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: _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: 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, bu