Footnote 959: [(return)]
Cooper to T.M. Scott, October 1, 1864, Official Records, vol. xli, part i, 783; Watie to T.B. Heiston, October 3, 1864, ibid., 785.
Footnote 960: [(return)]
—Ibid., 793, 794. Cooper described it "as brilliant as any one of the war" [ibid., 783] and Maxey confessed that he had long thought that movements of the raiding kind were the most valuable for his district [ibid., 777].
Footnote 961: [(return)]
Maxey to Boggs, October 9, 1864, ibid., part iii, 990.
Footnote 962: [(return)]
Cooper to Bell, October 6, 1864, ibid., 982-984.
Footnote 963: [(return)]
Curtis Johnson to W.H. Morris, September 20, 1864 [ibid., part i, 774].
of less consequence now than it had been before. The incorporation with the Department of Arkansas and the consequent separation from that of Kansas had been anything but a wise move. The relations of the Indian country with the state in which its exiles had found refuge were necessarily of the closest and particularly so at this time when their return from exile was under way and almost over. For reasons not exactly creditable to the government, when all was known, Colonel Phillips had been removed from command at Fort Gibson. At the time of Watie's raid, Colonel C.W. Adams was the incumbent of the post; but, following it, came Colonel S.H. Wattles[964] and things went rapidly from bad to worse. The grossest corruption prevailed and, in the midst of plenty, there was positive want. Throughout the winter, cattle-driving was indulged in, army men, government agents, and civilians all participating. It was only the ex-refugee that faced starvation. All other folk grew rich. Exploitation had succeeded neglect and Indian Territory presented the spectacle of one of the greatest scandals of the time; but its full story is not for recital here.
Great as Maxey's services to Indian Territory had been and yet were, he was not without his traducers and Cooper was chief among them, his overweening
Footnote 964: [(return)]
Official Records, vol. xli, part iii, 301. Wattles was not at Fort Gibson a month before he was told to be prepared to move even his Indian Brigade to Fort Smith [ibid., part iv, 130]. The necessity for executing the order never arose, although all the winter there was talk off and on of abandoning Fort Gibson entirely, sometimes also there was talk of abandoning Fort Smith. So weak had the two places been for a long time that Cooper insisted there was no good reason why the Confederates should not attempt to seize them. It is interesting that Thayer notified Wattles to be prepared to move just when there was the greatest prospect of a Confederate Indian raid into Kansas.