to Thornton his complete set of rituals for Prince Hall Scottish Rite Masonry to use. Pike's only known writing on the Klan, an 1868 editorial in the Memphis Daily Appeal, indicates that his main problems lay not with its aims, but with its methods and leadership. Later in this editorial, he proposed "one great Order of Southern Brotherhood," a secret society which would have been a larger and more centrally organized version of the Klan: "If it were in our power, if it could be effected, we would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members." Histories of the Ku Klux Klan published in the early 20th century identify Pike as a high-ranking official of the order. Walter Lynwood Fleming, in 1905's Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment, lists Pike as the Klan's "chief judicial officer". Susan Lawrence Davis, whose father was a founding member of the Klan in Alabama, writes in her sympathetic account titled Authentic History: Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1877, published in 1924, that Pike was personally chosen by Nathan Bedford Forrest to serve as the Klan's "Chief Judicial Officer" and to head the Klan in Arkansas as "Grand Dragon of that Realm." In 1939's Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871, Stanley Horn also reports that Forrest appointed Pike and credits him with a surge of local Klan activity in April 1868. Horn says that a pro-Klan poem, Death's Brigade, is attributed to Pike. Southern Agrarian poet John Gould Fletcher, who grew up in Little Rock in a house that Pike built, also believed Pike was the poem's author. It was not until 1971, that Allen W. Trelease published White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, and cast doubt on Pike's KKK membership as, according to Trelease, the offices that Pike allegedly held are not mentioned in "The Prescript", the Klan constitution. However, the office of Grand Dragon, which Davis claims Pike once held, is mentioned in the 1867 Klan constitution. No contemporary evidence shows that Pike was ever affiliated with the Klan. When the US Congress investigated the KKK in 1871, its report failed to support these