ions, and no money, within
the limits of the district. Governor Moore was willing to aid me to the
extent of his ability, but, deprived by the loss of New Orleans and the
lower river parishes of half the population and three fourths of the
resources of his State, he could do little.

General Magruder had recently been assigned to command in Texas, and
General Holmes, the senior officer west of the Mississippi, was far to
the north in Arkansas. To him I at once reported my arrival and
necessities. Many days elapsed before his reply was received, to the
effect that he could give me no assistance, as he meditated a movement
against Helena on the Mississippi River. Without hope of aid from
abroad, I addressed myself to the heavy task of arousing public
sentiment, apathetic if not hostile from disaster and neglect, and the
creation of some means of defense. Such was the military destitution
that a regiment of cavalry could have ridden over the State, while
innumerable rivers and bayous, navigable a large part of the year, would
admit Federal gunboats to the heart of every parish.

To understand subsequent operations in this region, one must have some
idea of its topography and river systems.

Washed on the east, from the Arkansas line to the Gulf of Mexico, by the
Mississippi, western Louisiana is divided into two not very unequal
parts by the Red River, which, entering the State at its northwestern
angle, near the boundaries of Texas and Arkansas, flows southeast to the
Mississippi through a broad, fertile valley, then occupied by a
population of large slave-owners engaged in the culture of cotton. From
the southern slopes of the Ozark Mountains in Central Arkansas comes the
Washita River to unite with the Red, a few miles above the junction of
the latter with the Mississippi. Preserving a southerly course, along
the eastern foot of the hills, the Washita enters the State nearly a
hundred miles west of the Mississippi, but the westerly trend of the
great river reduces this distance until the waters meet. The alluvion
between these rivers, protected from inundation by levees along the
streams, is divided by many bayous, of which the Tensas, with its branch
the Macon, is the most important. These bayous drain the vast swamps
into the Washita, and, like this river, are in the season of floods open
to steam navigation. Here was one of the great cotton-producing regions
of the South. Estates of 5,000 acres and more abounded, a