[Footnote 936:  February 23, 1864, Official Records, vol. xxxiv, part ii, 408.]

[Footnote 937:  John M. Thayer to Charles A. Dana, March 15, 1864, Ibid., 617.]

western counties of Arkansas[938] so as to round out the Department of Kansas.  To them it was absurd that Fort Smith should be within their jurisdiction and its environs within Steele and Thayer’s.  The upshot of the quarrel was, the reorganization of the frontier departments on the seventeenth of April which gave Fort Smith and Indian Territory to the Department of Arkansas[939] and sent Blunt back to Leavenworth.  His removal from Fort Smith, especially as Curtis had intended, had no change in department limits been made, to transfer Blunt’s headquarters to Fort Gibson,[940] was an immense relief to Phillips.  Blunt and Phillips had long since ceased to have harmonious views with respect to Indian Territory.  During his short term of power, Blunt had managed so to deplete Phillips’s forces that two of the three Indian regiments were practically all that now remained to him since one, the Second Indian Home Guards, had been permanently stationed at Mackey’s Salt Works on the plea that its colonel, John Ritchie, was Phillips’s ranking officer and it was not expedient that he and Phillips “should operate together."[941] Blunt had detached also a part of the Third Indian and had placed it at Scullyville as an outpost to Fort Smith.  There were to be no more advances southward for Phillips.[942] Instead of making them he was to occupy himself with the completion of the fortifications at Fort Gibson.[943]

[Footnote 938:  Thayer to Grant, March 11, 1864, Official Records, vol. xxxiv, part ii, 566.]

[Footnote 939:—­Ibid., part iii, 192, 196.]

[Footnote 940:—­Ibid., part ii, 651.  Blunt would have preferred Scullyville [Ibid., part iii, 13].]

[Footnote 941:  Blunt to Curtis, March 30, 1864, Ibid., part ii, 791.]

[Footnote 942:  Blunt to Phillips, April 3, 1864, Ibid., part iii, 32; Phillips to Curtis, April 5, 1864, Ibid., 52-53.]

[Footnote 943:  Curtis had ordered the completion of the fortifications which might be taken to imply that he too was not favoring a forward policy.]

Among the southern Indians, Maxey’s reconstruction policy was all this time having its effect.  It was revitalizing the Indian alliance with the Confederacy, but army conditions were yet a long way from being satisfactory.  In March Price relieved Holmes in command of the District of Arkansas.[944] A vigorous campaign was in prospect and Price asked for all the help the department commander could afford him.  The District of Indian Territory had forces and of all the disposable Price asked the loan.  Maxey, unlike his predecessors, was more than willing to cooeperate but one difficulty, which he would fain have ignored himself—­for he was not an Albert Pike—­he was compelled to report.  The Indians had to be free, absolutely free, to go or to