PARK HILL, CHEROKEE NATION,
May 18, 1861.

GENTLEMEN: Your letter of the 9th instant has been received. Personal indisposition and the press of official business and correspondence will account to your satisfactory, I hope, for my delay in acknowledging it.

You are right in supposing that both my attention and interest have been elicited by the momentous issues to which you refer. Since the receipt of your communication I have been addressed in relation to the same subject by Lieut.-Col. Kannady, commanding at Fort Smith, and I beg you to accept of the enclosed copy of my reply to him as a response to yourselves; also as to the position which I occupy in regard to the objects of your inquiry. A residence of more than twenty years in your immediate vicinity can leave no room for doubt as to my friendship for the people of Arkansas; but if you might desire us to be, you will not surely regard us as an enemy.

You are fully aware of the peculiar circumstances of our condition, and will not expect us to destroy our national and individual rights and bring around our hearth-stones the horrors and desolations of civil war prematurely and unnecessarily. I am--the Cherokees are--your friends and the friends of your people, but we do not wish to be brought into the feuds between yourselves and your Northern brethren. Our wish is for peace, peace at home and peace among you. We will not disturb it as it now exists, nor interfere with the rights of the people of the States anywhere. War is more prospective than real. It has not. been declared by the United or Confederate States. It may not be. I most devoutly hope it might not be. Your difficulties may be ended soon by compromise or peaceful separation. What will then be our situation if we now abrogate our rights, when no one else is or can just now be bound for them? All these questions present themselves to us and constrain us to avow a position of strict neutrality. That position I shall endeavor honestly to maintain. The Cherokee Nation will not interfere with you right nor invade your soil, nor will I doubt that the people of Arkansas and other States will be alike just toward the Cherokee people.

With my best for your personally, I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your friend and obedient servant,

JNO. ROSS,
Principal Chief Cherokee Nation.


Messrs. MARK BEAN, W. B. WELCH, E. W. MacCLURE, JOHN SPENCER, J. A. McCOLLOCH, JOHN M. LACY, J. P. CARNAHAN, and others.