The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War

by Annie Heloise Abel

Footnote 319: [(return)]

Official Records, vol. xiii, 28.

Footnote 320: [(return)]

The emphasis should be upon the word, official, since the government must assuredly have acquiesced in Hindman's appointment. Hindman declared that the Secretary of War, in communicating on the subject to the House of Representatives, "ignored facts which had been officially communicated to him," in order to convey the impression that Hindman had undertaken to fill the post of commander in the Trans-Mississippi Department without rightful authority [Hindman to Holmes, February 8, 1863, ibid., vol. xxii, part 2, p. 785]. The following telegram shows that President Davis had been apprised of Hindman's selection, and of its tentative character.

BALDWIN, June 5, 1862.

(Received 6th.)

THE PRESIDENT:

Do not send any one just now to command the Trans-Mississippi District. It will bring trouble to this army. Hindman has been sent there temporarily. Price will be on to see you soon.

EARL VAN DORN, Major-General.

[Ibid., vol. lii, part 2, supplement, p. 320.]

Hindman had assumed the command of the Trans-Mississippi Department.[³²¹] As an Arkansan, deeply moved by the misfortunes and distress of his native state, he had stepped into Van Dorn's place with alacrity, intent upon forcing everything within his reach to subserve the interests of the Confederate cause in that particular part of the southern world. To the Indians and to their rights, natural or acquired, he was as utterly indifferent as were most other American men and all too soon that fact became obvious, most obvious, indeed, to General Pike, the one person who had, for reasons best known to himself, made the Indian cause his own.

General Hindman took formal command of the Trans-Mississippi Department at Little Rock, May 31. It was a critical moment and he was most critically placed; for he had not the sign of an army, Curtis's advance was only about thirty-five miles away, and Arkansas was yet, in the miserable plight in which Van Dorn had left her in charge of Brigadier-general J.S. Roane, it is true, but practically denuded of troops. Pike was at Fort McCulloch, and he had a force not wholly to be despised.[³²²] It was to him, therefore, that Hindman

Footnote 321: [(return)]

Department seems to be the more proper word to use to designate Hindman's command, although District and Department are frequently used interchangeably in the records. In Hindman's time and in Holmes's, the Trans-Mississippi Department was not the same as the Trans-Mississippi District of Department No. 2 [See Thomas Jordan, Chief of Staff, to Hindman, July 17, 1862, Official Records, vol. xiii, 855]. On the very date of Hindman's assignment, the boundaries of his command were defined as follows:

"The boundary of the Trans-Mississippi Department will embrace the States of Missouri and Arkansas, including Indian Territory, the State of Louisiana west of the Mississippi, and the State of Texas."—Ibid., 829.

Footnote 322: [(return)]

Yet Hindman did, in a sense, despise it and, from the start, he showed a tendency to disparage Pike's abilities and efforts. On the nineteenth of June, he reported to Adjutant-general Cooper, among other things, that he had ordered Pike to establish his headquarters at Fort Gibson and added, "His force does not amount to much, but there is no earthly need of its (cont.)

made one of his first appeals for help and he ordered him so to dispose of his men that some of the more efficient, the white, might be sent to Little Rock and the less efficient, the red, moved upward "to prevent the incursions of marauding parties," from Kansas.[³²³] The orders were repeated about a fortnight later; but Pike had already complied to the best of his ability, although not without protest[³²⁴] for he had collected his brigade and accoutered it by his own energies and his own contrivances solely. Moreover, he had done it for the defence of Indian Territory exclusively.

Included among the marauders, whose enterprises General Hindman was bent upon checking, were Doubleday's men; for, as General Curtis shrewdly surmised,[³²⁵] some inkling of Doubleday's contemplated maneuvers had most certainly reached Little Rock. Subsequently, when the Indian Expedition was massing at Baxter Springs, more vigorous measures than any yet taken were prepared for and all with the view of delaying or defeating it. June 23, Pike ordered Colonel Douglas H. Cooper to repair to the country north of the Canadian River and to take command of all troops, except Jumper's Seminole battalion, that should be there or placed there.[³²⁶] Similarly, June 26, Hindman, in ignorance of Pike's action, assigned Colonel J.J. Clarkson[³²⁷] to the supreme command, under