reliable information before the attack is made; it must be a surprise, or it will avail nothing. If it is practicable march until daylight and then hide in the woods,and reach Fayetteville by daylight Sunday morning. Send an express to Colonel Hall to rendezvous with his regiment at Newtonia, leaving one company at Neosho and another at Mount Vernon.

E. B. BROWN,

Brigadier-General, Commanding.

HEADQUARTERS, Fort Laramie, July 11, 1862.

General JAMES G. BLUNT, Fort Leavenworth:

GENERAL: I am in receipt to-day of a dispatch informing me that the Postmaster-General has ordered the Overland Mail Company to abandon the North Platte and Sweet Water portion of the route and remove their stages and stock to a route south of this running through Bridger Pass. As I feel uncertain as to my duty, and as the stages and stock are now being concentrated preparatory to removal, I have thought proper to send Lieutenant Wilcox, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, to you with this letter. My instructions require me to protect the overland mail along the telegraphs line, and the emigration not being mentioned, I have up to this time directed my attention to the safety of all these. My recollection of the act of Congress is that the mail company are not confined to any particular pass or route,but are to run from the Missouri River to a point in California daily, supplying Denver City, and Salt Lake City twice a week. On the application of agents I have to-day ordered two small escorts, one of 25, the other of 30, men,to accompany the stages and protect them to the new route, and until I receive your orders I will retain upon the present route the larger portion of the troops to protect the telegraph line and the emigration, at least until the emigration,which consists principally of family trains, has passed through my district. I do this because the Indians evince a disposition to rob the trains and destroy the wires. Indeed I am satisfied that unless the Government is ready to abandon this route both for mails and emigrants an Indian war is inevitable. All the tribes in these mountains, except perhaps one of the Lenox bands, are in bad humor; charge the Government with bad faith and breaches of promise in failing to send them an agent and presents. They have come in by hundreds form the Upper Missouri, attacked and robbed emigrant trains and mail stations,and in one instance last week they robbed a mail station within two hours after a detachment of Colonel Collins' troops had passed, and carried the herdsman away with them to prevent him from notifying the troops for successful pursuit. That renegade white men are with them I have no doubt. I have a white man in the guard-house, who was found in possession of pocket-book, money,and papers of an emigrant, who is missing and believed to have been murdered. I am satisfied that the mail company and the Government would both be benefitted by the change of routes at a proper time, and so wrote the Postmaster-General some weeks since. Then everything was quiet. Since that time the Indians have made hostile demonstrations,and I fear it the mail and all the the troops leave this route the Indians will suppose they were frightened away, and will destroy the telegraph line and probably rob and murder such