330 CUEROKEE NATION OF INDIANS. 
prestige of the Confederacy seemed, for the time being, to have become 
less potent in that region, their troops having been withdrawn to other 
localities, these discontented and unfed Cherokee soldiers found them- 
selves in a condition ripe for revolt. Almost en masse, they abandoned 
the Confederate service and enlisted in that of the United States. 
Conduct of John Ross.—Ross, finding that he had been abandoned by 
Drew’s regiment, concluded to make a virtue of necessity and become a 
loyal man too, with the shrewd assertion that such had always been 
the true impulse of his heart; he had been overborne, however, by the 
authority and power of the Confederate Government and felt constrained 
to save his people and their material interests from total destruction by 
dissembling before the officials of that Government, seeking only the first 
opportunity, which he had now embraced, to return with his people to the 
fealty they so delighted to bear to the Federal Government.! He was es- 
corted out of the Cherokee country by Colonel Weir’s regiment and did 
not soon return. The burden of proof seems to be almost, if not quite, 
conclusive against his pretensions to loyalty up to this period, and now 
that the opportunity he had so long desired of placing himself and his 
people within the protection of the United States had arrived, instead 
of manifesting any of that activity which had characterized his conduct 
in behalf of the Confederate States, he retired to Philadelphia, and did 
not return to his people for three years.” 
O-poth-le-yo-ho-lu and his loyal followers.—General Pike, in his letter 
to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs pending the negotiation of the 
treaty of 1866, seeks to convey the impression that there were no ac- 
tively loyal Indians among the Southern tribes during the incipient 
stages of the rebellion, and perhaps this is in large measure correct as 
to most of those tribes. 
Their situation was such as would have worked confusion in the ideas 
of a less primitive and simple minded people. Jor years before the 
outbreak of the rebellion their superintendents, agents, and agency 
employés had been, almost without exception, Southern men or men of 
Southern sympathies. They were a slavehelding people, and the idea 
was constantly pressed upon them that the pending difficulties between 
the North and the South were solely the result of a determination on the 
part of the latter to protect her slave property from the aggressions 
and rapacity of the former. When at last hostilities commenced, they 
saw the magnitude of the preparation and the strength of the Confed- 
erate forces in their vicinity. The weakness of the Federal forces was 
equally striking. Within the scope of their limited horizon there was 
naught that seemed to shed a ray of hope upon the rapidly darkening 
sky of Federal supremacy. Those who were naturally inclined to sym- 
pathize with, and who retained a feeling of friendship and reverence for, 

u Gonniasonen of Indian Affairs to the Ppieside nt, Fane 15, 1866. 
2Tbid. 
