Gen. Halleck's laboriously elaborate system received a little shock so ludicrous as to be almost incredible were it not solemnly told in an official communication by himself to Gen. Sterling Price: St Louis, Jan. 27, 1862. Maj.-Gen. Sterling Price, Commanding, etc., Springfield, Mo. General: A man calling himself L. V. Nichols came to my headquarters a day or two since, with a duplicate of your letter of the 12th instant. On being questioned, he admitted that he belonged to your service; that he had come in citizen's dress from Springfield, avoiding some of our military posts and passing through others in disguise, and without reporting himself to the Commander. He said that he had done this by your direction. On being asked for his flag of truce, he pulled from his pocket a dirty pocket-handkerchief, with a short stick tied to one corner. Gen. Halleck then proceeded to read Gen. Price a lecture on the etiquette of flags of truce. A feature of peculiar pathos was the war storms' reaching and rending of the haven of refuge which the Government had provided for its wards in the Indian Territory. More than a century of bitter struggling between the Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, and the Carolinians, Georgians, Floridians, Alabamians, and Mississippians, marked by murderous massacres and bloody retaliations, had culminated in the Indians being removed in a body from their tribal domains, and resettled hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi, where it was confidently hoped they would be out of the way of the advancing wave of settlement and out of the reach of the land-hungry whites. Their mills, churches, and school houses were reerected there, and the devoted missionaries, the Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Moravians and Jesuits resumed with increased zeal the work of converting them to Christianity and civilization, which had been so far prosecuted with gratifying success. 280