[Footnote 170:  O.S.  Coffin to William G. Coffin, January 26, 1862, Indian Office Special Files, no. 201, Southern Superintendency, C 1506 of 1862.]

had.  When all was gone, how pitiful it must have been for him to see the “hundreds of anxious faces” for whom there was nothing!  Captain Turner, from Hunter’s commissary department, had similar experiences.  According to him, the refugees were “in want of every necessary of life.”  That was his report the eleventh of February.[171] On the fifteenth of February, the army stopped giving supplies altogether and the refugees were thrown back entirely upon the extremely limited resources of the southern superintendency.

Dole[172] had had warning from Hunter[173] that such would have to be the case and had done his best to be prepared for the emergency.  Secretary Smith authorized expenditure for relief in advance of congressional appropriation, but that simply increased the moral obligation to practice economy and, with hundreds of loyal Indians on the brink of starvation,[174] it was no

[Footnote 171:  Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report, 1862, pp. 152-154.]

[Footnote 172:  Dole had an interview with the Indians immediately upon his arrival in Kansas [Moore, Rebellion Record, vol. iv, 59-60, Doc. 21].]

[Footnote 173:  Hunter to Dole, February 6, 1862, forwarded by Edward Wolcott to Mix, February 10, 1862 [Indian Office General Files, Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862, W 513 and D 576 of 1862; Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report, 1862, p. 150].]

[Footnote 174:  Agent G.C.  Snow reported, February 13, 1862, on the utter destitution of the Seminoles [Indian Office General Files, Seminole, 1858-1869] and, on the same day, Coffin [Ibid., Southern Superintendency, 1859-1862, C 1526] to the same effect about the refugees as a whole.  They were coming in, he said, about twenty to sixty a day.  The “destitution, misery and suffering amongst them is beyond the power of any pen to portray, it must be seen to be realised—­there are now here over two thousand men, women, and children entirely barefooted and more than that number that have not rags enough to hide their nakedness, many have died and they are constantly dying.  I should think at a rough guess that from 12 to 15 hundred dead Ponies are laying around in the camp and in the river.  On this account so soon as the weather gets a little warm, a removal of this camp will be indespensable, there are perhaps now two thousand Ponies living, they are very poor and many of them must die before grass comes which we expect here from the first to the 10th of March.  We are issuing a little corn to (cont.)]

time for economy.  The inadequacy of the Indian service and the inefficiency of the Federal never showed up more plainly, to the utter discredit of the nation, than at this period and in this connection.