Who, many years after the war, was elected Head Chief of the Nation. Mayes espoused the cause of the Confederacy and was captain of a company or band of Cherokees who followed General Ben McCulloch to Missouri.—Quantrill and the Border Wars, 198.
A letter, written by McCulloch to Colonel John Drew, September 1, 1861, seems to indicate that individual Cherokees had joined him [Official Records, first ser., vol. iii, 691].
[428] The Federal defeat was believed by contemporaries to have been due to mismanagement, to army friction, to the incompetency and sloth of Sigel, and to Frémont’s failure to reinforce the redoubtable Lyon, who fell in the engagement. An investigation into Sigel’s conduct was subsequently made by Halleck, Sigel’s bitter enemy. Halleck hated Sigel, because Sigel so greatly admired Frémont, whom Halleck supplanted; and because Sigel was the hero of the Germans, and one of them. For the Germans, Halleck had a great antipathy. Many of them were “pfälzisch-badischen Revolutionäre” and Halleck regarded them as adventurers or as refugees from justice. They in turn referred to Halleck as one of the West Point “bunglers” who were so numerous in the northern army, the really efficient and capable West Pointers, so they said, having all gone with the South [Kaufmann’s “Sigel und Halleck” in Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter, Band, 210-216, October 1910].
[429] Even in the latter part of May, these were so serious as to threaten a Cherokee civil war [Letter of John Crawford, May 21, 1861, General Files, Cherokee, 1859-1865; Mix to Crawford, June 4, 1861, Indian Office, Letter Book, no. 66, pp. 15-16].
[430] Ben McCulloch to Walker, September 2, 1861 [Official Records, first ser., vol. iii, 692]; Pike to Benjamin, December 25, 1861 [ibid., vol. viii, 720].
[431] “Meetings and Proceedings of the Executive Council of the Cherokee Nation, July 2, 1861” [General Files, Cherokee, 1859-1865, C515].
[432] See “Meetings and Proceedings of the Cherokee Executive Council, August 1, 1861” [General Files, Cherokee, 1859-1865, C515].
[433] Pike to Ross, August 1, 1861 [ibid.].
A general meeting of the Cherokee people was held at Tahlequah on Wednesday, the 21st day of August, 1861. It was called by the executive of the Cherokee Nation for the purpose of giving the Cherokee people an opportunity to express their opinions in relation to subjects of deep interest to themselves as individuals and as a nation. The number of persons in attendance, almost exclusively adult males, was about 4,000, whose deportment was characterized by good order and propriety, and the expression of whose opinions and feelings was frank, cordial, and of marked unanimity.—Report of the Proceedings at Tahlequah, August 21, 1861, transmitted to General McCulloch by the Executive Council, August 24, 1861 [Official Records, first ser., vol. iii, 673].