[Footnote 39: A restricted use of the Indians in offensive guerrilla
action Pike would doubtless have permitted and justified. Indeed, he
seems even to have recommended it in the first days of his interest in
the subject of securing Indian Territory. No other interpretation can
possibly be given to his suggestion that a battalion be raised
from Indians that more strictly belonged to Kansas [_Official
Records_, vol. iii, 581]. It is also conceivable that the force
he had reference to in his letter to Benjamin, November 27, 1861
[Ibid., vol. viii, 698] was to be, in part, Indian.]

[Footnote 40: Harrell, _Confederate Military History_, vol. x,
121-122.]

which he negotiated he pledged distinctly and explicitly the opposite
course of action, unless, indeed, the Indian consent were first
obtained.[41] The Indian troops, however and wherever raised under the
provisions of those treaties, were expected by Pike to constitute,
primarily, a home guard and nothing more. If by chance it should
happen that, in performing their function as a home guard, they should
have to cross their own boundary in order to expel or to punish an
intruder, well and good; but their intrinsic character as something
resembling a police patrol could not be deemed thereby affected.
Moreover, Pike did not believe that acting alone they could even be a
thoroughly adequate home force. He, therefore, urged again and again
that their contingent should be supplemented by a white force and by
one sufficiently large to give dignity and poise and self-restraint
to the whole, when both forces were combined, as they always ought to
be.[42]

At the time of Pike's assumption of his ill-defined command, or