[Footnote 50:  (cont.) text of continuation:  needed at home, not only for the defence of Arkansas, but for that of the adjoining territory [Official Records, vol. liii, supplement, 781-782].  There were, in fact, only two Arkansas regiments absent and they were guarding the Mississippi River [Ibid., 786].  By the middle of February, or thereabouts, Price and McCulloch were in desperate straits and were steadily “falling back before a superior force to the Boston Mountains” [Ibid., 787].]

country south of the Osage and west of the Meramec River."[51] Under orders of November 9, the old Department of the West, of which Fremont had had charge and subsequently Hunter, but for only a brief period, had been reorganized and divided into two distinct departments, the Department of Missouri with Halleck in command and the Department of Kansas with Hunter.  Curtis, at the time when he made his memorable advance movement from Rolla was, therefore, serving under Halleck.

In furtherance of Van Dorn’s original plan, General Pike had been ordered to march with all speed and join forces with the main army.  At the time of the issuance of the order, he seems to have offered no objections to taking his Indians out of their own territory.  Disaster had not yet overtaken them or him and he had not yet met with the injustice that was afterwards his regular lot.  If his were regarded as more or less of a puppet command, he was not yet aware of it and, oblivious of all scorn felt for Indian soldiers, kept his eye single on the assistance he was to render in the accomplishment of Van Dorn’s object.  It was anything but easy, however, for him to move with dispatch.  He had difficulty in getting such of his brigade as was Indian and as had collected at Cantonment Davis, a Choctaw and Chickasaw battalion and the First Creek Regiment, to stir.  They had not been paid their money and had not been furnished with arms and clothing as promised.  Pike had the necessary funds with him, but time would be needed in which to distribute them, and the order had been for him to move promptly.  It was something much more easily said than done.  Nevertheless, he did what he could, paid outright the Choctaws and Chickasaws, a performance that occupied

[Footnote 51:  Official Records, vol. liii, supplement, vol. viii, 462.]

three precious days, and agreed to pay McIntosh’s Creek regiment at the Illinois River.  To keep that promise he tarried at Park Hill one day, expecting there to be overtaken by additional Choctaws and Chickasaws who had been left behind at Fort Gibson.  When they did not appear, he went forward towards Evansville and upward to Cincinnati, a small town on the Arkansas side of the Cherokee line.  There his Indian force was augmented by Stand Watie’s regiment[52] of Cherokees and at Smith’s Mill by John

[Footnote 52:  Watie’s regiment of Cherokees was scarcely in either marching or fighting trim.  The following letter from John Ross to Pike, which is number nine in the John Ross Papers in the Indian Office, is elucidative.  It is a copy used in the action against John Ross at the close of the war.  The italics indicate underscorings that were probably not in the original.