Gen. Hunter having reported that the division of Kansas from Missouri was unwise, the Department was merged into Gen. Halleck's command, and Gen. Hunter assigned to duty in South Carolina.
Gen. Halleck's laboriously elaborate system received a little shock so ludicrous as to be almost incredible were it not solemnly told in an official communication by himself to Gen. Sterling Price:
St Louis, Jan. 27, 1862. Maj.-Gen. Sterling Price,
Commanding, etc., Springfield, Mo. General: A man calling
himself L. V. Nichols came to my headquarters a day or two
since, with a duplicate of your letter of the 12th instant.
On being questioned, he admitted that he belonged to your
service; that he had come in citizen's dress from
Springfield, avoiding some of our military posts and passing
through others in disguise, and without reporting himself to
the Commander. He said that he had done this by your
direction. On being asked for his flag of truce, he pulled
from his pocket a dirty pocket-handkerchief, with a short
stick tied to one corner.
Gen. Halleck then proceeded to read Gen. Price a lecture on the etiquette of flags of truce.
A feature of peculiar pathos was the war storms' reaching and rending of the haven of refuge which the Government had provided for its wards in the Indian Territory. More than a century of bitter struggling between the Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, and the Carolinians, Georgians, Floridians, Alabamians, and Mississippians, marked by murderous massacres and bloody retaliations, had culminated in the Indians being removed in a body from their tribal domains, and resettled hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi, where it was confidently hoped they would be out of the way of the advancing wave of settlement and out of the reach of the land-hungry whites. Their mills, churches, and school houses were reerected there, and the devoted missionaries, the Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Moravians and Jesuits resumed with increased zeal the work of converting them to Christianity and civilization, which had been so far prosecuted with gratifying success.
In their new home they had prospered wonderfully. Their numbers increased until they were estimated from 100,000 to 120,000. Many of them lived in comfortable houses, wore white men's clothes, and tilled fields on which were raised in the aggregate great quantities of wheat, corn, cotton and potatoes. They had herds of horses, cattle, sheep and swine large beyond any precedent among the whites. It was common for an Indian to number his horses and cattle by the thousands, while the poorest of them owned scores which foraged in the plenty of limitless rich prairies and bottom land. Churches, school houses and mills abounded, and they had even a printing press, from which they issued a paper and many religious and educational works in an alphabet invented by a full-blood Cherokee. Each tribe constituted an individual Nation under a written Constitution, with a full set of elective officers. Slavery had been introduced by the half-breeds, and the census of 1860 shows the following number of slaves and slave-owners in the five Nations:
Owners. Slaves.
Choctaws..........................385 2,297
Cherokees.........................384 2,604
Creeks............................287 1,661
Chickasaws........................118 917
Semlnoles..................... ....— ———.
One Choctaw owned 227 negroes.