...was water, some eight miles in the rear, and there encamped. I assent that General E. Kirby Smith, Commander-in-Chief of the Trans-Mississippi Department, who had ridden that day sixty miles from Shreveport , General Richard Taylor and myself, drank coffee together at my camp-fire, between eight and nine o'clock that night, and that the place was not more than eight hundred yards from the village of Plea...