Chapter I: General Account of Documentary Sources

The material for this book has been drawn almost entirely from documentary sources and, in a very large measure, from unpublished documentary sources; namely, the manuscript records of the United States Indian Office. Those records to-day are in a very disorganized state, largely due to change of system and to the many removals to which they have been subjected within the last few years. At the time when they were examined for the purposes of the present work, such of them as were not included in _Registers_, _Letter Books_, and _Report Books_ were classified as _Land Files_, _General Files_, _Special Files_, _Emigration Files_, _Miscellaneous Files_, _Star Files_, and the like, the basis of classification being, convenience in the current and routine work of the office. The individual files were arranged according to tribe, agency, or superintendency and every incoming letter had its own file mark. It had a letter to designate the transmitter, that letter being the initial of the transmitter's surname or of the office he represented, and it had a number to indicate its rank in a series, all the papers of which bore the same initial letter and had been received in the same given year. Finally, it was rated as belonging to a particular tribe, agency, or superintendency and to a particular file.

In the autumn of 1911, an attempt was made to consolidate the old _Land_ and _General Files_ with the result that now they are no longer distinct from each other; but it has seemed best not to change the reference in the citations. The year, the letter, and the number are permanent indices and, with them at hand, there ought to be no difficulty in the locating of a paper, except for the fact that nearly everything in the United States Indian Office seems, just now, rather transitory and chaotic. Had the inaugural ball for 1913 not been dispensed with, the plan was, to use the records as the base for the band-stand, a decidedly interesting reflection, one must admit, upon the popular notion of the value of the national archives.

Among the manuscripts used in the preparation of the present work, were two collections of papers that came into the United States Indian Office out of the regular course of its official business. In the citations, one is noted as _Leeper Papers_, and the other as _Fort Smith Papers_. Their history, since they came into the Indian Office, proves how urgent is the need for a Hall of Records. Inasmuch as these papers were not required for the every-day business of the office, they were packed away, years and years ago, along with a lot of other commercially useless papers, in huge boxes and stored in the attic of the old Post-office Building. There they were left to be forgotten. In the course of time, the Office of Indian Affairs was moved from the old Post-office Building to the Pension Building; but the packing-boxes in the attic were inadvertently left behind. One day, however, the writer discovered that papers, found at the Wichita Agency at the time Agent Leeper was killed, October, 1862, had really come into the Indian Office; but the question was, where were they? A search high and low was totally without success until it developed that the packing-boxes in the attic were supposed to contain "useless" papers and were still in the old Post-office Building. Permission was obtained to have them examined and, for this purpose, they were transferred to the Pension Building. Among their contents was found a number of interesting and valuable documents which very likely would soon have been lost forever, destroyed by the General Land Office because abandoned by the Indian. The contents included, besides the _Leeper Papers_ for which the search had been especially conducted, letter-books of Michigan territorial governors, file-boxes of all sorts, and a mass of Confederate stuff, brought from Fort Smith. The last-named proved a veritable mine of wealth. It comprised the occasional correspondence of Cooper, Cowart, Crawford, Drew, Dean, Rector, Pike, and many others whose official life had brought them into contact with the Indians. It was all very suggestive and remunerative.

To supplement the manuscripts an exhaustive search of the _Official Records of the War of the Rebellion_ has been made and with good results. It is a pity that the material in the _Official Records_ is so badly arranged and so much of it duplicated and often triplicated. Had it been better edited and better indexed, the danger of over-looking important documents would have been minimized a hundredfold. The volumes found particularly useful for Indian participation in the Civil War were the following:

First Series, vols. i; iii; iv; viii; ix; xiii; xxii, parts 1 and 2;
xxvi, parts 1 and 2; xxxiv, parts 1, 2, and 3; xli, parts 1, 2, 3, and
4; xlviii, parts 1 and 2; liii, supplement.

Third Series, vols. i; ii; iii.

Fourth Series, vols. i; ii; iii.