The
National party, headed by John Ross and supported by the patriotic
organization known as the Kitoowah society — whose members were
afterward known as Pin Indians — declared for strict neutrality. At
last, however, the pressure became too strong to be resisted, and on
October T, L'861, a treaty was concluded at Tahlequah, with General
Albert Pike, commissioner for the Confederate states, by which the
Cherokee Nation cast its lot with the Confederacy, as the Creeks,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Osage, Comanche, and several smaller
tribes had already done. 4
iW. A. Phillips. Sequoyah, in Harper's Magazine, September, 1*70; Foster. Sequoyah, 1885; Royc.e,
Cherokee Nation, Fifth Ann. Hep. Bureau of Ethnology, p. 302, 1888; letter of William P. Ross, former
editor of Cherokee Advocate, March 11, 18S9, in archives of Bureau of American Ethnology; Cherokee
Advocate, October 19, 1844, November J,following summer the
Union forces entered the Cherokee country and senl a proposition i<>
Ross, urging him to repudiate the treaty with the Confederate states,
but the offer was indignantlj declined. Shortly afterward, however,
the men of Drew's regiment, finding themselves unpaid and generally
neglected by their allies, went over almost in a body to the Union
side, thus compelling Ross to make an arrangement with the Union
commander, Colonel Weir. Leaving the Cherokee country, Ross
retired to Philadelphia, from which be did not return until the close
of the war. In the meantime Indian Territory was ravaged alter-
nately by contending factions and armed bodies, and thousands of
loyal fugitives were obliged to lake refuge in Kansas, where they
were eared for by the government. Among these, at the close of 1862,
were two thousand Cherokee. In the following spring