Col. John M. Harrell, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 10.2, Arkansas
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[367] of Pickett's Mill. Govan, with his two right regiments, disdaining the enemy in his own front, and Key with two pieces of artillery, materially aided Granbury by an enfilading fire. The enemy, pushing away some cavalry, went around Granbury's right and threatened disaster, when the Eighth and Nineteenth Arkansas met them, and in a sweeping charge, drove them back into the woods. The ground they rescued was held by reinforcements and the right of the army was saved. The casualties of the enemy were very heavy. Cleburne, out of 4,683, lost 85 killed and 363 wounded.

A witness thus describes this heroic conflict:

In the valley the Confederates left 770 Federals to be buried in one pit. Had a Tamerlane been there, he could have erected a pyramid of human skulls at New Hope church. Had Ahmed, the butcher, seen it, he would have been appalled at the sacrifice. This was part of the 1,400 that Gen. O. O. Howard says Wood's division lost alone. Never to be forgotten were two little boys whom we saw among the dead Federals. They appeared to be about fourteen years old, and were nearly exactly alike. Their hands were clasped in death, with feet to the guns and faces to the sky. The heart was melted at the idea that these little boys must have been twin brothers, and their spirits had taken flight together far from the mother's home in the forefront of cruel battle.

The grape vine dispatches in our army were that on the evening of the 25th, Stewart had annihilated ‘Fighting Joe Hooker,’ and that on the evening of the 27th, Pat Cleburne had not left a man of Wood's division to carry the message to Sherman how old Joe enjoyed the game of chess with him. I went through the New Hope battlefield afterward. I wondered, when I saw that the trees were imbedded and mown down with shot and shell, how it had been possible for men to come out of that battlefield alive. I recall the scene of the dead piled upon each other between the contending lines, the seething mass of quivering flesh, the groans of the dying; the sudden and unlooked — for attack by Hooker's corps of three divisions, whipped in a square fight by three brigades and the artillery that bore the brunt. Alexander P. Stewart was a