As the year 1860 approached, appearances assumed an even more serious aspect. Kansas settlers and would-be settlers demanded that the Indians, so recently the only legal occupants of the territory, vacate it altogether. So soon had the policy of granting them peace and undisturbed repose on diminished reserves proved futile. The only place for the Indian to go, were he indeed to be driven out of Kansas, was present Oklahoma; but his going there would, perforce, mean an invasion of the property rights of the southern tribes, a matter of great moment to them but seemingly of no moment whatsoever to the white man. Some of the Kansas Indians saw in removal southward a temporary refuge--they surely could not have supposed it would be other than temporary--and were glad to go, making their arrangements accordingly.[27] Some, however, had to be cajoled into promising to go and some had to be forced. A few held out determinedly against all thought of going. Among the especially obstinate ones were the Osages,[28] natives of the soil. The Buchanan government failed utterly to convince them of the wisdom of going and was, thereupon, charged by the free-state Kansans with bad faith, with not being sincere and sufficiently persistent in its endeavors to treat, its secret purpose being to keep the free-state line as far north as possible. The breaking out of the Civil War prevented the immediate removal of any of the tribes but did not put a stop to negotiations looking towards that end. All this time there was another influence within the Indian country, north and south, that boded good or ill as the case might be. This influence emanated from the religious denominations represented on the various reserves. Nowhere in the United States, perhaps, was the rivalry among churches that had divided along sectional lines in the forties and fifties stronger than within the Indian country. There the churches contended with each other at close range. The Indian country was free and open to all faiths, while, in the states, the different churches kept strictly to their own sections, the southern contingent of each denomination staying close to the institution it supported. Of course the United States government, through its civilization fund, was in a position to show very pointedly its sectional predilections. It will probably never be known, because so difficult of determination, just how much the churches aided or retarded the spread of slavery.[29]