Today in History:

954 Series I Volume XIII- Serial 19 - Missouri - Arkansas Campaign

Page 954 MO., ARK., KANS., IND. T., AND DEPT. N. W. Chapter XXV.

already has not enough on hand, and three months' supply of flour for 8,000 men. He will, in preference, contract with the producers themselves, by means of honest and trustworthy agents.

IX. The department quartermaster will take steps, in the same way, to have delivered at the same places 30,000 bushels of corn and 50,000 bushels of oats. He will also provide for an ample supply of hay at this post and at Frozen Rock, or by procuring moving machines and employing laborers to make the hay. No hay contracts at villainous prices, such as have been allowed by other officers, will be tolerated.

X. The necessary supplies of sugar will be procured from Louisiana; and the subsistence of the troops will not be left in the least to depend on the precarious chance of procuring supplies of any kind from Fort Smith.

By order of brigadier-general commanding:

FAYETTE HEWITT,

Assistant Adjutant-General.


HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF THE INDIAN TERRITORY,
Fort McCulloch, July 3, 1862.

Major General T. C. HINDMAN,

Commanding Trans-Mississippi District:

GENERAL: Your dispatch of the 21st instant* reached me this morning, and has given me great gratification. I could not have believed that you were in such a condition as your letter shows in regard to arms and men.

If General Van Dorn had let my supplies alone, I should have had an abundance of ammunition for both of us. I had an ample supply of fixed ammunition, and he got the whole of it, except what Captain Woodruff took from Fort Smith in his caissons.

General Van Dorn has been actuated by personal hatred of me, owing to my reports to the Government, old and new, in regard to his attack at daylight on a Comanche camp of men, women, and children, who had come in under the promise of protection from the commandant at Fort Arbuckle; consequently he was glad of the opportunity to seize all my supplies, and in the same breath to inform me that I was expected to maintain myself independent of this army. That he had taken or was going to take anything of mine he never notified me; that he ordered everything of mine to be kept at Fort Smith (before his blunders at Elkhorn) he never notified me. Colonel Hebert hit the nail on the head when he said that the whole affair of Van Dorn's march was "a great faux pas," and somebody had to bear the blame. You know the old saying "Les absents ont toujours tort." I was away, where I could not be heard, and it was convenient to accuse a man who had a little command of Indians, and only caught up with the army a few hours before the action, without knowing anything about it, the enemy, the country, or the general's plans, of having failed to do God knows what. I knew nothing of the death of McCulloch or McIntosh until near 3 o'clock. I was on the extreme right, with my Indians and nobody else. A battery and 3,000 infantry in front of me. Van Dorn says McIntosh took three guns there. It is not true. He never came near them, and did not know they were there until we took them. He says the carriages were burned; so they were, by the Cherokees, by whom they were drawn into the woods. The credit of taking them is

*Not found.


Page 954 MO., ARK., KANS., IND. T., AND DEPT. N. W. Chapter XXV.