It is not easy to determine always just what motives did actuate Commissioner Dole.  They were not entirely above suspicion and his name is indissolubly connected with some very nefarious Indian transactions; but fortunately they have not to be recounted here.  At the very time when he was offering unanswerable arguments against the propositions of Lane and Pomeroy, he was entertaining something similar to those propositions in his own mind.  A special agent, Augustus Wattles, who had been sufficiently familiar and mixed-up with the free state and pro-slavery controversy to be called upon to give testimony before the Senate

[Footnote 633:  Robertson wrote to the Secretary of the Interior, January 7, 1862, asking most earnestly “that decisive measures be not taken against the oppressed and betrayed people of the Creek and Cherokee tribes, until everything is heard about their struggle in the present crisis” [Department of the Interior, Register of Letters Received, “Indians,” no. 4].  The letter was referred to the Indian Office and Mix replied to it, February 14, 1862 [Indian Office Letter Book, no. 67, p. 357].  The concluding paragraph of the letter is indicative of the government feeling, “...  In reply I transmit herewith for your information the Annual Report of this Office, which will show ... what policy has governed the Office as to this matter, and that it is in consonance with your wish....”]

[Footnote 634:  Jones wrote frequently and at great length on the subject of justice to the Cherokees.  One of his most heartfelt appeals was that of January 21, 1862 [Indian Office Consolidated Files, Cherokee, J 556 of 1862].]

[Footnote 635:  Cyrus Aldrich, representative from Minnesota and chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs referred the memorial to the Indian Office [Letters Registered, vol. 58, Southern Superintendency, A. 484 of 1862].]

Harper’s Ferry Investigating Committee[636] and who had been on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune,[637] had, in 1861, been sent by the Indian Office to inspect the houses that Robert S. Stevens had contracted to build for the Sacs and Foxes of Mississippi and for the Kaws.[638] The whole project of the house-building was a fraud upon the Indians, a scheme for using up their funds or for transferring them to the pockets of promoters like Stevens[639] and M.C.  Dickey[640] without the trouble of giving value received.

From a letter[641] of protest, written by Stevens against Wattles’s mission of inspection, it can be inferred that there was a movement on foot to induce the Indians to emigrate southward.  Stevens, not wholly disinterested, thought it a poor time to attempt changes in tribal

[Footnote 636:  Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 358.]

[Footnote 637:—­Ibid., 370.  For other facts touching Wattles and his earlier career, see Villard, John Brown, index; Wilson, John Brown:  Soldier of Fortune, index.]