.

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.

280

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............