The Battle of Pea Ridge, in its preliminary stages, was already being fought.  It was a three day fight, counting the skirmish at Bentonville on the sixth between General Franz Sigel’s detachment and General Sterling Price’s advance guard as the work of the first day.[57] The real battle comprised the engagement at

[Footnote 52:  (cont.) the mass of the People are all right in Sentiment for the support of the Treaty of Alliance with the Confederate States.  I shall be happy to hear from you—­I have the honor to be your ob’t Serv’t

John Ross, Prin’l Chief, Cherokee Nation.]

[Footnote 53:  Pike’s Report, March 14, 1862, Official Records, vol. viii, 286-292.]

[Footnote 54:  James McIntosh to S. Cooper, January 4, 1862, Ibid., 732; D.H.  Cooper to Pike, February 10, 1862, Ibid., vol. xiii, 896.]

[Footnote 55:—­Ibid., 819.]

[Footnote 56:—­Ibid., vol. viii, 287.]

[Footnote 57:—­Ibid., 208-215, 304-306.]

Leetown on the seventh and that at Elkhorn Tavern[58] on the eighth.  At Leetown, Pike’s Cherokee contingent[59] played what he, in somewhat quixotic fashion, perhaps, chose to regard as a very important part.  The Indians, then as always, were chiefly pony-mounted, “entirely undisciplined,” as the term discipline is usually understood, and “armed very indifferently with common rifles and ordinary shot-guns."[60] The ponies, in the end, proved fleet of foot, as was to have been expected, and, at one stage of the game, had to be tethered in the rear while their masters fought from the vantage-ground of trees.[61] The Indian’s most effective work was done, throughout, under cover of the woods.  Indians, as Pike well knew, could never be induced to face shells in the open.  It was he who advised their climbing the trees and he did it without discounting, in the slightest, their innate bravery.[62] There came a time, too, when he gave countenance to another of their

[Footnote 58:  The Elkhorn Tavern engagement is sometimes referred to, and most appropriately, as the Sugar Creek [Phisterer, Statistical Record, 95].  Colonel Eugene A. Carr of the Third Illinois Cavalry, commanding the Fourth Division of Curtis’s army, described the tavern itself as “situated on the west side of the Springfield and Fayetteville road, at the head of a gorge known as Cross Timber Hollow (the head of Sugar Creek) ...” [Official Records, vol. viii, 258].  “Sugar Creek Hollow,” wrote Curtis, “extends for miles, a gorge, with rough precipitate sides ...” [Ibid., 589].  It was there the closing scenes of the great battle were enacted.]