ent Elder had been obliged to make Fort
Scott, for the time being, the Neosho Agency headquarters, everything
being desperately insecure at Crawford's Seminary.[103]

[Footnote 101: Britton, _Civil War on the Border_, vol. i, 122.]

[Footnote 102: _Official Records_, vol. iii, 465.]

[Footnote 103: The following letter, an enclosure of a report from
Branch to Dole, August 14, 1861, gives some slight indication of its
insecurity:

OFFICE OF NEOSHO AGENCY
Fort Scott, July 27, 1861.

Sir--I deem it important to inform the Department of the situation
of this Agency at this time. After entering upon the duties of this
office as per instructions--and attending to all the business that
seemed to require my immediate attention--I repaired to Franklin Co.
Kan. to remove my family to the Agency.

Leaving the Agency in care of James Killebrew Esq the Gov't Farmer for
the Quapaw Nation. Soon after I left I was informed by him that the
Agency had been surrounded by a band of armed men, and instituted an
inquiry for "_that Abolition Superintendent and Agent_." After
various interrogatories and answers they returned in the direction of
Missouri and Arkansas lines from whence they were supposed to
have come. He has since written me and Special Agent Whitney and
Superintendent Coffin told me that it would be very unsafe for me to
stay at that place under the present excited state of public feeling
in that vicinity. I however started with my family on the 6th July and
arrived at Fort Scott on the 9th intending to go direct to the Agency.
Here I learned from Capt Jennison commanding a detachment of Kansas
Militia, who had been scouting in that vicinity, that the country
was full of marauding parties from Gov. Jackson's Camp in S.W. Mo.
I therefore concluded to remain here and watch the course of events
believing as I did the Federal troops (cont.)]

Lane, conjecturing rightly that Price, moving northwestward from
Springfield, which place he had left on the twenty-sixth of August,
would threaten, if he did not actually attempt, an invasion of Kansas
at the point of its greatest vulnerability, the extreme southeast,
hastened his preparations for the defence and at the very end of the
month appeared in person at Fort Scott, where all the forces he could
muster, many of them refugee Missourians, had been rendezvousing. On
the second of September, the two armies, if such be not too dignified
a name for them, came into initiatory actio