[Footnote 659:  Presumably, Lane was the chief promoter of it.  See Baptiste Peoria to Dole, February 9, 1863, Indian Office General Files, Osage River, 1863-1867.]

[Footnote 660:  U.S.  Statutes at Large, vol. xii, 793.]

[Footnote 661:  Dole to Usher, July 29, 1863, Indian Office Report Book, no. 13, p. 211.]

[Footnote 662:  His associates were then the three men, Lewis Downing, James McDaniel, and Evan Jones, who had been appointed delegates with him, (cont.)]

real encouragement[663] to renew their offer, yet the Cherokees had as early as February repudiated their alliance with the southern Confederacy.  That the United States government was only awaiting a time most propitious for itself is evident from the fact that, when, in the spring following, refugees from the Neutral Lands were given an opportunity to begin their backward trek, they were told that they would not be permitted to linger at their old homes but would have to go on all the way to Fort Gibson, one hundred twenty miles farther south.[664] That was one way of ridding Kansas of her Indians and a way not very creditable to a professed and powerful guardian.

Almost simultaneously with Ross’s first application came an offer from the oppressed Delawares to look for a new home in the far west, in Washington Territory.  The majority preferred to go to the Cherokee country.[665] Some of the tribe had already lived there and wanted to return.  Had the minority gained their point, the Delawares would have traversed the whole continent within the space of about two and a half centuries.  They would have wandered from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Susquehanna River to the Willamette, in a desperate effort to escape the avaricious pioneer, and, to their own chagrin, they would have found him on the western coast also.  Never again would there be any place for them free from his influence.

In the summer of 1863, negotiations were undertaken

[Footnote 662:  (cont.) by the newly-constructed national council, for doing business with the United States government [Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report, 1863, p. 23].]

[Footnote 663:  See Office letter of November 19, 1863.]

[Footnote 664:  David M. Harlan to Dole, December 20, 1864, Indian Office General Files, Cherokee 1859-1865, H 1033.]

[Footnote 665:  Johnson to Dole, May 24, 1863, ibid., Delaware, 1862-1866.]

in deadly earnest.  A commencement was made with the Creeks in May, Agent Cutler calling the chiefs in council and laying before them the draft of a treaty that had been prepared, upon the advice of Coffin,[666] in Washington and that had been entrusted for transmission to the unscrupulous ex-agent, Perry Fuller.[667] The Creek chiefs consented to sell a tract of land for locating other Indians upon, but declared themselves opposed to any plan for “sectionizing” their country and asked that they might be consulted as to the Indians who were to share it with them.  The month before they had prayed to be allowed to go back home.  Well fed and clothed though they were, and quite satisfied with their agent, they were terribly homesick.[668] Might they not go down and clean out their country for themselves?  It seemed impossible for the army to do it.[669]