Indians, in order that their friendly alliance might be maintained. He
urged many things and one thing very particularly. It was the crux
of them all and it was that Indian Territory should be absolutely
separated from Arkansas, in a military way, and that no troops
from either Arkansas or Texas should be stationed within it. Other
suggestions of Pike's were equally sound. Indeed, the entire letter of
the first of August was sound and in no part of it more sound than in
that which recommended the immediate appointment of a superintendent
of Indian affairs for the Arkansas and Red River Superintendency, also
the appointment of Indian agents for all places that had none.[484] It
was high time that positions in connection with the conduct of Indian
affairs should be something more than sinecures.
Aspirants for the office of superintendent had already made their
wants known. Foremost among them was Douglas H. Cooper. It was not in
his mind, however, to separate the military command from the civil
and he therefore asked that he be made brigadier-general and _ex
officio_ superintendent of Indian affairs in the place of Pike
removed.[485] His own representations of Pike's grievous offence had
fully prepared him for the circumstance of Pike's removal and he
anticipated it in making his own application for office. Subsequent
knowledge of Pike's activities and of his standing at Richmond must
have come to Cooper as a rude awakening.
Nevertheless, Cooper did get his appointment. It
[Footnote 484: In his message of August 18, 1862 [Richardson, vol. i,
238], President Davis remarked upon the vacancies in these offices and
said that, in consequence of them, delays had occurred in the payment
of annuities and allowances to which the Indians were entitled.]
[Footnote 485: _Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 821.]
came the twenty-ninth of September in the form of special orders from
the adjutant-general's office.[486] Pike was still on the ground, as
will be presently shown, and Cooper's moral unfitness for a position
of so much responsibility was yet to be revealed. The moment was
one when the Confederacy was taking active steps to keep its most
significant promise to the Indian nations, give them a representation
in Congress. The Cherokees had lost no time in availing themselves of
the privilege of electing a delegate, neither had the Choctaws
and Chickasaws. Elias C. Boudinot had proved to be the successful
candidate of the former and Robert M. Jones[487] of the latter. Over
the credentials of Boudinot, the House of Representatives made some
demur; but, as there was no denying his constitutional right, under
treaty guarantee, to be present, they were accepted and he was given
his seat.[488] Provisions had, however, yet to be determined for
regulating Indian elections and fixing the pay and mileage, likewise
also, the duties and privileges of Indian delegates.[489] Perhaps it
is unfair to intimate that the provisions would have been determined
earlier, had congress not preferred to go upon the assumption that
they would never be needed, since it was scarcely likely that the
Indians would realize the importance of their rights and act upon
them.[490]
[Footnote 486: War Department, _Confederate Records, Special Orders
of the Adjutant and Inspector General's Office_, C.S.A., 1862, p.
438; _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 885.]
[Footnote 487: See document of date, October 7, 1861, signed by
Douglas H. Cooper, certifying that Robert M. Jones had received the
"greatest number of votes cast" as delegate in Congress for the
Choctaws and Chickasaws [Pickett _Papers_, Package 118].]
[Footnote 488: _Journal_, vol. v, 513, 514.]
[Footnote 489:--Ibid., vol. ii, 452, 457, 480; vol. v, 514,
523, 561.]
[Footnote 490: Davis had thrown the responsibility of the whole matter
upon Congress, when he insisted that the "delegate" clauses in the
treaties should (cont.)]
While Congress was debating the question of Indian delegate
credentials and their acceptance, a tragedy took place in
Indian Territory that more than confirmed General Pike's worst
prognostications and proved his main contention that Indian affairs
should be considered primarily upon their own merits, as an end in
themselves, and dealt with accordingly. Had the Arkansas and Red River
Superintendency been regularly established, the tragedy referred to
might never have occurred; but it was not yet established and for
many reasons, one of them being that, although Douglas H. Cooper's
appointment had been resolved upon, he had not yet been invested with
the office of superintendent.[491] His commission was being withheld
because charges of incapacity and drunkenness had been preferred
against him.[492]
General Pike's disclosures had aroused suspicion and grave
apprehension in Richmond, so much so, indeed, that the War Department,
convinced that conditions in Indian Territory were very far from being
what they should be, decided to undertake an investigation of its own
through its Indian bureau. Promptly, therefore, S.S. Scott, acting
commissioner, departed for the West. General Pike was in Texas.
Now one of the contingencies that Pike had most constantly dreaded was
tribal disorder on the Leased
[Footnote 490: (cont.) be so modified as to make the admission of the
Indians dependent, not upon the treaty-making power, but upon the
legislative. See his message of December 12, 1861, Richardson, vol. i,
149-151.]
[Footnote 491: Elias Rector, who had been retained as superintendent
under the Confederate government, seems never to have exercised the
functions of the office subsequent to the assumption by Pike of his
duties as commander of the Department of Indian Territory. He
was probably envious of Pike and resigned rather than serve in a
subordinate capacity. He seems to have made some troube for Pike
[_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 964, 976].]
[Footnote 492:--Ibid., 906, 908, 910-911, 927-928.]
District,[493] a disorder that might at any moment extend itself to
Texas and to other parts of the Indian Territory, imperiling the whole
Confederate alliance. So long as there was a strong force at Fort
McCulloch and at the frontier posts of longer establishment,
particularly at Fort Cobb, the Reserve Indians could be held in check
with comparative ease. Hindman, ignorant of or indifferent to the
situation, no matter how serious it might be for others, had ordered
the force to be scattered and most of it withdrawn from the Red River
Valley.
The so-called Wichita, or Reserve, Indians, to call them by a
collective term only very recently bestowed, had ever constituted a
serious problem for the neighboring states as well as for the central
government. It was with the Confederacy as with the old Union. The
Reserve Indians were a motley horde, fragments of many tribes that
had seen better days. They were all more or less related, either
geographically or linguistically. Some of them, it is difficult
to venture upon what proportion, had been induced to enter into
negotiations with Pike and through him had formed an alliance with
the Confederacy. Apparently, those who had done this were chiefly
Tonkawas. Other Reserve Indians continued true to the North. As time
went on hostile feelings, engendered by living in opposite camps,
gained in intensity, the more especially because white men, both north
and south, encouraged them to go upon the war-path, either against
their own associates or others. Reprisals, frequently bloody, were
regularly instituted. With Pike's departure from Fort McCulloch an
opportunity for greater vindictiveness offered, notwithstanding the
fact that the Choctaw and Chickasaw
[Footnote 493: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 868.]
troops had been left behind and were guarding the near-by country,
their own.
Sometime in the latter part of August or the early part of September,
Matthew Leeper, the Wichita agent under the Confederate government, a
left-over from Buchanan's days, went from the Leased District,[494]
frightened away, some people thought, perhaps afraid of the inevitable
results of the mischief his own hands had so largely wrought, and
sojourned in Texas, his old home. The sutler left also and a man named
Jones was then in sole charge of the agency. The northern sympathizers
among the Indians thereupon aroused themselves. They had gained
greatly of late in strength and influence and their numbers had
been augmented by renegade Seminoles from Jumper's battalion and by
outlawed Cherokees. They warned Jones that Leeper would be wise not to
return. If he should return, it would be the worse for him; for they
were determined to wreak revenge upon him for all the misery his
machinations in favor of the Confederacy and for his own gain had cost
them. Presumably, Jones scorned to transmit the warning and, in course
of time, Leeper returned.
The twenty-third of October witnessed one of the bloodiest scenes ever
enacted on the western plains. The northern Indians of the Reserve
together with a lot of wandering Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos,
many of them good-for-nothing or vicious, some Seminoles and Cherokees
attacked Leeper unawares, killed him,[495] as also three white male
employees of the agency.
[Footnote 494: _Official Records_, vol. liii, supplement, 828.]
[Footnote 495: On the murder of Agent Leeper, see Scott to Holmes,
November 2, 1862, _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 919-921; Holmes
to Secretary of War, November 15, 1862, Ibid., 919: F. Johnson
to Dole, January 20, 1863, Abel, _American Indian as Slaveholder and
Secessionist_, 329-330, _footnote_; (cont.)]
They then put "the bodies into the agency building and fired it." The
next morning they made an equally brutal attack upon the Tonkawas and
with most telling effect. More than half of them were butchered. The
survivors, about one hundred fifty, fled to Fort Arbuckle.[496] Their
condition was pitiable. The murderers, for they were nothing less than
that, fled northward, they and their families, to swell the number of
Indian refugees already living upon government bounty in Kansas.
Commissioner Scott then at Fort Washita hurried to the Leased District
to examine into the affair. He had made many observations since
leaving Richmond, had talked with Pike, now returned from Texas,
and had come around pretty much to his way of thinking. His
recommendations to the department commander that were intended to
reach the Secretary of War as well were in every sense a corroboration
of Pike's complaints in so far as the woeful neglect of the Indians
was concerned. Better proof that Hindman's conduct had been highly
reprehensible could scarcely be asked for.
[Footnote 495: (cont.) Moore, _Rebellion Record_, vol. vi, 6;
W.F. Cady to Cox, February 16, 1870, Indian Office _Report Book_,
no. 19, 186-188; Coffin to Dole, September 24, 1863, Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, _Report_, 1863, 177.]
[Footnote 496: S.S. Scott asked permission of Governor Winchester
Colbert, November 10, 1862, to place the fugitive Tonkawas
"temporarily on Rocky or Clear Creek, near the road leading from Fort
Washita to Arbuckle." Colbert granted the permission, "provided they
are subject to the laws of the Chickasaw Nation, and will furnish
guides to the Home Guards and the Chickasaw Battalion, when called
upon to do so."]
VIII. THE RETIREMENT OF GENERAL PIKE
The tragedy at the Wichita agency brought General Pike again to the
fore. His resignation had not been accepted at Richmond as Hindman
supposed was the case at the time he released him from custody. In
fact, as events turned out, it looked as though Hindman were decidedly
more in disrepute there than was Pike. His arbitrary procedure in the
Trans-Mississippi District had been complained of by many persons
besides the one person whom he had so unmercifully badgered.
Furthermore, the circumstances of his assignment to command were being
inquired into and everything divulged was telling tremendously against
him.
The irregularity of Hindman's assignment to command has been already
commented upon in this narrative. Additional details may now be given.
Van Dorn had hopes, on the occasion of his own summons to work farther
east, that Sterling Price would be the one chosen eventually to
succeed him or, at all events, the one to take the chief command of
the Confederate forces in the West. He greatly wished that upon him
and upon him alone his mantle should fall.[497] The filling of the
position by Hindman was to be but tentative, to last only until
Price,[498] perhaps also Van Dorn,
[Footnote 497: Van Dorn to President Davis, June 9, 1862, _Official
Records_, vol. xiii, 831-832.]
[Footnote 498: Price was preferred to H.M. Rector; because Van Dorn
felt that Rector's influence with the people of Arkansas had greatly
declined. The truth was, Governor Rector had become incensed at the
disregard shown for Arkansas by Confederate commanders. In a recent
proclamation, he had announced that the state would henceforth look
out for herself.]
could discuss matters personally with the president and remove the
prejudice believed to be existing in his mind against Price; but the
War Department had quite other plans developed, a rumor of which soon
reached the ears of Van Dorn. It was then he telegraphed, begging
Davis to make no appointment for the present to the command of the
Trans-Mississippi District and informing him that Hindman had been
sent there temporarily.[499] The request came to Richmond too late. An
appointment had already been resolved upon and made. The man chosen
was John Bankhead Magruder, a major-general in the Army of Northern
Virginia. However, as he was not yet ready to take up his new duties,
Hindman was suffered to assume the command in the West; but Magruder's
rights held over. They were held in abeyance, so to speak, temporarily
waived.[500]
The controversy between Pike and Hindman would seem to have impelled
Secretary Randolph to wish to terminate early Magruder's delay; but
Magruder was loath to depart. His lack of enthusiasm ought to have
been enough to convince those sending him that he
[Footnote 499: The orders for Hindman to repair west, issuing from
Beauregard's headquarters, were explicit, not upon the point of the
temporary character of his appointment, but upon that of its having
been made "at the earnest solicitation of the people of Arkansas."
[_Official Records_, vol. x, part ii, 547].]
[Footnote 500: Price, nothing daunted, continued to seek the position
and submitted plans for operations in the West. His importunities
finally forced the inquiry from Davis as to whether Magruder's
appointment had ever been rescinded and whether, since he seemed in
no hurry to avail himself of it, he really wanted the place. Randolph
reported that Magruder had no objection to the service to which he had
been ordered but desired to remain near Richmond until the expected
battle in the neighborhood should have occurred. Randolph then
suggested that Price be tendered the position of second in command
[Randolph to Davis, June 23, 1862, _Official Records_, vol.
xiii, 837], an arrangement that met with Magruder's hearty approval
[Magruder to R.E. Lee, June 26, 1862, Ibid., 845].]
was hardly the man for the place. His acquaintance with
Trans-Mississippi conditions was very superficial, yet even he found
out that they were of a nature to admonish those concerned of their
urgency, especially in the matter of lack of arms.[501] By the
fourteenth of July his indecision was apparently overcome. At any
rate, on that day Randolph wrote Pike that Magruder, the real
commander of the Trans-Mississippi District, would soon arrive at
Little Rock and that the offences of which Pike had had reason to
complain would not be repeated.
Letters travelled slowly in those days and Randolph's comforting
intelligence did not reach Pike in time to avert the catastrophe of
his proclamation and consequent arrest. And it was just as well, all
things considered, for Magruder never reached Little Rock. He was a
man of intemperate habits and, while _en route_, was ordered back
to Richmond to answer "charges of drunkenness and disobedience of
orders."[502] His appointment was thereupon rescinded. The man
selected in his place, to the total ignoring of Price's prior claims,
was Theophilus H. Holmes, a native of North Carolina.[503] President
Davis was still possessed of the notion that frontier affairs could be
best conducted by men who had no local attachments there. Late events
had all too surely lent weight to his theory. Nevertheless, in holding
it, Davis was strictly inconsistent and illogical; for loyalty to
the particular home state constituted the strongest asset that the
Confederacy had. It was the lode-star that had drawn Lee and
[Footnote 501: Magruder to Randolph, July 5, 1862, _Official
Records_, vol. xiii, 851-852.]
[Footnote 502: Clark to Price, July 17, 1862, _Official Records_,
vol. liii, supplement, 816-817.]
[Footnote 503: Wright, _General Officers of C.S.A_., 15-16.]
many another, who cared not a whit for political principles in and
for themselves, from their allegiance to the Union. It was the great
bulwark of the South.
Holmes was ordered west July 16;[504] but, as he had the necessary
preparations to make and various private matters to attend to, August
had almost begun before it proved possible for him to reach Little
Rock.[505] The interval had given Hindman a new lease of official life
and a further extension of opportunity for oppression, which he had
used to good advantage. The new department commander, while yet in
Richmond, had discussed the Pike-Hindman controversy with his superior
officers and had arrived at a conclusion distinctly favorable to Pike.
He frankly confessed as much weeks afterwards. Once in Little Rock,
however, he learned from the Hindman coterie of Pike's Indian
proclamation and immediately veered to Hindman's side.[506] Pike
talked with him, recounted his grievances in a fashion that none could
surpass, but made absolutely no impression upon him. So small a thing
and so short a time had it taken to develop a hostile prejudice in
Holmes's mind, previously unbiased, so deep-seated that it never,
in all the months that followed, knew the slightest diminution.
Conversely and most fortuitously, a friendliness grew up between
Holmes and the man whom he had supplanted that made the former, either
forget the orders given him in Richmond or put so new a construction
upon them that they were rendered nugatory. It was a situation,
exceedingly fortunate for
[Footnote 504: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 855.]
[Footnote 505: He had reached Vicksburg by the thirtieth of July and
from that point he issued his orders assuming the command [ibid.,
860].]
[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
[Footnote 508: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 861, 864, 868.]
[Footnote 509: Holmes to the Secretary of War, November 15, 1862
[ibid., 918].]
[Footnote 510: For an account of Pike's movements, see _Confederate
Military History_, vol. x, 126.]
[Footnote 511: Abel, _American Indian as Slaveholder and
Secessionist_, 356.]
[Footnote 512: Pike to Holmes, December 30, 1862, "Appendix."]
news that President Davis had refused positively to accept Pike's
resignation.[513] What better proof could anyone want that Pike was
sustained at headquarters? What that view of the matter may have meant
in emboldening him to his later excessively independent actions must
be left to the reader's conjecture. It never occurred to Pike that if
his resignation had been refused, it had probably been refused upon
the supposition that, with Hindman out of the way, all would be well.
One good reason for thinking that that was the Richmond attitude
towards the affair is the fact that no record of anything like
immediate and formal action upon the resignation is forthcoming.
Pike heard that it had been refused and positively, which was very
gratifying; but it is far more likely that it had been put to one side
and purposely; in order that, since Pike was unquestionably the best
man for Indian Territory, all difficulties might be left to adjust
themselves, the less said about Hindman's autocracy the better it
would be for all concerned.
But it was soon apparent that Hindman was not to be put out of the
way. It was to be still possible for him to work mischief in Indian
Territory. With some slight modifications, the Trans-Mississippi
District had been converted into the Trans-Mississippi Department and,
on the twentieth of August, orders[514] issued from
[Footnote 513: There is something very peculiar about the acceptance
or non-acceptance of Pike's resignation. Randolph wrote to Holmes,
October 27, 1862, these words: "... General Pike's resignation having
been accepted, you will be left without a commanding officer in the
Indian Territory..." [_Official Records_, vol. xiii, 906]. A
letter endorsement, made by Randolph, on or later than September 19th,
was to this effect: "General Pike's resignation has not yet been
accepted" [Ibid., liii, supplement, 821], and another, made by
him, November 5th, to this: "Accept General Pike's resignation, and
notify him of it" [Ibid., 822].]
[Footnote 514: _Official Records_, vol. xiii, 877.]