the way, widely, i want to give you a sense here, widely is -- the consensus view in the h his historigraphy, yes, this is not a sugar coated thing. generally civilians are not killed. the incidents of rape and sexual assault is very low, especially when compared to other conflicts. at least with white civilians. african-americans it becomes a different issue. even then, relatively low. measures are made. we don't have a lot of evidence of mass starvation during the civil war. there sunt much evidence of that. people have to flee for their lives and their livelihoods are destroyed. they eventually find a place to get food. we have evidence that the federal army will, for example, leave and that people won't starve. they'll destroy everything else and be rude and obnoxious about it. but that's -- -- this is the issue of attacking the confederate economy. and grant is the overall -- part of the overall master mind of this. who is the person who really executes this to the furthest degree? sherman. but obviously grant is a part of this set of schemes. all right. so here you have some of the dif

because it happened in arkansas, historigraphy. remember in the civil war. wartime journalists celebrated events in the east, they downplayed events in the west, and they basically ignored events in the trans-mississippi. when the war ended, historians simply continued that mindset, that attitude, that approach. things are changing now these last 20 years. there's a really good book on pea ridge here. everybody should have a copy. but this development is new, and it's going to take a few decades, i think, before we really begin to grasp how important, how interesting, how significant events were in the trans-mississippi. now curtis was a modest man. a very methodical man. really he had the heart and soul of a civil engineer. he did not like to blow his own horn. he never made much of this revolution in military operations. but inside, curtis knew what he had accomplished. in a private letter to his brother in ohio, a lawyer, and we know it's private because curtis wrote on the outside of the envelope "private" and underlined the word three times. he told wha