[Footnote 440:  Hindman’s Report [Official Records, vol. xiii, 40].]

[Footnote 441:  Pike to the Secretary of War, July 20, 1862 [Ibid., 859].]

[Footnote 442:—­Ibid., 954-962.]

changing nothing as regarded the facts but showing a willingness to let bygones be bygones.  Considering how great had been his chagrin, his indignation, and his poignant sense of ingratitude and wrong, he rose to heights really noble.  He seemed desirous, even anxious, that the great cause in which they were both so vitally interested should be uppermost in both their minds always and that their differences, which, after all, were, comparatively speaking, so very petty, should be forgotten forever.  It was in the spirit of genuine helpfulness that he wrote and also in the spirit of great magnanimity.  Pike was a man who studied the art of war zealously, who knew the rules of European warfare, and a man, who, even in war times, could read Napier’s Peninsular War and succumb to its charm.  He was a classicist and a student very much more than a man of action.  Could those around him, far meaner souls many of them than he, have only known and remembered that and, remembering it, have made due allowances for his vagaries, all might have been well.  His generous letter of the third of July failed utterly of its mission; but not so much, perhaps, because of Hindman’s inability to appreciate it or unwillingness to meet its writer half-way, as because of the very seriousness of Hindman’s own military situation, which made all compromises impossible.  The things he felt it incumbent upon him to do must be done his way or not at all.  The letter of July 3 could scarcely have been received before the objectionable orders of July 8 had been planned.

The last ten days of July were days of constant scouting on the part of both the Federal and Confederate Indians but nothing of much account resulted.  Colonel W.A.  Phillips of the Third Indian Home Guard,

whose command had been left by Furnas to scout around Tahlequah and Fort Gibson, came into collision with Stand Watie’s force on the twenty-seventh at Bayou Bernard, seven miles, approximately, from the latter place.  The Confederate Cherokees lost considerably in dead and prisoners.[443] Phillips would have followed up his victory by pursuing the foe even to the Verdigris had not Cooper, fearing that his forces might be destroyed in detail, ordered them all south of the Arkansas and thereby circumvented his enemy’s designs.  Phillips then moved northward in the direction of Furnas’s main camp on Wolf Creek.[444]