The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War Part 26

"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 skirmis.h.i.+ng. On Cowskin River, Phillips's Third Indian and, near s.h.i.+rley'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 a.s.sert 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 t.i.tle 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 rea.s.sumed 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 a.s.signed, 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 generals.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.signed 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.]