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mikeejay2 -> Brig Gen Randolph Barnes Marcy (4/6/2007 5:19:06 AM)
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Brig Gen Randolph Barnes Marcy (b 1812 - died 1887) Marcy was born at Greenwich, Massachusetts in April, 1812. He graduated from West Point in 1832 and was commissioned a lieutenant in the 5th U. S. Infantry, and served with the 5th in the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin. In 1846, he was promoted to Captain and fought with the 5th in the Mexican War at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma.
He was then assigned to duty in the in Texas and Oklahoma, escorting emigrants, locating military posts, exploring the wilderness, and mapping routes. In 1857, Marcy accompanied General Albert Sydney Johnston on the expedition against the Mormons in Utah. It was during this period that Capt. Marcy led his men safely from Utah to New Mexico on a forced march through the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter, during which his troops ran out of provisions the last two weeks of their journey, in extremely harsh weather. Marcy was promoted to acting Inspector General of the Department of Utah, but his exploits and his well-written military reports had attracted attention in Washington, and he was recalled to work for the Department of State (which at this time had responsibilities much beyond the conduct of foreign affairs), preparing a guidebook on Western travel. Marcy provided the overland pioneer with literally life-or-death advice on, packing, choosing the best routes to California, wagon maintenance and the selection and care of horses, food supplies, packing, traveling, fording rivers, tracking, and bivouacking on the plains, finding and treating water, building a fire, avoiding quicksand, treating snakebites, and other first-aid procedures. Marcy also conveys information "concerning the habits of Indians," including Native American tracking and hunting techniques, smoke signals and sign language, and battle tactics. After completing this task, Capt. Marcy was promoted to major and posted to the Pacific Northwest, where his talents were wasted by making him a paymaster. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he was promoted to Colonel and named Inspector General of McClellan's Army of the Potomac. Before the War ended, he was appointed as one of the four Inspectors-General of the U. S. Army, and as brigadier general of volunteers (1863). After the War, he continued to serve as inspector general, but the Senate failed to confirm his wartime rank of general before it expired. Not until 1878, when he was appointed to brigadier general as the Inspector General of the U. S. Army, was he finally given the rank consistent with the extraordinarily important services Marcy had rendered to his country. He retired from the army in January, 1881. Marcy’s greatest contribution was not as a soldier but as an author when he conveyed his wisdom in his 1859 book, The Prairie Traveler: A Handbook for Overland Expeditions, with Maps, Illustrations, and Itineraries of the Principal Routes between the Mississippi and the Pacific, a guidebook for the great Western overland migration of the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century which might have been recorded (in history) as a great disaster of needless suffering and death, rather than the great and epic struggle – and success – we celebrate today. Marcy died in West Orange, New Jersey and is buried in Riverview Cemetery, Trenton, New Jersey.
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