Although the plan for colonizing some of the Texas Indians had been completed in 1855, the Indian Office found it impossible to execute it until the summer of 1859. This was principally because the War Department could not be induced to make the necessary military arrangements.[73] In point of fact, the southern Indian country was, at the time, practically without a force of United States troops, quite regardless of the promise that had been made to all the tribes upon the occasion of their removal that they should _always be protected_ in their new quarters and, inferentially, by the regular army. Even Fort Gibson had been virtually abandoned as a military post on the plea that its site was unhealthful; and all of Superintendent Rector's recommendations that Frozen Rock, on the south side of the Arkansas a few miles away, be substituted[74] had been ignored, not so much by the Interior Department, as by the War. Secretary Thompson thought that enough troops should be at his disposal to enable him to carry out the United States Indian policy, but Secretary Floyd demurred. He was rather disposed to dismantle such forts as there were and to withdraw all troops from the Indian frontier,[75] a course of action that would leave it exposed, so the dissenting Thompson prognosticated, to "the most unhappy results."[76] It happened thus that, when the United States surveyors started in 1858 to establish the line of the ninety-eighth meridian west longitude and to run other boundary lines under the treaty of 1855,[77] they found the country entirely unpatrolled. Troops had been ordered from Texas to protect the surveyors; but, pending their arrival, Agent Cooper, who had gone out to witness the determination of the initial point on the line between his agency and the Leased District, himself took post at Fort Arbuckle and called upon the Indians for patrol and garrison duty.[78] It would seem that Secretary Thompson had verbally authorized[79] Cooper to make this use of the Indians; but they proved in the sequel very inefficient as garrison troops. On the thirtieth of June, Lieutenant Powell, commanding Company E, First United States Infantry, arrived at Fort Arbuckle from Texas and relieved Cooper of his self-imposed task. The day following, Cooper set out upon a sixteen day scout of the Washita country, taking with him his Indian volunteers, Chickasaws[80] and a few Cherokees;[81] and for this act of using Indian after the arrival of white troops, he was severely criticized by the department. One thing he accomplished: he selected a site for the prospective Wichita Agency with the recommendation that it be also made the site[82] of the much-needed military post on the Leased District. The site had originally been occupied by a Kechie village and was admirably well adapted for the double purpose Cooper intended. It lay near the center of the Leased District and near the sources of Cache and Beaver Creeks.