Our mails throughout the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw & Creek nations have all been stopped by the old mail carriers....—Ibid.
[447] On August 26, 1861, Wattles wrote Farnsworth from Lawrence,
I wrote you a few days ago concerning the employment of the Indians in the defence of our frontier.
The necessity seemed imperative. But on hearing that the Commissioner of Indian Affairs was in Kansas and will probably see you—I think it best to say nothing to the Indians till he is consulted in the matter.
Gen. Lane has 60 miles of the Missouri border to guard, and an army of at least double his to hold in check, which employs all his force night & day.
Besides this, he has the Indian frontier on the south of about 100 miles. This he intends to intrust to the loyal Indians—I will add, if the Commissioner agrees to it.
The stay of execution was not of long duration, however; for, September 10, 1861, J. E. Prince sent Farnsworth from Fort Leavenworth a circular requesting immediate enrollment and an estimate of the strength of the loyal Indians.
[448] The conduct of Lane was presumptuous, arrogant, dictatorial; but he had interfered in yet other ways in Indian concerns. He must have had quite a hold, political or otherwise, over several of the agents and they appealed to him in matters that ought, in the first instance, to have been referred to the Indian Office and left there. Thus, in July, Agent F. Johnson had approached Lane on the subject of having Charles Journeycake appointed Delaware chief in place of Rock-a-to-wa deceased. Both Pomeroy and Lane endorsed the appointment but it was unquestionably entirely out of their province to do so. Tribal politics were assuredly no concern of the Kansas delegation in Congress.
[449] Dole had gone to Kansas in the latter part of August “to submit in person the amendments, made by the Senate at its last session, to the Delaware treaty of May 30, 1860” [Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Report, 1861, p. 11].