I also inclose a printed notice from Major N. B. Pearce, requiring all persons in the Indian Territory having accounts against the Government to present them at his office at Fort Smith, where they will be audited, and as soon as the funds are obtained and estimates made on the information thus obtained they will be paid off. Of this order no copy has been sent to me, except by these printed slips being inclosed to me without any proper or respectful notice that I was expected to obey Major Pearce's in that regard. As I have been charged by an act of Congress, approved the 24th of December, 1861, with the special duty of examining all accounts for debts incurred by or moneys advanced to the acting commissaries and quartermasters of all Indian troops during the time they were in the service before being regularly mustered in, and of determining whether they were excessive of exorbitant and whether the debts were contracted in good faith and the moneys actually advanced, and as upon such accounts being audited by me they are by that act of Congress to be paid by the brigade quartermaster, this order of Major Pearce and the general order on which it is based are an additional unlawful interference with the officers of my department, virtually depriving me of my command.

I also inclose an advertisement for sealed proposals for hay, 500 tons to be delivered at Fort Smith and 200 at or within 25 miles of Forth Gibson. I foresaw the apparition of these contracts. They hay will cost the Government about $16, perhaps $18, a ton. It is worth and can be had for about $6. I can buy a moving-machine, employ hands, and it will not cost$5. What need is there of 500 tons at Fort Smith? It cannot be hauled any distance without costing as much more as the first cost. In thus interfering with the business of my quartermaster I am contemptuously passed by. What I procure for myself and need they seize on and appropriate. What I do not ask orr want them to furnish they are officious in offering.

I also inclose a notice in regard to public property in the possession of persons in the Indian country. I have already taken steps to recover that; and when an assistant commissary of subsistence and acting quartermaster announces his attention to deal with all persons in this department as holders of stolen property, without orders from me, he strangely forgets the ordinary rules of the service which he must have been familiar with when in the Army of the United States.

I suppose these things are done precisely in this way for the purpose of compelling me to resign. At the same moment that I am ordered by handbills stuck up and through circuitous and crooked channels to denude myself of all possible means of moving anywhere, ordering anything, I am urged to make a forward movement.

I do not believe a parallel case has ever happened since the creation of the world or ever will happen again until its end.

[ALBERT PIKE.]

RICHMOND, July 5, 1862.

Honorable GEORGE W. RANDOLPH,

Secretary of War:

SIR: I am informed that there are large bodies of troops in the Trans-Mississippi District who are without arms. The absence of all resources in that district for the manufacture of arms and ordnance stores, the daily increasing difficulties of intercommunication between it and this portion of the Confederacy, the number of men capable of bearing arms