.[506] Pike talked with him, recounted his grievances in a fashion that none could surpass, but made absolutely no impression upon him. So small a thing and so short a time had it taken to develop a hostile prejudice in Holmes’s mind, previously unbiased, so deep-seated that it never, in all the months that followed, knew the slightest diminution. Conversely and most fortuitously, a friendliness grew up between Holmes and the man whom he had supplanted that made the former, either forget the orders given him in Richmond or put so new a construction upon them that they were rendered nugatory. It was a situation, exceedingly fortunate for
[Footnote 504: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 855.]
[Footnote 505: He had reached Vicksburg by the thirtieth of July and from that point he issued his orders assuming the command [ibid., 860].]
[Footnote 506: Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862 (Appendix); _Confederate Military History_, vol. x, 121-122.]
the service as a whole, no doubt, but most unhappy for Indian Territory.
It finally dawned upon Pike that it was useless to argue any longer upon the matters in dispute between him and Hindman, for Holmes had pre-judged the case. Moreover, Holmes was beginning to appreciate the advantage of being in a position where he could, by ignoring Pike’s authority and asserting his own, be much the gainer in a material way. How he could have reconciled such an attitude with the instructions he had received from Randolph it is impossible to surmise. The instructions, whether verbal or written, must have been in full accord with the secretary’s letter to Pike of the fourteenth of July, which, although Pike was as yet ignorant of it, had explicitly said that no supplies for Indian Territory should be diverted from their course and that there should be no interference whatever with Pike’s somewhat peculiar command.[507] All along the authorities in Richmond, their conflicting departmental regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, had insisted that the main object of the Indian alliance had been amply attained when the Indians were found posing as a Home Guard. Indians were not wanted for any service outside the limits of their own country. Service outside was to be deprecated, first, last, and always. Indeed, it was in response to a suggestion from Pike, made in the autumn of 1861, that the Indian Territory ought to be regarded as a thing apart, to be held for the Confederacy most certainly but not to be involved in the warfare outside, that Pike’s department had been created and no subsequent
[Footnote 507: Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862. The same assurance had apparently been given to Pike in May [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 863].]
arrangements for the Trans-Mississippi Department or District, whichever it may have been at the period, were intended to militate against that fundamental fact.[508]
Despairing of accomplishing anything by lingering longer in Little Rock, Pike applied to Holmes for a leave of absence and was granted it for such time as might have to elapse before action upon his resignation could be secured.[509] The circumstance of Hindman’s having relieved Pike from duty was thus ignored or passed over in silence. General Pike had come to Little Rock to see his family[510] but he now decided upon a visit to Texas. Exactly what he expected to do there nobody knows; but he undoubtedly had at heart the interests of his department. He went to Warren first and later to Grayson County. At the latter place, he made Sherman his private headquarters and it was from there that he subsequently found it convenient to pass over again into Indian Territory.
Pike was in Arkansas as late as the nineteenth of August and probably still there when Randolph’s letter of the fourteenth of July, much delayed, arrived.[511] If angry before, he was now incensed; for he knew for a certainty at last that Hindman had been a sort of usurper in the Trans-Mississippi District and, with power emanating from no one higher than Beauregard, had never legally possessed a flicker of authority for doing the many insulting things that he had arrogantly done to him.[512] Next, from some source, came the
[Footnote 508: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 861, 864, 868.]
[Footnote 509: Holmes to the Secretary of War, November 15, 1862 [ibid., 918].]
[Footnote 510: For an account of Pike’s movements, see _Confederate Military History_, vol. x, 126.]
[Footnote 511: Abel, _American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist_, 356.]
[Footnote 512: Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862, “Appendix.”]
news that President Davis had refused positively to accept Pike’s resignation.[513] What better proof could anyone want that Pike was sustained at headquarters? What that view of the matter may have meant in emboldening him to his later excessively independent actions must be left to the reader’s conjecture. It never occurred to Pike that if his resignation had been refused, it had probably been refused upon the supposition that, with Hindman out of the way, all would be well. One good reason for thinking that that was the Richmond attitude towards the affair is the fact that no record of anything like immediate and formal action upon the resignation is forthcoming. Pike heard that it had been refused and positively, which was very gratifying; but it is far more likely that it had been put to one side and purposely; in order that, since Pike was unquestionably the best man for Indian Territory, all difficulties might be left to adjust themselves, the less said about Hindman’s autocracy the better it would be for all concerned.
But it was soon apparent that Hindman was not to be put out of the way. It was to be still possible for him to work mischief in Indian Territory. With some slight modifications, the Trans-Mississippi District had been converted into the Trans-Mississippi Department and, on the twentieth of August, orders[514] issued from
[Footnote 513: There is something very peculiar about the acceptance or non-acceptance of Pike’s resignation. Randolph wrote to Holmes, October 27, 1862, these words: “… General Pike’s resignation having been accepted, you will be left without a commanding officer in the Indian Territory…” [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 906]. A letter endorsement, made by Randolph, on or later than September 19th, was to this effect: “General Pike’s resignation has not yet been accepted” [Ibid., liii, supplement, 821], and another, made by him, November 5th, to this: “Accept General Pike’s resignation, and notify him of it” [Ibid., 822].]
[Footnote 514: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 877.]
Little Rock, arranging for an organization into three districts, the Texas, the Louisiana,[515] and the Arkansas. The last-named district was entrusted to General Hindman and made to embrace Arkansas, Missouri, and the Indian Territory. Hindman took charge at Fort Smith, August twenty-fourth and straightway planned such disposition of his troops as would make for advancing the Confederate line northward of the Boston Mountains, Fort Smith, and the Arkansas River. The Indian forces that were concentrated around Forts Smith and Gibson were shifted to Carey’s Ferry that they might cover the military road southward from Fort Scott. To hold the Cherokee country and to help maintain order there, a battalion of white cavalry was posted at Tahlequah and, in each of the nine townships, or districts, of the country, the formation of a company of home guard, authorized.[516]
The maintaining of order in the Cherokee Nation had come to be imperatively necessary. John Ross, the Principal Chief, was now a prisoner within the Federal lines.[517] His capture had been accomplished by strategy only a short time before and not without strong suspicion that he had been in collusion with his captors. Early in August, General Blunt, determined that the country north of the Arkansas should not be abandoned, notwithstanding the retrograde movement of Colonel Salomon, had ordered Salomon, now a brigadier in command of the Indian Expedition, to send
[Footnote 515: Not all of Louisiana was in Holmes’s department and only that part of it west of the Mississippi constituted the District of Louisiana. Governor Moore had vigorously protested against a previous division, one that “tacked” “all north of Red River” “onto Arkansas” [_Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 819].]
[Footnote 516:–Ibid., vol. xiii, 46-47.]
[Footnote 517: Nominally, Ross was yet a prisoner, although, as a matter of fact, he had started upon a mission to Washington, his desire being to confer with President Lincoln in person regarding the condition of the Cherokees [Blunt to Lincoln, August 13, 1862, ibid., 565-566].]
back certain white troops in support of the Indian.[518] Dr. Gillpatrick, who was the bearer of the orders, imparted verbal instructions that the expeditionary force so sent should proceed to Tahlequah and complete what Colonel Phillips had confessed he had not had sufficient time for, the making of diplomatic overtures to the Cherokee authorities.[519]
Blunt’s expeditionary force had proceeded to Tahlequah and to Park Hill and there, under the direction of Colonel William F. Cloud, had seized John Ross and his family, their valuables, also official papers and the treasury of the Cherokee Nation.[520] The departure of the Principal Chief had had a demoralizing effect upon the Cherokees; for, when his restraining influence was removed, likewise the Federal support, political factions, the Pins, or full-bloods, and the Secessionists, mostly half-breeds, had been able to indulge their thirst for vengeance uninterruptedly.[521] Chaos had well-nigh resulted.
The departure of the expeditionary force had meant more than mere demoralization among the Indians. It had meant the abandonment of their country to the Confederates and the Confederates, once realizing that, delaying nothing, took possession. The secessionist Cherokees then called a convention, formally deposed John Ross, and elected Stand Watie as Principal Chief in his stead.[522] Back of all such revolutionary work, was General Hindman and it was not long before Hindman himself was in Tahlequah.[523] Once there, he proceeded to set his stamp upon things with customary
[Footnote 518: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 531-532.]
[Footnote 519:–Ibid., 182.]
[Footnote 520:–Ibid., 552.]
[Footnote 521:–Ibid., 623, 648.]
[Footnote 522: _Confederate Military History_, vol. x, 129.]
[Footnote 523: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 42.]
vigor and order was shortly restored both north and south of the Arkansas. Guerrilla warfare was summarily suppressed, marauding stopped, and the perpetrators of atrocities so deservedly punished that all who would have imitated them lost their taste for such fiendish sport. As far north as the Moravian Mission, the Confederates were undeniably in possession; but, at that juncture, Holmes called Hindman to other scenes. A sort of apathy then settled like a cloud upon the Cherokee Nation[524]. Almost lifeless, it awaited the next invader.
One part of the programme, arranged for at the time of the re-districting of the Trans-Mississippi Department, had called for a scheme to reenter southwest Missouri. Hindman was to lead but Rains, Shelby, Cooper, and others were to constitute a sort of outpost and were to make a dash, first of all, to recover the lead mines at Granby. The Indians of both armies were drawn thitherward, the one group to help make the advance, the other to resist it. At Newtonia on September 30 the first collision of any moment came and it came and it ended with victory for the Confederates[525]. Cooper’s Choctaws and Chickasaws fought valiantly but so also did Phillips’s Cherokees. They lost heavily in horses[526], their own poorly shod ponies; but they themselves stood fire well. To rally them after defeat proved, however, a difficult matter. Their
[Footnote 524: Report of M.W. Buster to Cooper, September 19, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 273-277.]
[Footnote 525: For detailed accounts of the Battle of Newtonia, see Ibid., 296-307; Edwards, _Shelby and his Men_, 83-89; Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, 355-363; Anderson, _Life of General Stand Watie_, 20; Crawford, _Kansas in the Sixties_, 54; _Confederate Military History_, vol. x, 132.]
[Footnote 526: Evan Jones to Dole, January 8, 1864, Indian Office General Files, Cherokee, 1859-1865, J 401.]
disciplining had yet left much to be desired.[527] Scalping[528] of the dead took place as on the battle-field of Pea Ridge; but, in other respects, the Indians of both armies acquitted themselves well and far better than might have been expected.
The participation of the Indians in the Battle of Newtonia was significant. Federals and Confederates had alike resorted to it for purposes other than the red man’s own. The Indian Expedition had now for a surety definitely abandoned the intention for which it was originally organized and outfitted. As a matter of fact, it had long since ceased to exist. The military
[Footnote 527: “Since leaving the Fugitive Indians on Dry Wood Creek, nothing has occurred of material interest other than you will receive through official Dispatches from the Officers of our Army. The Indians under Col. Phillips fought well at the Battle Newtonia, they have at all times stood fire. The great difficulty of their officers is in keeping them together in a retreat, and should such be necessary on the field in presence of an enemy in their present state of discipline it would be almost impossible to again return them to the attack in good order–Another Battle was fought at this place in which the enemy were defeated with considerable loss, four of their guns being taken by a charge of the 2d Kansas.
“In this Contest the Indians behaved well, the officers and soldiers of our own regiments now freely acknowledge them to be valuable Allies and in no case have they as yet faltered, untill ordered to retire, the prejudice once existing against them is fast disappearing from our Army and it is now generaly conceded that they will do good service in our border warfare. This we have never doubted and confident as we have been of their fitness for border warfare we have been content to await, untill they had proven to the country not only their loyalty but their ability to fight. Since their organization they have been engaged in several battles and in every case successfully, one of us will start in a day or two for Tahlequah and may find something of interest on the march. We are now in the Cherokee Nation. An effort is now being made by Gen’l Blunt to punish plundering in the country. Union People have suffered from this as much as rebels. We have before called the attention of our Army Officers to this fact; with our Fifteen Hundred Cherokee Warriors in the service of our government–we feel that every possible protection should be extended to them as a people” [Carruth to Coffin, October 25, 1862, enclosed in Coffin to Dole, November 16, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_ 1859-1862].]
[Footnote 528: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 894.]
organization, of which the Indian regiments in the Federal service now formed a part, was Blunt’s division of the Army of the Frontier and it had other objects in view, other tasks to perform, than the simple recovery of Indian Territory.
It is true General Blunt had set his heart upon that particular accomplishment but he was scarcely a free agent in the matter. Men above him in rank had quite other aims and his, perforce, had to be subordinated to theirs. In August, Blunt had planned a kind of second Indian Expedition to go south to Fort Gibson and to restore the refugees to their homes.[529] It had started upon its way when the powers higher up interposed.
General Schofield, anticipating the renewed endeavor of the Confederates to push their line forward, had called upon Blunt for assistance and Blunt had responded with such alacrity as was possible, considering that many of the troops he summoned for Schofield’s use were those that had been doing hard service within and on the border of the Indian country for full two months. During all that time their horses had been deprived entirely of grain feed and had been compelled to subsist upon prairie grass. They were in a bad way.[530] Once outside the Indian Territory, the Indian regiments, begrudging the service demanded of them, were kept more fully occupied than were the white; for there was
[Footnote 529: “Orders have been given by General Blunt for the Indian Expedition to go South soon; he says the families of the Indians may go”–CARRUTH to Coffin, August 29, 1862, enclosed in Coffin to Mix, August 30, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendence_, 1859-1862.
“Enclosed you will find an order from General James G. Blunt in regard to the removal of the Indian families to their homes. I start to-morrow for Fort Scott, Kansas, to overtake the second Indian expedition, commanded by General Blunt in person.”–Carruth to Coffin, September 19, 1862, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report, 1862, p. 166.]
[Footnote 530: Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, 337.]
always scouting[531] for them to do and frequently skirmishing. On Cowskin River, Phillips’s Third Indian and, near Shirley’s Ford on Spring River, Ritchie’s Second had each engaged the Confederates with success, although not entirely with credit. Ritchie had allowed his men to run amuck even to the extent of attacking their comrades in Colonel Weer’s brigade, which was the second in Blunt’s reorganized army. On account of his lack of control over his troops, Ritchie was reported upon for dismissal from the service.[532]
The Battle of Newtonia was inconclusive. Subsequent to it, the Federals were greatly reenforced and, in the first days of October, Schofield and Blunt, who had both arrived recently upon the scene, coming to the aid of Salomon, who had been the vanquished one at Newtonia, were able, in combination with Totten, to deprive Cooper of all the substantial fruits of victory. He was obliged to fall back into Arkansas, whither a part of Blunt’s division pursued him and encamped themselves on the old battle-field of Pea Ridge.[533]
Cooper was far from being defeated, however, and, under orders from Rains, soon made plans for attempting an invasion of Kansas; but Blunt, ably seconded by Crawford of the Second Kansas, was too quick for him. He followed him to Maysville and then a little beyond the Cherokee border to old Fort Wayne in the present Delaware District of the Nation. There, on the open prairie, a battle was fought,[534] on October 22, so
[Footnote 531: Phillips to Blunt, September 5, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 614-615.]
[Footnote 532: Weer to Moonlight, September 12, 1862, ibid., 627; Weer to Blunt, September 24, 1862, ibid., 665-666; Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, 352.]
[Footnote 533: Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, 366; Crawford, _Kansas in the Sixties_, 54.]
[Footnote 534: Anderson, _Life of General Stand Watie_, 20; Crawford, _Kansas in the_ (cont.)]
disastrous to the Confederates, who, by the by, were greatly outnumbered, that they fled, a demoralized host, by way of Fort Gibson across the Arkansas River to Cantonment Davis,[535] Stand Watie and his doughty Cherokees covering their retreat. The Federals had then once again an undisputed possession of Indian Territory north of the Arkansas.[536]
Such was the condition of affairs when Pike emerged from his self-imposed retreat in Texas. The case for the Confederate cause among the Indians was becoming desperate. So many things that called for apprehension were occurring. Cooper and Rains were both in disgrace, the failure of the recent campaign having been attributed largely to their physical unfitness for duty. Both were now facing an investigation of charges for drunkenness. Moreover, the brutal attack upon and consequent murder of Agent Leeper had just shocked the community. Hearing of that murder and considering that he was still the most responsible party in Indian Territory, General Pike made preparations to proceed forthwith to the Leased District. His plans were frustrated by his own arrest at the command of General Holmes.
His unfriendliness to Pike was in part due to Holmes’s own necessities. It was to his interest to assert authority over the man who could procure supplies for Indian Territory and when occasion offered, if that man should dare to prove obdurate, to ignore his position altogether. Nevertheless, Holmes had not seen fit in early October to deny Pike his title of
[Footnote 534: (cont.) _Sixties_, 56-62; Edwards, _Shelby and his Men, 90; Official Records, vol. xiii, 43, 324. 325, 325-328, 329-331, 331-332, 332-336, 336-337, 759_; Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, _364-375_.]
[Footnote 535: _Official Records, vol. xiii, 765_.]
[Footnote 536: Blunt was ordered “to clean out the Indian country” [Ibid., 762].]
commander and had personally addressed him by it.[537] Yet all the time he was encroaching upon that commander’s prerogatives, was withholding his supplies, just as Hindman had done, and was exploiting Indian Territory, in various ways, for his own purposes. Rumors came that Pike was holding back munition trains in Texas and then that he was conspiring with Texan Unionists against the Confederacy. To further his own designs, Holmes chose to credit the rumors and made them subserve the one and the same end; for he needed Pike’s ammunition and he wanted Pike himself out of the way. He affected to believe that Pike was a traitor and, when he reappeared as brigade commander, to consider that he had unlawfully reassumed his old functions. Accordingly, he issued an order to Roane,[538] to whom he had entrusted the Indians, for Pike’s arrest; but he had already called Pike to account for holding back the munition trains and had ordered him, if the charge were really true, to report in person at Little Rock.[539]
The order for General Pike’s arrest bore date of November 3. Roane, the man to whom the ungracious task was assigned, was well suited to it. He had been adjudged by Holmes himself as absolutely worthless as a commander and, being so, had been sent to take care of the Indians,[540] a severe commentary upon Holmes’s own fitness for the supreme control of anything that had to do with them or their concerns. Others had an equally poor opinion of Roane’s generalship and character. John S. Phelps, indeed, was writing at this very time, the autumn of 1862, to Secretary
[Footnote 537: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 924.]
[Footnote 538:–Ibid., 923, 980, 981.]
[Footnote 539:–Ibid., 904.]
[Footnote 540:–Ibid., 899.]
Stanton in testimony of Roane’s unsavory reputation.[541]
The arrest of Pike took place November 14 at Tishomingo in the Chickasaw country and a detachment of Shelby’s brigade was detailed to convey him to Little Rock.[542] Then, as once before, his reported resignation saved him from long confinement and from extreme ignominy. On the fifth of November, President Davis instructed the adjutant-general to accept Pike’s resignation forthwith and five days thereafter,[543] before the arrest had actually taken place, Holmes advised Hindman that he had better let Pike go free so soon as he should leave the Indian country; inasmuch as his resignation was now an assured thing.[544] Holmes evidently feared to let the release take place within the limits of Pike’s old command; for some of the Indians were still devotedly attached to him and were still pinning their faith upon his plighted word. John Jumper and his Seminole braves were among those most loyal to Pike; and Holmes was afraid that wholesale desertions from their ranks would follow inevitably Pike’s degradation. Many desertions had already occurred, ostensibly because of lack of food and raiment. Commissioner Scott had complained to Holmes of the Indian privations[545] and Holmes had been forced to concede, although only at the eleventh hour, the Indian claim to some consideration. He had arbitrarily shared tribal quota of supplies, bought with tribal money, with white troops and had lamely excused himself by saying that he had done it to prevent
[Footnote 541: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 752.]
[Footnote 542:–Ibid., 921.]
[Footnote 543:–Ibid., vol. liii, supplement, 821.]
[Footnote 544:–Ibid., vol. xiii, 913.]
[Footnote 545:–Ibid., 920.]
grumbling[546] and the charge of favoritism. One other offence of which Holmes was guilty he did not attempt to palliate, the taking of the Indians out of their own country without their consent. To the very last Pike had expostulated[547] against such violation of treaty promises; but Holmes and Hindman were deaf alike to entreaty and to reprimand.
General Pike, poet and student, was now finally deprived of his command and the Indians left to their own devices or at the mercy of men, who could not be trusted or were not greatly needed elsewhere. No one attempted any longer to conceal the truth that alliance with the Indians was a supremely selfish consideration, and nothing more, on the part of those who coveted Indian Territory because of its geographical position, its strategic and economic importance. For a little while longer, Pike contended with his enemies by means of the best weapon he had, his facile pen. His acrimonious correspondence with the chief of those enemies, Hindman and Holmes, reached its highest point of criticism in a letter of December 30 to the latter. That letter summed up his grievances and was practically his last charge. Having made it, he retired from the scene, not to reappear until near the close of the war, when Kirby Smith found it advantageous to reemploy him for service among the red men.
[Footnote 546: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 928.]
[Footnote 547:–Ibid., 905, 963.]
IX. THE REMOVAL OF THE REFUGEES TO THE SAC AND FOX AGENCY
General Blunt’s decision to restore the Indian refugees in Kansas to their own country precipitated a word war of disagreeable significance between the civil and military authorities. The numbers of the refugees had been very greatly augmented in the course of the summer, notwithstanding the fact that so large a proportion of the men had joined the Indian Expedition. It is true they had not all stayed with it. The retrograde movement of Colonel Salomon and his failure later on to obey Blunt’s order to the letter[548] that he should return to the support of the Indians had disheartened them and many of the enlisted braves had deserted the ranks, as chance offered, and had strayed back to their families in the refugee camps of southern Kansas.[549]
[Footnote 548: Blunt to Caleb Smith, November 21, 1862 [Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862, I 860].]
[Footnote 549: One of the first notices of their desertion was the following:
“We are getting along well, very well. The Indians seem happy and contented, and seemingly get enough to eat and wear. At least I hear no complaint. For the last two or three days the Indian soldiers have been stragling back, until now there are some three or four hundred in, and they are still coming. I held a council with them to-day to try and find out why they are here. But they don’t seem to have any idea themselves. All I could learn was that Old George started and the rest followed. The Col. it seems told them to go some where else. I shall send an express to Col. Furness in the morning to find out if possible what it means. It seems to me it will not do to give the provisions purchased for the women and children to the soldiers….
“The soldiers look clean and hearty, and complain of being treated like dogs, starved etc, which I must say their looks belie….”–GEO.A. CUTLER to Wm. G. Coffin, August 13, 1862, Ibid.]
Then the numbers had been augmented in other ways. The Quapaws, who had been early driven from their homes and once restored,[550] had left them again when they found that their country had been denuded of all its portable resources. It was exposed to inroads of many sorts. Even the Federal army preyed upon it and, as all the able-bodied male Quapaws were gradually drawn into that army, there was no way of defending it. Its inhabitants, therefore, returned as exiles to the country around about Leroy.[551]
It was much the same with near neighbors of the Quapaws, with the Senecas and the Seneca-Shawnees. These Indians had been induced to accept one payment of their annuities from the Confederate agent[552] but had later repented their digression from the old allegiance to the United States and had solicited its protection in order that they might remain true. Some of them stayed with Agent Elder near Fort Scott,[553] others moved northward and lived upon the charity of the Shawnees near Lawrence.[554] But those Shawnees were doomed themselves to be depredated upon, especially that group of them known as Black Bob’s Band, a band that had been assigned a settlement in Johnson
[Footnote 550: Coffin to Elder, August 9, 1862; Coffin to Mix, August 16, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Neosho_, C 1745 of 1862.]
[Footnote 551: Some of the Quapaws that went to Leroy were not _bona fide_ refugees. Elder reported them as lured thither by the idea of getting fed [Elder to Dole, July 9, 1862, Ibid., E 114 of 1862].]
[Footnote 552: Coffin to Dole, May 31, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Neosho_.]
[Footnote 553: Coffin to Mix, July 30, 1862, Ibid., C 1732 of 1862.]
[Footnote 554: J.J. Lawler to Mix, August 2, 1862, Ibid., _Shawnee_, 1855-1862; Abbott to Branch, July 26, 1862, Ibid. Some of the Senecas, about one hundred twenty-three, went as far as Wyandot City. For them and their relief, the Senecas in New York interceded. See Chief John Melton to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 2, 1862, Ibid., _Neosho_, H 541; Mix to Coffin, September 11, 1862, Indian Office _Letter Book_, no. 69, 99.]
County, adjoining the Missouri border.[555] In August[556] and again in the first week of September[557] guerrillas under Quantrill,[558] crossed over the line and raided the Black Bob lands, robbing the Indians of practically everything they possessed, their clothing, their household goods, their saddles, their ponies, their provisions, and driving the original owners quite away. They fired upon them as they fled and committed atrocities upon the helpless ones who lagged behind. They then raided Olathe.[559] Somewhat earlier, guerrillas had similarly devastated the Kansas Agency, although not to the same extent.[560] The Black Bob Shawnees found a refuge in the western part of the tribal reserve.[561]
[Footnote 555: This group of Shawnee refugees must be distinguished from the so-called _Absentee Shawnees_, who also became refugees. The Shawnees had been very much molested and disturbed during the period of border strife following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Black Bob’s Band was then exceedingly desirous of going south to dwell with the Seneca-Shawnees [Rector to Greenwood, January 6, 1860, enclosing Dorn to Greenwood, December 30, 1859, Indian Office General Files, _Neosho_, R 463 of 1860]. The Absentee Shawnees had taken refuge in Indian Territory prior to the war, but were expelled immediately after it began. They obtained supplies for a time from the Wichita Agent and lived as refugees on Walnut Creek [Paschal Fish and other Shawnee delegates to Cooley, December 5, 1865, Indian Office Land Files, _Shawnee_, 1860-1865]. Later on, they seem, at least some of them, to have gone up to the Shawnee Reserve [Dole to Coffin, July 27, 1863, Indian Office _Letter Book_, no. 71, 195; Dole to Usher, July 27, 1863, Ibid., _Report Book_, no. 13, 208-209].]
[Footnote 556: H.B. Branch to Dole, June 19, 1863, enclosing various letters from Agent Abbott, Indian Office General Files, _Shawnee_, 1863-1875, B 343.]
[Footnote 557: Branch to Dole, October 3, 1862, transmitting letter from Abbott to Branch, September 25, 1862, Ibid., _Shawnee_, 1855-1862, B 1583.]
[Footnote 558: Connelley, _Quantrill and the Border Wars_, 269, says that, from’ August 15, 1863, the Confederate government was directly responsible for the work of Quantrill. From that day, the guerrillas were regular Confederate soldiers. They were not generally regarded as such, however; for, in November, 1863, Price was trying to prevail upon Quantrill and his men to come into the regular army [_Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 907-908].]
[Footnote 559: Governor Robinson issued a proclamation, on the occasion of this emergency for volunteers against guerrillas.]
[Footnote 560: Farnsworth to Dole, July 23, 1862 [Indian Office General Files, _Kansas_, 1855-1862, F 386].]
[Footnote 561: Letter of Agent Abbott, June 5, 1863, Ibid., _Shawnee_, 1863-1875, B 343.]
Some Wyandot Indians, who before the war had sought and found homes among the Senecas,[562] were robbed of everything they possessed by secessionist Indians,[563] who would not, however, permit them to go in search of relief northward.[564] When all efforts to induce them to throw in their lot with the Confederacy proved unavailing, the strict watch over them was somewhat relaxed and they eventually managed to make their escape. They, too, fled into Kansas. And so did about one hundred Delawares, who had been making their homes in the Cherokee country. In the spring of 1862, they had begun to return destitute to the old reservation[565] but seem not to have been counted refugees until much later in the year.[566] The Delaware Reservation on the northern bank of the Kansas River and very near to Missouri was peculiarly exposed
[Footnote 562: Indian Office General Files, _Neosho_, I 81 of 1860.]
[Footnote 563: Lawrence and others, Wyandots, to Dole, December 23, 1862, ibid., Land Files, _Shawnee_, 1860-1865, L 12 of 1862. This letter was answered January 20, 1863, and, on the same day, Coffin was instructed to relieve their distress.]
[Footnote 564: “Being personally acquainted with the condition of the Wyandots … would here state, that a portion of them are living among the Senecas bordering on the Cherokee Country, and they are in a suffering condition. The rebel portion of the Senecas and Cherokees have robbed them of all of their ponies, and in fact all the property they had, and will not allow them to leave to come to Wyandott, which is about 2 hundred miles in distance, and their friends in Wyandott are unable to relieve them (on account of the rebel forces) without protection of our armies. The Wyandotts that are here are anxious to go and relieve their friends, and would respectfully request that they be allowed to form into a military company and be mustered into Gov’nt service and go with the expedition south to relieve their friends and assist in reclaiming the rebel Indians. A few of the Wyandotts are in service … They are all very anxious to be transferred into a company by themselves for the purpose above stated….”–CHARLES MOORE to Dole, February 9, 1862, Indian Office Special Files, no. 201, D 576.]
[Footnote 565: Johnson to Dole, April 2, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Delaware_, 1862-1866.]
[Footnote 566: Johnson to Dole, November 5, 1862, ibid., _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862.]
to ravages, horses and cattle being frequently stolen.[567] For that reason and because so much urged thereto by Agent Johnson,[568] who was himself anxious for service, the Delawares were unusually eager to enlist.
The Osages had been induced by Ritchie and others to join the Indian Expedition or to serve as independent scouts.[569] Their families, consequently, found it safe and convenient to become refugees.[570] In July, they formed much the larger part of some five hundred from Elder’s agency, who sought succor at Leroy. That did not deter the Osages, however, from offering a temporary abiding-place, within their huge reserve, to the homeless Creeks under Opoeth-le-yo-ho-la.[571]
[Footnote 567: Johnson to Dole, May 28, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Delaware_, I 667 of 1862.]
[Footnote 568: Johnson wished to retain his agency and also hold a commission as colonel of volunteers, Department of the Interior, _Register of Letters Received_, no. 4, pp. 214, 357. James H. Lane endorsed his request and it was granted.]
[Footnote 569: The Osages rendered occasionally some good service. They and the Comanches plundered the Chickasaws very considerably [Holmes Colbert to N.G. Taylor, April 14, 1868, Indian Office Consolidated Files, _Chickasaw_, C 716 of 1868. See also Office letter to Osage treaty commissioners, May 4, 1868]. In October, the Osage force advanced as far as Iola and then retreated [Henning to Blunt, October 11, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 726]. Soon after that they were mustered out and in a very disgruntled condition. They claimed that the government had used them very badly and had never paid them anything [Henning to Chipman, November 13, 1862, Ibid., 790]. They knew little of the discipline of war and left the army whenever they had a mind to.]
[Footnote 570: The Osages joined the Indian Expedition only upon condition that their families would be supported during their absence [Coffin to Dole, June 4, 1862, Indian Office Consolidated Files, _Neosho_, C 1662 of 1862]. The families were soon destitute. Coffin ordered Elder to minister to them at Leroy; but he seems to have distrusted the southern superintendent and to have preferred to keep aloof from him. Coffin then appointed a man named John Harris as special Osage agent [Coffin to Dole, July 7, 1862, Ibid., C 1710]. Elder tried to circumvent Coffin’s plans for the distribution of cattle [Coffin to Elder, July 16, 1862, ibid., C 1717] and Coffin lodged a general charge of neglect of duty against him [Coffin to Dole, July 19, 1862, Ibid.].]
[Footnote 571: The invitation was extended by White Hair and Charles Mograin [Coffin to Dole, November 16, 1862, Ibid., C 1904]. Coffin was anxious for (cont.)]
During the summer the wretched condition of the Indian refugees had, thanks to fresh air, sunlight, and fair weather, been much ameliorated. Disease had obtained so vast a start that the medical service, had it been first-class, which it certainly was not, would otherwise have proved totally inadequate. The physicians in attendance claimed to have from five to eight thousand patients,[572] yet one of them, Dr. S.D. Coffin, found it possible to be often and for relatively long periods absent from his post. Of this the senior physician, Dr. William Kile, made complaint [573] and that circumstance marked the beginning of a serious estrangement between him and Superintendent Coffin.[574]
In August, General Blunt announced his intention of returning the Indian families to their homes.[575] He was convinced that some of the employees of the Indian Office and of the Interior Department were personally profiting by the distribution of supplies to the refugees and that they were conniving with citizens of Kansas in perpetrating a gigantic fraud against the government. The circumstances of the refugees had been well aired
[Footnote 571: (cont.) Opoeth-le-yo-ho-la who had been rather obstreperous, to accept [Coffin to Dole, November 14, 1862, Indian Office General Files, Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862].]
[Footnote 572: Dr. S.D. Coffin, to Dole, July 5, 1862, ibid., General Files, Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862; J.C. Carter to Dole July 22, 1862, ibid.]
[Footnote 573: Kile to Dole, ibid.]
[Footnote 574: The estrangement resulted in the retirement of Kile from the service. In September, Dr. Kile asked for a leave of absence. Shortly afterwards, Secretary Smith instructed Charles E. Mix, the acting commissioner, that the services of Kile were no longer needed, since the superintendent could attend to the purchasing and distributing of supplies [Smith to Mix, September 22, 1862, Indian Office General Files, Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862]. Mix promptly informed Kile that his resignation was accepted [Mix to Kile, September 22, 1862, ibid., Letter Book, no. 69, p. 133].]
[Footnote 575: “Orders have been given by General Blunt for the Indian Expedition to go South soon; he says the families of the Indians may go. They wish to do so but no provision is made for their subsistence or conveyance. We wish immediate instructions in this particular.”–Carruth to Coffin, August 29, 1862, ibid., General Files, Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862.]
in Congress, first in connection with a Senate resolution for their relief.[576] On July fifth, Congress had passed an act suspending annuity appropriations to the tribes in hostility to the United States government and authorizing the president to expend, at discretion, those same annuities in behalf of the refugees.[577] At once, the number[578] of refugees increased and white men rushed forward to obtain contracts for furnishing supplies.
There was a failure of the corn crop in southern Kansas that year and Dr. Kile, appreciating certain facts, that the Indian pony is dear, as is the Arabian horse, to his master, that the Indian ponies were pretty numerous in spite of the decimation of the past winter, and that they would have to be fed upon corn, advised a return to Indian Territory before the cold weather should set in.[579] He communicated with Blunt[580] and found Blunt of the same opinion, so also Cutler[581] and Coleman.[582] Contrariwise was Superintendent Coffin,[583] whose view of the case was strengthened by E.H. Carruth, H.W. Martin,[584] and A.C. Ellithorpe.[585]
[Footnote 576: _U.S. Congressional Globe_, 37th congress, second session, part i, 815, 849, 875, 891, 940.]
[Footnote 577: _U.S. Statutes at Large_, vol. xii, 528.]
[Footnote 578: In October, Coffin put the number of refugees, inclusive of the Cherokees on Drywood Creek, at almost seven thousand five hundred [Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Report_ 1862, p. 137] and asked for sixty-nine thousand dollars for their support during the third quarter of 1862 [Coffin to Mix, September 16, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862].]
[Footnote 579: Kile to Dole, July 25, 1862, Ibid.]
[Footnote 580: Kile to Blunt, September 2, 1862, Ibid.]
[Footnote 581: Cutler to Coffin, September 30, 1862, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Report_, 1862, 139.]
[Footnote 582: Coleman to Coffin, September 30, 1862, Ibid., 141.]
[Footnote 583: Coffin to Mix, August 30, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862: same to same, September 13, 1862, Ibid.]
[Footnote 584: Carruth and Martin to Coffin, September 28, 1862, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Report_, 1862, 167.]
[Footnote 585: “In replying to the several interrogatorys contained in your letter of the 11th inst, I shall base my answer entirely upon my own (cont.)]
In the contest that ensued between the military and civil authorities or between Blunt and Coffin,[586] Coffin triumphed, although Blunt made no concealment of his
[Footnote 585: (cont.) observations and experience, obtained during a six months campaign with the Indians, and in the Creek and Cherokee countries. Taking a deep interest in the welfare of these loyal refugee Indians, who have sacrificed _all_, rather than fight against our Flag, I shall be cautious and advise no policy but that which will insure their safe restoration to their homes.
“The important question in your letter and that which embodies the whole subject matter is the following–‘Would it be safe in the present condition of the country to restore the southern refugee Indians now in southern Kansas, the women and children, the old, feeble and infirm to their homes in the Indian country?’
“I answer–It would not be safe to take the women and children to the Creek or Cherokee countries this fall for the following reasons, 1st The corn and vegetable crop north of the Arkansas River will not afford them subsistence for a single month. The excessive drouth has almost completely destroyed it, and what little would have matured is laid waste by the frequent foraging parties of our own Army, or those of the Rebels.
“The amount of Military force necessary to restore and safely protect this people in their homes would far exceed what is at present at the disposal of the Department of Kansas; and should they be removed to the Indian country, and our forces again be compelled to fall back for the protection of Missouri or Kansas, it would again involve their precipitate flight, or insure their total destruction.
“Again–the effectiveness of our troops would be materially embarased by the presence of such a vast number of timid and helpless creatures–I base my judgment upon the following facts–viz.:
“The expedition which I have been with during the summer, exploring this country, consisted of three Brigades but containing actually only about 6 thousand men. We routed, captured, and pursued the fragments of several Rebel commands, driving them south of the Arkansas River, opposite to, and in the vicinity of Fort Gibson. This done, we found the whole of Western Arkansas alive, and the numerous rebel squads were at once reinforced from the guerila parties of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and the various rebel Indian tribes, until they now number a force of from 30 to 40 thousand strong, under the command of Pike, Drew, McIntosh, Rains, Stand Watie and others, ready to contest the passage of the Arkansas River at any point and in fact capable of crossing to the north side of the river and possessing the country we have twice passed over. Why did our command fall back? Simply because we had not force sufficient to cross the Arkansas River and maintain our position and because we were to remote from our dipo of supplies.
“The Creek country west of the Verdigris River is almost destitute (cont.)]
[Footnote 586: A dispute between Blunt and Coffin had been going on for some time. In August, Coffin wrote to Mix that “The contrariness and (cont.)]
suspicions of graft and peculation[587] and the moment, following the defeat of the Confederates at old Fort Wayne, seemed rather auspicious for the return of the refugees. In reality, it was not, however; for the Federals were far from possessing Indian Territory and they had no force that they could devote to it exclusively.
[Footnote 585: (cont.) of forage for man or beast, owing to the drouth–Hence to remove these families would involve to the gov’t great additional expense, not only to subsist but to protect them–Where they are they need no military protection and food is abundant.
“You will bear in mind that a large portion of the Indian country is south of the Arkansas River and is at present the stronghold of the Rebels. Many portions of it mountainous and rugged, affording secure retreats that will require a powerful army to dislodge.”–A.C. ELLITHORPE to Coffin, September 12, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862.]
[Footnote 586: (cont.) interference manifested by the military authorities in the Indian Country towards those who are having charge of the Indians within the Cherokee Nation is so annoying and embarrassing that it has become unpleasant, difficult, and almost impossible for them to attend to the duties of their official capacities with success. If the Military would only make it their business to rid the Indian Territory of Rebels instead of intermeddling with the affairs of the Interior Department or those connected with or acting for the same, the Refugee Indians in Kansas might have long since been enabled to return to their homes …”–Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1863-1864, C 466.]
[Footnote 587: It was not long before the Indians were complaining of the very things that General Blunt suspected. For instance, in December, the Delawares begged President Lincoln to remove Agent Johnson because of his peculations and ungovernable temper. They also asked that the store of Thomas Carney and Co. be ordered away from their reservation. The latter request had been made before, the Delawares believing that Leavenworth and Lawrence were sufficiently near for them to trade independently [Indian Office General Files, _Delaware_, 1862-1866]. Coffin made a contract with Stettaner Bros. November 29, 1862, and Dole confirmed it by letter, December 13, 1862 [ibid., _Southern Superintendency_, 1863-1864]. Secretary Smith was not very well satisfied with the Stettaner bids. They were too indefinite [Ibid., 1859-1862, 1837]. Nevertheless, Dole, who was none too scrupulous himself, recommended their acceptance [Dole to Smith, December 11, 1862]. Number 201 of Indian Office _Special Files_ is especially rich in matter relating to transactions of Stettaner Bros., Carney and Stevens, and Perry Fuller, so also are the files of the Indian Division of the Interior Department, and also, to some extent, the House Files in the Capitol Building at Washington, D.C.]
Aside from pointing out the military inadequacy, Coffin had chiefly argued that provisions could easily be obtained where the refugees then were; but his opposition to Blunt’s suggestion was considerably vitiated by recommendations of his own, soon given, for the removal of the refugees to the Sac and Fox Agency upon the plea that they could not be supported much longer to advantage in southern Kansas. The drouth was the main reason given; but, as Kile had very truly said, the settlers were getting pretty tired of the Indian exiles, whose habits were filthy and who were extremely prodigal in their use of timber. The Sac and Fox Agency was headquarters for the Sacs and Foxes of Mississippi, for the Ottawas, and for the confederated Chippewas and Munsees. C.C. Hutchinson was the agent there and there Perry Fuller, Robert S. Stevens, and other sharpers had their base of operations.
The removal northward was undertaken in October and consummated in a little less than two months; but at an expense that was enormous and in spite of great unwillingness on the part of most of the Indians, who naturally objected to so greatly lengthening the distance between them and their own homes.[588] The refugees were distributed in tribal groups rather generally over the reserves included within the Sac and Fox Agency. At the request of Agent Elder, the Ottawas consented to accommodate the Seneca-Shawnees and the Quapaws, although not without expressing their fears that the dances and carousals of the Quapaws would demoralize their young men[589] and, finally, not without insisting upon a mutual agreement that no
[Footnote 588: Coffin to Dole, November 14, 1862, Ibid., Indian Office General Files, _Southern Superintendency_, 1859-1862.]
[Footnote 589: C.C. Hutchinson to Dole, August 21, 1863, Indian Office General Files, _Ottawa_, 1863-1872, D 236.]
spirituous liquors should be brought within the limits of their Reserve under any circumstances whatsoever.[590] The Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws found a lodgment on the Sac and Fox Reservation and the Seminoles fairly close at hand, at Neosho Falls. That was as far north as they could be induced to go.
Of the Cherokees, more needs to be said for they were not so easily disposed of. At various times during the past summer, Cherokees, opposed to, not identified with, or not enthusiastic in the Confederate cause, had escaped from Indian Territory and had collected on the Neutral Lands. Every Confederate reverse or Federal triumph, no matter how slight, had proved a signal for flight. By October, the Cherokee refugees on the Neutral Lands were reported to be nearly two thousand in number, which, allowing for some exaggeration for the sake of getting a larger portion of relief, was a goodly section of the tribal population.[591] At the end of October, Superintendent Coffin paid them a visit and urged them to remove to the Sac and Fox Agency, whither the majority of their comrades in distress were at that very moment going.[592] The Cherokees refused; for General Blunt had given them his word that, if he were successful in penetrating the Indian Territory, they should at once go home.[593] Not long after Coffin’s departure, their camp on Drywood
[Footnote 590: J.T. Jones to Dole, December 30, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Sac and Fox_, 1862-1866. The precautions proved of little value. Whiskey was procured by both the hosts and their guests and great disorders resulted. Agent Hutchinson did his best to have the refugees removed, but, in his absence, the Ottawas were prevailed upon by Agent Elder to extend their hospitality for a while longer.]
[Footnote 591: Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Report_, 1862, 137.]
[Footnote 592:–Ibid., 1863, 175.]
[Footnote 593: Coffin to Dole, November 10, 1862, enclosing copies of a correspondence between him and a committee of the Cherokee refugees, October 31, 1862, Indian Office General Files, _Cherokee_,