conflict of interests.[709] So petty was Schofield and so much in a mood for disparagement that he went the length of condemning the work of Blunt and Herron[710] in checking Hindman’s advance as but a series of blunders and their success at Prairie Grove as but due to an accident.[711] General Curtis, without, perhaps, having any particular regard for the aggrieved parties himself, resented Schofield’s insinuations against their military capacity, all the more so, no doubt, because he was not above making the same kind of criticisms himself and was not impervious to them.  In the sequel, Schofield reorganized the divisions of his command, relieved Blunt altogether, and personally resumed the direction of the Army of the Frontier.[712] Blunt went back to his District of Kansas and made his headquarters at Fort Leavenworth.

In some respects, the reorganization decided upon by Schofield proved a consummation devoutly to be wished; for, within the reconstituted First Division was placed an Indian Brigade, which was consigned to the charge of a man the best fitted of all around to have it, Colonel William A. Phillips.[713] And that was not all; inasmuch as the Indian Brigade, consisting of the three regiments of Indian Home Guards, a battalion of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry, and a four-gun battery that had been captured at the Battle of Old

[Footnote 709:  It seems unnecessary and inappropriate to drag into the present narrative the political squabbles that disgraced Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Colorado during the war.  Lane was against Schofield, Gamble against Curtis.]

[Footnote 710:  Yet both Blunt and Herron were, at this very time, in line for promotion, as was Schofield, to the rank of major-general [Official Records, vol. xxii, part ii, II, 95.]]

[Footnote 711:—­Ibid., 6, 12, 95; Confederate Military History, vol. x, 195.]

[Footnote 712:—­Ibid., 22.]

[Footnote 713:  Britton, Civil War on the Border vol. ii, 18-19.]

Fort Wayne,[714] was almost immediately detached from the rest of Schofield’s First Division and assigned to discretionary “service in the Indian Nation and on the western border of Arkansas."[715] It continued so detached even after Schofield’s command had been deprived by Curtis of the two districts over which the brigade was to range, the eighth and the ninth.[716] Thus, at the beginning of 1863, had the Indian Territory in a sense come into its own.  Both the Confederates and the Federals had given it a certain measure of military autonomy or, at all events, a certain opportunity to be considered in and for itself.