As your order destroys all my plans, paralyzes all my efforts, and finishes the ruin of this command, I must beg your patient attention to the following statement of facts, which ought to be know to you, as the general in command of the department. I have already laid them fully before the Government at Richmond.

With the exception of the time during which I was in that city last winter, upon the business of this department, I have been in the Indian country thirteen months. As you are aware, I was the commissioner who concluded all the treaties between the Confederate States and the different Indian tribes; and if I had not disregarded the provision of an act of Congress, declining to assume the payments of the moneys due the Indians tribes; and if I had not disregarded the provision of an act of Congress, declining to assume the payments of the moneys due the Indians, and disobeyed the instructions to that effect of the Secretaries of State and War, there would have been o treaty made between us and any one of the important tribes west of Arkansas.

To induce these indians to take up arms for us and to enter our service, I was authorized to assure them that our Government would protect them, and to that end would place and keep three regiments of white troops in their country. It was also agreed that the Government would arm all the troops they might raise, and they were assured by the Secretary of War that the arms were then being purchased, and they were to be paid and supplied like other troops of the Confederacy.

Until the end of the past year it was a great misfortune to the service here that the Indian troops had to be supplied through officers of the quartermaster's department and commissariat stationed at Fort Smith, who had an army of white men in Arkansas to supply, and who were considered by the brigadier-general commanding that army to be under his orders. Until late in February, and when some of the Indian troops had been in the service over eight months, the whole amount of money received by the department quartermaster was $30,000, and of that received by the commissary $56,000. At one time $350,000 had been sent the commissary at Fort Smith, to be expended for the service in the Indian Territory and Arkansas. General McCulloch directed the debts of his command to be paid with it; and $345,000 was applied to that purpose, and $50,000 sent to Major Lanigan, the commissary for the Indian troops.

Until two days since, there had been received from all sources by the quartermaster and commissary of this department the sum of $553,734, of which I brought $442,734 with me from Richmond; and this sum, and $25,000 received of Major Pearce for the commissary, reached the two officers on the 24th of February. I advanced the quartermaster, in addition, $100,000, out of moneys in my hands appropriated for the Reserve Indians and Comanches; and he was thus enabled to pay off the non-commissioned officers and men of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Regiment up to the 1st of January, and those of the two Cherokee regiments their allowance in lieu of clothing for six months; to satisfy a few of the most pressing debts of his department, and to have some means on hand, until about five weeks since, when his funds and those of the commissariat were entirely exhausted. To the officers of those four regiments nothing has been paid; to the non-commissioned officers and men of the two Cherokee regiments only $25 each; to the Seminole battalion, Chilly McIntosh's Creek battalion, the Choctaw battalion, and the Chickasaw battalion nothing at all has been paid.

When I reached Cantonment Davis, on the 24th of February, I found that the quartermaster's department had not more than one-third the necessary transportation; and that what animals, wagons, and harness