The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 459 pages of information about The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War.

The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 459 pages of information about The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War.
be done, to lose it.  And you may rest assured, that whether I live or die, you shall not escape one jot or tittle of the deep damnation to which you are richly entitled for causing a loss so irretrievable, so astounding, so unnecessary and so fatal, and one which it will be impossible to excuse as owing to ignorance and stupidity.  No degree of these misfortunes, can be pleaded in bar of judgment. You will have forced the Indians to go to the North for protection. You will have given away their country to the enemy. You will have turned their arms against us.  You will have done this by disobeying the orders of your Government, continuing the courses it condemned, and to put an end to which it sent you out here; by falsifying its pledges and promises, taking for others’ uses the moneys which it sent out to pay the Indians, robbing them of the clothing sent by it to cover their nakedness, and thus thrusting aside all the considerations of common honesty, of justice, of humanity, and even of policy, expediency and common sense.

When Mr. C.B.  Johnson agreed, in September to loan your Quartermaster at Little Rock, $350,000 of the money he was

conveying to Major Quesenbury, the Quartermaster of the Department of Indian Territory, you promised him that it should be repaid to Major Quesenbury as soon as you should receive funds, and before he would have disposed of the remaining million. You got the money by means of that promise; and you did not keep the promise.  On the contrary, by an order that reached Fort Smith three hours before Mr. Johnson did, you compelled Major Quesenbury, the moment he received the money, to turn every dollar of it, over to a Commissary at Fort Smith; and it was used to supply the needs of Gen. Hindman’s troops; when the Seminoles, fourteen months in the service have never been paid a dollar; and the Chickasaw and Choctaw Battalion, and Chilly McIntosh’s Creeks, each corps a year and more in the service, have received only $45,000 each, and no clothing.  Was this violation of your promise, the act of the Government?

To replace the clothing I had procured for the Indians in December, 1861, and which, with near 1,000 tents, fell into the hands of the troops of Generals Price and Van Dorn, I sent an agent, in June, to Richmond, who went to Georgia, and there procured some 6,500 suits, with about 3,000 shirts and 3,000 pairs of drawers, and some two or three hundred tents.  These supplies were at Monroe early in September; and the Indians were informed that they and the moneys had been procured and were on the way.  The good news went all over their country, as if on the wings of the wind; and universal content and rejoicing were the consequences.

The clothing reached Fort Smith; and its issue to Gen. Hindman’s people commenced immediately.  I sent a Quartermaster for it and he was retained there.  If any of it has ever reached the Indians, it has been only recently, and but a small portion of it.

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The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.