William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[286] adapted for his work. A man of portly frame and rosy face, he wore a veil of silver hair, which hung about his neck in clouds; giving him the jovial look of youth combined with the aspect of a sage. A clerk, a poet, an attorney, a scout, a trapper, a school teacher, a cavalry officer, a journalist-Pike had tried all trades and seen the world on many sides. In riding hard, in drinking deep, in talking big, few men were equal to Albert Pike. Some verses from his pen have won repute, even in England, notably his Ode to the Mocking Bird and his Hymns to the Gods. Having spent some years of his life on the Red River and the Arkansas, he knew the Light Horse and the Pin League, and was a master in all the arts and artifices necessary for the seduction of savage tribes.

Riding from camp to camp, Pike told the warriors that the old Union under which they had lived was gone; gone like the old Indian League of the Six Nations, never to be renewed on earth. The flag was rent to shreds, the flagstaff snapt in two. The gentry of the South could never again join hands with the hucksters of the North. He bade them. choose their side. Slavery, he said, was the cornerstone