coln and others, and obtained such a degree of exemption as it was possible to give under the rigid terms of the law. Later in the war two fathers were drafted and Father De Smet was compelled again to intercede. The authorities had no power to exempt them directly, but they were told to remain at their work and they would not be ordered to the front.
Father De Smet made a journey to Washington in the fall of 1861 and was there at the time of the disastrous battle of Bull Run. In the spring of 1862 he went again and made a third trip in the fall of that year. On this last journey he records that he "heard the roar of the cannon in the battle of Antietam."
In the Letters are some interesting notes upon the second of the above journeys, in which the modest priest is seen visiting the chief magistrate of the nation, dining with the ministers of foreign nations, and displaying a naive skill at diplomacy with the departments of the Government. They can best be told in his own words: "Towards the end of last February I had to go to Washington to arrange the accounts of our Indian Missions among the Potawatomies and Osages. Since the outbreak of the war and the great expenditures which it occasions, the Government is necessarily delayed, in the payment of its contracts with the Indian tribes, the motto for to-day being ' the expenses of the war before everything else.' A sum of over eighteen thousand dollars was due the missions. I presented my request to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, with the remark that a refusal or delay oil the part of the Government of its debt and promise would singularly disarrange the ideas of our Indians, who have thus far been loyal and attached to the Union side; that if we were obliged by lack of means to send some 400 children back to their poor parents, they would conclude' that their Great Fattier, President Lincoln, had taken the money that ought to have gone to the support of their children and used it for other purposes,' and that they might be led in consequence to lend a