Pike received Hindman’s communication of May 31 late in the afternoon of June 8 and he replied to it that same evening immediately after he had made arrangements[400] for complying in part with its requirements.

The reply[401] as it stands in the records today is a strong indictment of the Confederate management of Indian

[Footnote 396:  Pike had fought a duel with Roane, Roane having challenged him because he had dared to criticize his conduct in the Mexican War [Hallura, Biographical and Pictorial History of Arkansas, vol. i, 229; Confederate Military History, vol. x, 99].]

[Footnote 397:  Maury to Roane, May 11, 1862, Official Records, vol. xiii, 827.]

[Footnote 398:  Maury to Pike, May 19, 1862, Ibid.]

[Footnote 399:  Pike to Roane, June 1, 1862, Ibid., 935-936.]

[Footnote 400:  General Orders, June 8, 1862, Ibid., 943.]

[Footnote 401:  Pike to Hindman, June 8, 1862, Ibid., 936-943.]

affairs in the West and should be dealt with analytically, yet also as a whole; since no paraphrase, no mere synopsis of contents could ever do the subject justice.  From the facts presented, it is only too evident that very little had been attempted or done by the Richmond authorities for the Indian regiments.  Neither officers nor men had been regularly or fully paid.  And not all the good intentions, few as they were, of the central government had been allowed realization.  They had been checkmated by the men in control west of the Mississippi.  In fact, the army men in Arkansas had virtually exploited Pike’s command, had appropriated for their own use his money, his supplies, and had never permitted anything to pass on to Indian Territory, notwithstanding that it had been bought with Indian funds, “that was fit to be sent anywhere else.”  The Indian’s portion was the “refuse,” as Pike so truly, bitterly, and emphatically put it, or, in other words of his, the “crumbs” that fell from the white man’s table.

Pike’s compliance with Hindman’s orders was only partial and he offered not the vestige of an apology that it was so.  What he did send was Dawson’s[402] infantry regiment and Woodruff’s battery which went duly on to Little Rock with the requisite thirty days’ subsistence and the caution that not a single cartridge was to be fired along the way.  The caution Pike must have repeated in almost ironical vein; for the way to Little Rock lay through Indian Territory and cartridges like everything else under Pike’s control had been collected solely for its defense.

Respecting the forward movement of the Indian troops, Pike made not the slightest observation in his

[Footnote 402:  C.L.  Dawson of the Nineteenth Regiment of Arkansas Volunteers had joined Pike at Fort McCulloch in April [Fort Smith Papers].]