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. II. ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SOURCES AMERICAN ANNUAL CYCLOPEDIA, 1861-1865, inclusive (New York).