Presumably, the suggestions, contained in the closing paragraphs of the commissioners’ report, in so far as they concerned Texas, were immediately acted upon by her. It was very true, as the commissioners had reported, that a change was taking place in the disposition of Federal troops within the Indian country. About the middle of February, a complaint[134] had been filed at the Indian Office by the Wichita agent, Matthew Leeper, to the effect that men, claiming to be Choctaws and Chickasaws, were trespassing upon the Leased District. The Reserve Indians asked for relief and protection at the hands of their guardian, the United States government. Shortly afterwards, perhaps in a measure in response to the appeal or more likely, to a hint that everything was not quite as it should be on the Texan border, Colonel William H. Emory, First United States Cavalry, was ordered, March 13,[135] to take post at Fort Cobb. He was then in Washington and, immediately upon his departure thence, was ordered, March 18,[136] to form his regiment at Fort Washita instead, word having come from the commander at that post,[137] in a report of the third instant, of a threatened attack by Texans. In explanation of a policy so vacillating, Emory was given to understand that the change of destination was really made at the solicitation of the agent and delegation of the Chickasaws. Those men were in Washington, out of reach of and apparently out of sympathy with, the events transpiring at home. Agent Cooper, secessionist though he was, probably did not altogether approve of the interference of the Texans. At any rate, he shared the representations of the Chickasaw delegation that Fort Washita stood in need of reënforcement,[138] and the War Department acceded to their request on the ground that, “The interests of the United States are paramount to those of the friendly Indians on the reservation near Fort Cobb.”[139]
Emory’s orders further comprehended a concentration of all the troops at Fort Washita that were then at that place and at Forts Cobb and Arbuckle;[140] but the orders were discretionary in their nature and permitted his leaving a small force at the more northern posts should circumstances warrant or demand it. On the nineteenth, General Scott had had a conference with Senator Charles B. Mitchell of Arkansas and, in deference to Mitchell’s opinion, still further modified his orders to Emory so that, while leaving him the bulk of his discretionary power, he recommended that, if advisable, Emory retain one company at Fort Cobb.[141] In any event, one company of infantry was to move in advance from Fort Arbuckle to Fort Washita.[142]
Up to the twenty-fourth of March, at which time he left Memphis, Colonel Emory made pretty good time in his attempt to reach his destination; but from Memphis on his movements were unavoidably and considerably hampered. Low water in the Arkansas detained him for several days so that he deemed it prudent to send his orders on ahead to the commanding officer at Fort Arbuckle “to commence the movement upon Fort Washita, and, in the event of the latter place being threatened, to march to its support with his whole force.”[143] On reaching Fort Smith, Emory found that matters had come to a crisis in Arkansas and, touching the disposition of his force and the objects of his mission, allowed himself to be unduly influenced in his judgment by men of local predilections.[144] It was upon their advice and upon the urgent pleadings of Matthew Leeper,[145] Indian agent on the Leased District, that he exercised his discretionary power as to the disposal of troops, without listening to his military subordinates[146] or having viewed the locality for himself. In the interests of these local petitioners,[147] he even enlarged upon Mitchell’s recommendation and concluded to leave two companies at Fort Cobb as one was deemed altogether inadequate to the protection of so isolated a post. It never seems to have occurred to him that the attack would have to come from the south, from the direction of Fort Washita, and that a force large enough to be efficient at either Fort Washita or Fort Arbuckle would necessarily protect Fort Cobb and the Indians of the Leased District.
The position of the Indians in the Leased District was serious in the extreme. They lived in mortal terror of the Texans and their agent, the man placed over them by the United States government, was now an avowed secessionist. He was a Texan and declared, as so many another southerner did from General Lee down, that honor and loyalty compelled him to go with his state. In February, he had been in Washington City, settling his accounts with the government and estimating for the next two quarters in accordance with the rulings and established usage of the Indian Office. On his way west and back to his agency, he was waylaid by a man of the name of “Burrow,” very probably Colonel N. B. Burrow, acting under authority from the state of Arkansas, who despoiled him of part of his travelling equipment and then suffered him to go on his way.[148] Leeper reached his agency to find the Indians greatly excited. He endeavored to allay their fears, assuring them that the Texans would do them no harm. Soon, however, came his own defection and he thenceforward made use of every means, either to make the way easy for the Texans or to induce the Indians to side with them against the United States.
While Emory was dilly-dallying at Fort Smith, the Texans made their preparations[149] for invading the Indian country and a regiment of volunteers under William C. Young, once a planter of Braganza County and now state regimental colonel, moved towards the Red River. There is something to show that they came at the veiled invitation[150] of the Indians. At any rate they seem to have felt pretty sure of a welcome[151] and were close at hand when Colonel Emory reached Fort Washita. He reached Fort Washita to find that the concentration of troops, even of such as his ill-advised orders would permit, had not yet fully taken place, that his supplies had been seized by the Texans, and that a general attack by them upon the poorly fortified posts was to be hourly expected. Emory, thereupon, resolved to withdraw from Fort Washita towards Arbuckle and Cobb. The day after he did so, April 16, Young’s troops entered in force. Emory hurried forward to strengthen Fort Cobb and, indeed, to relieve it, taking, in his progress, the open prairie road that his cavalry might be more available. On the way,[152] he was joined by United States troops from Fort Arbuckle, the Texans in close pursuit. Fort Arbuckle was occupied by them in turn and then Fort Cobb, Emory never so much as attempting to enter the place; for he found its garrison in flight to the northeast. Fugitives all together, the Federal troops, piloted by a Delaware Indian, Black Beaver,[153] hurried onwards towards Fort Leavenworth. They seem to have made no lengthy stop until they were safe across the Arkansas River[154] and their flight may well be said to have been a precipitous one. Behind them, at Fort Arbuckle, Colonel Young took possession of abandoned property and placed it in the care of the Chickasaw Indians,[155] who had materially aided him in his attack. His next move was to negotiate,[156] unauthoritatively, a treaty with the Reserve Indians, gaining the promise of their alliance upon the understanding that the Confederacy, in return, would feed and protect them. Fort Cobb was rifled and the Indians made rich, in their own estimation, with booty.[157] Colonel Young seems then to have drawn back towards the Red River; but for several months he continued to occupy with his forces,[158] under the authority of Texas and with the consent of the Chickasaw Indians, the three frontier posts that Emory had been instructed to guard; viz., Forts Washita, Arbuckle, and Cobb.
If Texas took time by the forelock in her anxiety to secure the Indian country and its inhabitants, Arkansas most certainly did the same; and, in the undertaking, various things told to her advantage, among which, not the least important was the close family relationship existing between her secessionist governor, Henry M. Rector, and the southern superintendent. They were cousins and, to all appearances, the best of friends. It is doubtful if in any state the executive authority thereof worked more energetically for secession or with greater consistency and promptitude than in Arkansas. Governor Rector had been elected, in the autumn of 1860, by the Democrats and old-line Whigs. He belonged to a numerous and most influential family, land-surveyors most of them, seemingly by inheritance, and, although from northern or border states originally, strongly committed to the doctrine of state sovereignty. The family connections were also powerful socially and politically. The gubernatorial inauguration came in November, 1860, and from that moment Henry M. Rector and his host of relations and friends worked for secession.
At the outset, Governor Rector identified the Indian interests with those of Arkansas. Even in his message[159] of December 11, 1860 he gave it as his opinion that the two communities must together take measures to prevent anti-slavery migration. It was rather late in the day, however, to intimate that men of abolitionist sentiments must not be allowed to cross the line, and a man of the political acumen of Henry M. Rector must have known it. Immediately after the general election there were evidences of great excitement in Arkansas and, when news[160] came that the disused arsenal at Little Rock was to be occupied by artillery under Captain James Totten from Fort Leavenworth, it broke out into expressions of public dissent. Little Rock was scarcely less radical and secessionist in its views than was Fort Smith and Fort Smith was regarded as a regular hot-bed of sectionalism. The legislature, too, was filled with state-rights advocates and some of the actions taken there were almost revolutionary in their trend. With the new year came new alarms and false reports of what was to be. Harrell records[161] that the first message over the newly completed telegraph line between Memphis and Little Rock was a repetition of the rumor, quite without foundation, that Major Emory had been ordered from Fort Gibson to reinforce Totten at Little Rock, and that the effect upon Helena was electrical. It is no wonder that the newspapers and personal communications[162] of the time showed great intensity of feeling and a tendency to ring the changes on a single theme.
The public indignation following the receipt of the unsubstantiated rumor that Totten was to be reënforced seems to have compelled the action of Governor Rector in taking possession,[163] on February eighth, in the name of the state of Arkansas, of the United States arsenal at Little Rock; but, as a matter of fact, Rector needed only an excuse, and a very slight one at that, for doing more than he had already done to prove his sectional bias. Nor had he forgotten or neglected the Indians. Indeed, never at any time did he leave a single stone unturned in his search for inside and outside support; and, notwithstanding the fact that the Arkansas Ordinance of Secession was not passed until the sixth of May, Governor Rector conducted himself, for months before that, as though the state were a bona fide member of the Confederacy. In all his audacious venturings, proposals, and acts, he had the full and unquestioning support, not only of his cousin, Elias Rector,[164] in whose honor Albert Pike had written the well-known parody[165] on “The Old Scottish Gentlemen;”[166] but of the leading citizens of Fort Smith and Little Rock, particularly of those whose previous occupations, residence, inclinations, or interests had made them conversant with Indian affairs and, therefore, unusually appreciative of the strategic value of the Indian country. Under such circumstances, it is not at all surprising that Governor Rector seized, as he did, the earliest[167] opportunity to approach the Cherokees. Fort Smith at the junction of the Arkansas and Poteau Rivers was only eighty miles from Fort Gibson.
Before taking up for special comment Governor Rector’s negotiations with the Cherokees through their principal chief, John Ross, it might be well to retrace our steps a little in order to show how, in yet other ways, Arkansas interested herself more than was natural in the concerns of the Indians and made some of her citizens, in the long run, more than ordinarily responsible for the development of secessionist sentiment among the southern tribes.
When David Hubbard, journeying westward as special secessionist commissioner[168] from Alabama to Arkansas, reached Little Rock—and that was in the early winter of 1861—he soon discovered that many Arkansans were not willing for their state to go out of the Union unless she could take Indian Territory with her. Hubbard’s letter,[169] descriptive of the situation, is very elucidating. It is addressed to Andrew B. Moore,[170] governor of Alabama, and bears date Kinloch, Alabama, January third.