Indian Territory, some of which belongs to me for advances made, and with stationery and instruments procured by me, for my Department, in Richmond, a year ago; and then you find out that there are such things as Engineers, and that you need one; and you seize on Engineer, money, and stationery.  You even take, notwithstanding Paragraph VI, of General Orders No. 50, the stationery procured by me for the Adjutant General’s Office of my Department, by purchase in Richmond in December, 1861; for the want of which I had been compelled to permit my own private stock to be used for months.

I no longer wonder that you do these things.  When you told me that you could not judge me fairly, because I told the Indians that others had done them injustice, you confessed much more than you intended.  It was a pregnant sentence you uttered.  By it you judged and convicted yourself, and pronounced your own sentence, when you uttered it.

The Federal authorities were proposing to the Indians at the very time when you stopped their clothing and money, that, if they would return to the old Union, they should not be asked to take up arms, their annuities should be paid them in money, the negroes taken from them be restored, all losses and damage sustained by them be paid for, and they be allowed to retain, as so much clear profit, what had been paid them by the Confederate States.  It was a liberal offer and a great temptation, to come at the moment when you and Hindman were felicitously completing your operations, and when there were no breadstuffs in their country, and they and their women and children were starving and half-naked.  You chose an admirable opportunity to rob, to disappoint, to outrage and exasperate them, and make your own Government fraudulent and contemptible in their eyes.  If any human action can deserve it, the hounds of hell ought to hunt your soul and Hindman’s for it through all eternity.

Instead of co-operating with the Federal authorities, and doing all that he and you could do to induce the Indians to listen to and accept their propositions, he had better have expelled the enemy from Arkansas or “have perished in the attempt;” and you had better have marched on Helena, before its fortifications were finished, and purged the eastern part of the State of the enemy’s presence.  If you had succeeded as admirably in that, as you have in losing

the Indian Country, you would have merited the eternal gratitude of Arkansas, instead of its execrations; and the laurel, instead of a halter.  I said that you and your Lieutenant had left nothing undone.  I repeat it.  Take another small example.  Until I left the command, at the end of July, the Indian troops had regularly had their half rations of coffee.  As soon as I was got rid of, an order from Gen. Hindman took all the remaining coffee, some 3,000 lbs., to Fort Smith.  Even in this small matter, he could not forego an opportunity of injuring and disappointing them.