[Footnote 506:  Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862 (Appendix); Confederate Military History, vol. x, 121-122.]

the service as a whole, no doubt, but most unhappy for Indian Territory.

It finally dawned upon Pike that it was useless to argue any longer upon the matters in dispute between him and Hindman, for Holmes had pre-judged the case.  Moreover, Holmes was beginning to appreciate the advantage of being in a position where he could, by ignoring Pike’s authority and asserting his own, be much the gainer in a material way.  How he could have reconciled such an attitude with the instructions he had received from Randolph it is impossible to surmise.  The instructions, whether verbal or written, must have been in full accord with the secretary’s letter to Pike of the fourteenth of July, which, although Pike was as yet ignorant of it, had explicitly said that no supplies for Indian Territory should be diverted from their course and that there should be no interference whatever with Pike’s somewhat peculiar command.[507] All along the authorities in Richmond, their conflicting departmental regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, had insisted that the main object of the Indian alliance had been amply attained when the Indians were found posing as a Home Guard.  Indians were not wanted for any service outside the limits of their own country.  Service outside was to be deprecated, first, last, and always.  Indeed, it was in response to a suggestion from Pike, made in the autumn of 1861, that the Indian Territory ought to be regarded as a thing apart, to be held for the Confederacy most certainly but not to be involved in the warfare outside, that Pike’s department had been created and no subsequent

[Footnote 507:  Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862.  The same assurance had apparently been given to Pike in May [Official Records, vol. xiii, 863].]

arrangements for the Trans-Mississippi Department or District, whichever it may have been at the period, were intended to militate against that fundamental fact.[508]

Despairing of accomplishing anything by lingering longer in Little Rock, Pike applied to Holmes for a leave of absence and was granted it for such time as might have to elapse before action upon his resignation could be secured.[509] The circumstance of Hindman’s having relieved Pike from duty was thus ignored or passed over in silence.  General Pike had come to Little Rock to see his family[510] but he now decided upon a visit to Texas.  Exactly what he expected to do there nobody knows; but he undoubtedly had at heart the interests of his department.  He went to Warren first and later to Grayson County.  At the latter place, he made Sherman his private headquarters and it was from there that he subsequently found it convenient to pass over again into Indian Territory.

Pike was in Arkansas as late as the nineteenth of August and probably still there when Randolph’s letter of the fourteenth of July, much delayed, arrived.[511] If angry before, he was now incensed; for he knew for a certainty at last that Hindman had been a sort of usurper in the Trans-Mississippi District and, with power emanating from no one higher than Beauregard, had never legally possessed a flicker of authority for doing the many insulting things that he had arrogantly done to him.[512] Next, from some source, came the