identified with what he thought was the rescue of Kansas that he proposed resigning his seat in the senate that he might be entirely untrammelled.[131] Perchance, also, he had some inkling that with Frederick P. Stanton[132] contesting the seat, a bitter partisan fight was in prospect, a not altogether welcome diversion.[133] Stanton, prominent in and out of office in territorial days, was an old political antagonist of the Lane faction and one of the four candidates whose names had been before the legislature in March.  In the second half of October, Lane’s brigade notably contributed to Fremont’s show of activity and then, anticipatory perhaps to greater changes, it was detached from the main column and given the liberty of moving independently down the Missouri line to the Cherokee country.[134]

Lane’s efforts towards securing Indian enlistment did not stop with soliciting the Kansas tribes.  Thoroughly aware, since the time of his sojourn at Fort Scott, if not before, of the delicate situation in Indian Territory, of the divided allegiance there, and of the despairing cry for help that had gone forth from the Union element to Washington, he conceived it eminently fitting and practicable that that same Union element should have its loyalty put to good uses and be itself induced to take up arms in behalf of the cause it affected so ardently to endorse.  To an ex-teacher among the Seminoles, E.H.  Carruth, was entrusted the task of recruiting.

The situation in Indian Territory was more than

[Footnote 130:  (cont.) Robinson was opposed to the idea [Ibid., November 2, 6, 1861].]

[Footnote 131:  Official Records, vol. iii, 530.]

[Footnote 132:  Martin, First Two Years of Kansas, 24; Biographical Congressional Directory, 1771-1903.]

[Footnote 133:  Daily Conservative, November 1, 1861, gives Robinson the credit of inciting Stanton to contest the seat.]

[Footnote 134:  Daily Conservative, October 30, 1861.]

delicate.  It was precarious and had been so almost from the beginning.  The withdrawal of troops from the frontier posts had left the Territory absolutely destitute of the protection solemnly guaranteed its inhabitants by treaty with the United States government.  Appeal[135] to the War Department for a restoration of what was a sacred obligation had been without effect all the summer.  Southern emissaries had had, therefore, an entirely free hand to accomplish whatever purpose they might have in mind with the tribes.  In September,[136] the Indian Office through Charles E. Mix, acting commissioner of Indian affairs in the absence of William P. Dole, who was then away on a mission to the Kansas tribes, again begged the War Department[137] to look into matters so extremely urgent.  National honor would of itself have dictated a policy of intervention before

[Footnote 135:  Secretary Cameron’s reply to Secretary Smith’s first request was uncompromising in the extreme and prophetic of his persistent refusal to recognize the obligation resting upon the United States to protect its defenceless “wards.”  This is Cameron’s letter of May 10, 1861: