“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.]