The Arkansas in the Civil War Message Board

Re: Troops at Fort Smith, Dec. 1861

Unfortunately, guys, there is an even more fundamental problem. The hundreds of thousands of documents printed in the O.R., O.R.N., and S.O.R. are only the tip of the iceberg. I spent a few weeks at the National Archives way back in the 1980s (courtesy of you the taxpayers, by the way) and decided one day to ask the archival gnomes for the original headquarters books of the U.S. Army of the Southwest, S. R. Curtis commanding: general orders, special orders, letters received, letters sent, headquarters diary, all that sort of thing. Silly boy that I was, I thought I might find a FEW items in the books that were not included in the O.R.

Surprise! Surprise! as Gomer Pyle used to say. It was the other way around. The published material is only a TINY FRACTION of the original stuff. Probably less than 10% of the total (and of some books such as special orders probably less than 1%). And this was just ARMY headquarters books. Even less material was selected from DIVISION and BRIGADE headquarters books! By the way it is easy to tell which items were chosen for inclusion in the O.R. because War Department clerks thoughtfully stamped "copied" alongside each lucky entry in the left margin. Probably 95% of such material actually ended up in the O.R.

But wait, there's more! The clerks ruthlessly edited some entries, chopping out whole paragraphs, compressing two or three shorter paragraphs into larger blocks, and generally moving things around. Then there was the small matter of proper names. Everything in the books was handwritten, of course, not always under the best of conditions, and the clerks sometimes had a devilish time figuring out a word. "West" and "East" are frequently transposed. Proper names of individuals, especially unusual non-English names, are frequently garbled. Place names are in a category by themselves. My favorite are Lakes Ponchartrain and Maurepas in Louisiana. Two Confederate river gunboats bore these names and their multiple appearances in the pages of the O.R. and O.R.N. is a testament to the wonders of creative spelling. My favorite version of Maurepas is "Wareympae." Search engines are useless in such situations.

Finally, there is the unexpected stuff. Among the stacks of Curtis' headquarters books I found a book containing the NAMES and FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS of every slave freed by the Army of the Southwest during its march across eastern Arkansas to Helena. What a boon to family researchers, but as far as I can tell, no one except me has ever seen it.

Anyway, you get the picture.

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Troops at Fort Smith, Dec. 1861
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