[Footnote 758:  Confederate Records, chap. 2, no. 270, p. 224.]

[Footnote 759:  Holmes, as early as March, warned Steele that he would have to get his supplies soon from Texas.  It would not be possible to draw them much longer from the Arkansas River.  He was told to prepare to get them in Texas “at all hazard,” which instruction was construed by Steele to mean, “take it, if you cant buy it” [Ibid., 145-146].  It was probably the prospect of having to use force or compulsion that made Steele so interested, late in May, in finding out definitely whether Hindman’s acts in Arkansas had really been legalized [Steele to Blair, May 22, 1863, Ibid., 34].  Appreciating that it was matter of vital concern that the grain crop in northern Texas should be harvested, Steele was at a loss to know how to deal with petitions that solicited furloughs for the purpose [Steele to Anderson, May 4, 1863, Ibid., 227; Duval to Cabell, May 7, 1863, Ibid., 230-231].  Perhaps, it was a concession to some such need that induced him, in June, to permit seven day furloughs [Duval to Cooper, June 27, 1863, Ibid., no. 268, p. 100].]

Steele in despair cried out, “... it does appear as if the Texas troops on this frontier were determined to tarnish the proud fame that Texans have won in other fields."[760] The Arkansans were no better and no worse.  The most fitting employment for many, the whole length and breadth of Steele’s department, was the mere “ferreting out of jayhawkers and deserters."[761]

The Trans-Mississippi departmental change, effected in January, was of short duration, so short that it could never surely have been intended to be anything but transitional.  In February the parts were re-united and Kirby Smith put in command of the whole,[762] President Davis explaining, not very candidly, that no dissatisfaction with Holmes was thereby implied.[763] Smith was the ranking officer and entitled to the first consideration.  Moreover, Holmes had once implored that a substitute for himself be sent out.  As a matter of fact, Holmes had become too much entangled with Hindman, too much identified with all that Arkansans objected to in Hindman,[764] his intolerance, his arrogance, his illegalities, for him to be retained longer, with complacency, in chief command.  Hindman and he were largely to blame for the necessity[765] of suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in Arkansas and the adjacent Indian country, which had just been done.  Strong

[Footnote 760:  Steele to Alexander, April 23, 1863, Confederate Records, no. 270, pp. 210-211.]

[Footnote 761:  Duval to Colonel John King, June 30, 1863, Ibid., no. 268, p. 110.]

[Footnote 762:  Livermore, Story of the Civil War, part iii, book i, p. 255.]

[Footnote 763:  Davis to Holmes, February 26, 1863, Official Records, vol. liii, supplement, 849-850.]

[Footnote 764:  Davis to Holmes, January 28, 1863, Ibid., 846-847.]