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Mosby Monroe Parsons: Missouri’s Forgotten Brigadier Bill J. Gurley as with most traNs-mississippi CoNfederate geNerals, the life aNd war reCord of Mosby Monroe Parsons has largely gone unnoticed by historians. Such an oversight is regrettable, for in the pantheon of Southern generals who served west of the Mississippi River, few can match Parsons’s passion for Southern independence, his length of service, the number of major engagements he participated in as a general officer, the total distance marched by his commands , and the reputation of his Missourians as fighters. None, however, can match the irony of his death—coming just weeks after the war’s end. In many respects the story of Mosby M. Parsons is the story of the Confederate war effort in the Trans-Mississippi, a narrative begun in victory, sustained by perseverance and personal valor, but culminating in defeat and death. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on May 21, 1822, Mosby Monroe Parsons was the oldest of Gustavus and Patience Parsons’s nine children. In 1835, Gustavus Parsons moved his family to Missouri, eventually settling in the state capital, Jefferson City. As a youth, Monroe, as he was called by family and friends, worked in his father’s brickyard and briefly attended St. Charles Academy. After leaving the academy, the young Parsons read law with Judge James W. Morrow of Jefferson City and was admitted to the Missouri state bar in 1844. That September, he hung out his shingle in the Jefferson City Courthouse in an office above that of his father, who served as county court clerk. As was common for lawyers of that era, Parsons traveled the circuit, pleading cases in six different counties.1 In 1846, the young attorney entered a pivotal period that would profoundly affect his future. In May of that year, the United States declared war on Mexico and President James K. Polk appealed to twelve states for volunteers . At the behest of Missouri’s Governor John C. Edwards, a call was issued by Adjutant General Gustavus Parsons of the Missouri Militia for Bill J. Gurley 92 able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to form a regiment of mounted rifles. Mosby Parsons, responding to his father’s plea, formed the “Cole Dragoons,” a company of sixty men from Cole County, which elected the young lawyer as its captain. Parsons’s was one of ten volunteer companies recruited from counties along the Missouri River that assembled at Fort Leavenworth to form the 1st Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan. With his “Cole Dragoons” designated as Company F, Parsons secured the regiment’s senior captaincy—the youngest officer at that rank. The 1st Missouri Regiment made up the lion’s share of the Army of the West, a mixed command of Missouri volunteer cavalry and regular army dragoons led by Colonel Stephen W. Kearny of the U.S. Army. Kearny’s objective was the capture and occupation of Santa Fe, provincial capital of northern Mexico.2 At the end of June 1846, Kearny’s seventeen-hundred-man army set forth on the Santa Fe Trail. Along the way, Parsons carefully observed the leadership skills of Kearny and Doniphan—the former a career army officer and strict disciplinarian, the latter an intelligent citizen-soldier with an easy manner and avuncular style—appropriating their best qualities into his own administrative mode, one that would sustain him throughout his life. While the nine-hundred-mile trek across seemingly endless stretches of prairie and desert exacted its toll, the army entered Santa Fe in August, unmolested. At Santa Fe, Kearny issued a proclamation annexing for the United States the immense Territory of New Mexico. Shortly after the annexation decree, Kearny received orders to take his contingent of U.S. Dragoons to California, leaving Doniphan and the 1st Missouri with the option of either staying put or continuing deeper into Mexico. Doniphan and his Missourians remained in Santa Fe for three months establishing a new regional government and concluding peace treaties with the local Indians.3 In December, Doniphan’s truncated column moved three hundred miles south, crossed a forbidding ninety-mile expanse of desert, and on Christmas Day, near present-day El Paso, engaged and defeated a force of Mexican regulars at the Battle of Brazito. Though largely outnumbered, the Missourians inflicted over two hundred casualties while accruing only seven, a feat highly lauded in U.S. newspapers, which earned the regiment significant fame back in...

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