Note (return) — XI. INDIAN TERRITORY IN 1863, JANUARY TO JUNE INCLUSIVE

Indian Territory as a separate military entity came altogether too late into the reckonings of the North and the South. It was now a devastated land, in large areas, desolate. General Curtis and many another like him might well express regret that the red man had to be offered up in the white man's slaughter.717 It was unavailing regret and would ever be. Just as with the aborigines who lay athwart the path of empire and had to yield or be crushed so with the civilized Indian of 1860. The contending forces of a fratricidal war had little mercy for each other and none at all for him. Words of sympathy were empty indeed. His fate was inevitable. He was between the upper and the nether mill-stones and, for him, there was no escape.