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Return to First Page ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 12 (Winter 1953) p.304
west of Shreveport. Here the regiment lay by to receive supplies which had been shipped up the Trinity by steamboat. Bad weather and incessant rain delayed the departure from Robbin's Ferry until August 10, when the regiment again took up the march. Sunday, August 16, found them ferrying across the Brazos River at the town of Washington, a former capital of the Republic of Texas situated just below the mouth of the Navasota River. At last on August 28 the column reached the general rendezvous at San Antonio.(14)
General Wool ordered the Arkansas regiment to encamp at a point some four miles from San Antonio on the small stream that ran through the town. (15 ) In getting the companies into camp Colonel Yell not only placed them inreverse order, but also failed to make provisions for sanitation in the area. When General Wool came out to inspect the Arkansas regiment a few days later, he noted the unorthodox position of the companies and the unusually poor condition of the camp and immediately ordered them out. "We broke camp," said Pike, " and marched out on a ridge a mile or two away where there was no water. It was a hotter place than 'purgatory'. My company dwindled to sixteen men fit for duty." (16 ) Another officer in the Arkansas cavalry, while highly pleased with the first encampment, described this last campground as lying "in an open plain, without a particle of shade... during an excessively hot time." We have suffered terribly," he went on,"...[and] one morning had nearly 200 on the sick list." (17)
Such stern measures on the part of General Wool did little to make him popular among the "Arkansas Devils, as he soon came to call the Arkansas volunteers. A glimpse of the esteem in which "Old Wool" was held by Colonel Yell's men may be had from the diary of a private in one of the Illinois companies:
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14. Fulton, ed., Diary & Letters of Gregg, I, 201, pp.206-217.
15. Solon Borland to Major William Field, Camp Yell, San Antonio, Texas, September 28, 1846 in Little Rock Arkansas Banner, November 11 1846; "Autobiography of Albert Pike," New Age Magazine, XXXVIII (March, 1930), 142, hereafter cited "Autobiography." Also hereafter Little Rock Arkansas Banner cited Banner.
16. "Autobiography" New Age Magazine, XXXVIII, 142.
17. Borland to Field, September 28,1846, in Banner, November 11, 1846.