by H. W. Brands
The newlyweds traveled to Detroit when Grant’s leave of absence ended. The Fourth Regiment was now headquartered at this frontier town, and he reported for duty—only to be informed that the army needed him more at Sackets Harbor, New York. He and Julia journeyed east and endured a frosty winter on the shore of Lake Ontario. In the spring the army changed its mind and decided that Detroit, after all, was where Grant could serve his country best.
“Two years were spent with but few important incidents,” Grant later wrote of his time at Detroit. Among the few was the establishment of Julia and his first real home. “A little frame house, covered with wild grapes,” was how one of Grant’s fellow officers remembered it. “It always looked homey and cozy to me, a comfortable place for two young people just married.… Most of the officers lived in the hotel, all of the unmarried ones in fact, but Grant and his wife had their own little home.”
Grant’s professional obligations were undemanding, leaving him time for homemaking with Julia and outdoor activities with his comrades. “The town was full of lively fellows and there were many horses whose owners considered them to be fast,” Grant’s officer friend recalled. “On Saturdays the whole town seemed to get out on Fort Avenue and every man who had a horse took part.” Grant was a regular. “He was in the forefront of any racing that was going on.… Grant had that little black mare and it was a horse of tremendous speed. He was the best horseman I ever saw. He could fly on a horse, faster than a slicked bullet.”
In the autumn of 1849 Julia became pregnant, and as the time of her delivery approached, the post surgeon sent her to her family’s home in St. Louis. Frederick Dent Grant was born at the end of May 1850. Grant took leave to see his wife and son before bringing them back, by way of Ohio, to Detroit.
The next summer the army sent him again to Sackets Harbor. He and Julia decided she and the baby would be more comfortable living with her family until his future became clearer, and he went east alone. He missed them terribly. “Sackets Harbor is as dull a little hole as you ever saw,” he wrote her. “Take good care of little Fred, and learn him to say pa.… Do you think he recollects me? Has he any more teeth?”
In the spring of 1852 the army found a new mission for the Fourth Regiment: protecting America’s recently acquired West Coast. The decision came suddenly, preventing Grant from traveling to Missouri to visit Julia and Fred and say farewell. Julia was pregnant again, with the delivery expected almost any day, and he hated to leave without seeing her or their new child. “It distresses me, dearest, to think that this news has to be broken to you at just this time,” he wrote. “But bear it with fortitude.” He would try to do the same. “Our separation will not be a long one anyway. At least let’s hope so.” He urged her to remember him at the birth of their child. “If it is a girl name it what you like, but if a boy name it after me. I know you will do this, Julia, of your own choice, but then I want you to know it will please me too.”
Army business unexpectedly called him to Washington ahead of his New York departure. He had never seen the capital before and wasn’t impressed now. “I was very much disappointed in the appearance of things about Washington,” he wrote Julia. “The place seems small and scattering and the character of the buildings poor.” He arrived amid mourning for Henry Clay, whose recent passing betokened an end of both the Whig party, which Clay had led for twenty years, and the spirit of compromise for which the Kentucky senator was famous. “Mr. Clay’s death produced a feeling of regret that could hardly be felt for any other man,” Grant wrote.
The California gold rush revolutionized travel from America’s East to its Far West. The impecunious still trudged across the plains and mountains, but those with even a bit more money traveled by steamship to Panama, traversed the isthmus and caught another steamer to San Francisco.
The marine legs of the journey were swift and comparatively comfortable. The testing part was the fifty miles in the middle. For the officers and men of the Fourth Regiment, the challenge fell peculiarly upon Quartermaster Grant. The regiment reached the town of Aspinwall, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, amid the rainy season. “The streets of the town were eight or ten inches under water, and foot passengers passed from place to place on raised footpaths,” Grant recalled. “At intervals the rain would pour down in streams, followed in not many minutes by a blazing, tropical summer’s sun. These alternate changes, from rain to sunshine, were continuous in the afternoons. I wondered how any person could live many months in Aspinwall, and wondered still more why any one tried.” The town was named for William Aspinwall, the principal of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which was building a railroad across the isthmus to take travelers to its docks at Panama City. By the summer of 1852 the railroad had reached the Chagres River, about fifteen miles inland; there travelers boarded boats for Gorgona, near the continental divide.
“Boats on the Chagres River were propelled by natives not inconveniently burdened with clothing,” Grant recalled. The long, narrow boats carried three dozen or so passengers apiece. The crew of each boat, typically six men arrayed on planks mounted on the two sides of the boat, propelled the craft with long poles. “The men would start from the bow, place one end of their poles against the river bottom, brace their shoulders against the other end, and then walk to the stern as rapidly as they could,” Grant explained. The river current was strong, but the boats made a mile an hour against it.
At Gorgona most of the soldiers of Grant’s regiment reverted to infantry form and marched off, going over the divide and down to Panama City on the Pacific. Grant kept a company behind to help him with the baggage and with the families who accompanied some of the soldiers to their new posting. He hunted up the man who had won the contract to supply the mules for the baggage and the women and children. The man, an American, didn’t have the mules on hand but promised to produce them the next day. The next day he said they would arrive the day after that. Eventually Grant realized there would be no mules; the crush of traffic on the isthmus and the consequent demand for transport had prompted the man to ignore the contract he had with the army and rent his beasts to higher bidders.
The resulting delay might have been merely annoying but for the fact that the isthmus was one of the unhealthiest places on earth. Microbes flourished in the warm, damp climate, and the human flood swamped the rudimentary sanitary system. Cholera claimed one after another of the men in Grant’s company and an even larger portion of their family members. He sent most of the still-healthy ones off on foot to join the rest of the regiment at Panama City and scrambled to find other mules for the sick, the families and the baggage. After a week he paid a local the going rate—more than twice the contracted rate—to furnish the required transport. By then the cholera had spread, killing every third person with Grant. Nor did all those who had gone ahead escape; dozens succumbed, until more than a hundred—one-seventh of those who had set out with Grant from New York—had died.
Till now Grant had sometimes wished Julia and Fred had joined him on the journey west, but the epidemic erased such thoughts. “My dearest, you never could have crossed the isthmus,” he wrote her from the safety of the ship to San Francisco. “The horrors of the road, in the rainy season, are beyond description.” Realizing she might fear for his own safety, he assured her he was fine. “We are fast approaching a better climate. The Golden Gate takes us nearly 300 miles per day.”
8
CALIFORNIA DURING THE GOLD RUSH ATTRACTED AMBITIOUS, acquisitive types from around the globe, and nearly all of them entered through San Francisco. “I consider that city the wonder of the world,” Grant wrote Julia after a brief visit. “It is a place of but a few years’ growth and contains a wealthy population of probably fifty thousand persons.” What he learned from the locals of the city’s short history supplemented what he saw himself. “It has been burned down three times and rebuilt each time better than before. The ground where the houses are built have either been filled in or else the hills dug away.” The fill-ins were especial
ly interesting. Saloons and gambling houses crowded the waterfront till they ran out of room, and then they pushed out over the water on pilings. Wooden streets serviced the new neighborhoods but not always well. “Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below,” Grant recalled later, still astonished. “I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay.”
The army knew enough not to expose its soldiers to the hazards and temptations of San Francisco longer than necessary. And even if it had not known, it couldn’t have afforded to keep them there. The gold from the mines fueled a ferocious inflation, sending prices to levels unimagined in other American cities. Appropriations that supported a regiment for a year in the East lasted a month in California; the exorbitant cost of living forced soldiers to moonlight to supplement their salaries.
After a few weeks at Benicia, across the bay from San Francisco, Grant’s regiment steamed north to Fort Vancouver, in Oregon Territory, on the right bank of the Columbia River near its confluence with the Willamette River, several miles from the emerging town of Portland. The soldiers had little to do; the Indians of the Columbia Valley were fighting a smallpox epidemic and had no energy to battle the uniformed intruders. “During my year on the Columbia River,” Grant wrote, “the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially.”
Grant nonetheless fell in love with Oregon. “Everyone speaks well of the climate and the growing prospects of the country,” he wrote Julia. “It has timber and agricultural land, and the best market”—California—“in the world for all they can produce. Every article of produce can be raised here that can be in the states, and with much less labor, and finds a ready cash market at four times the value the same article would bring at home.” The region around Vancouver and Portland was particularly pleasing. “This is about the best and most populous portion of Oregon. Living is expensive but money can be made. I have made on one speculation fifteen hundred dollars since I have been here.” He explained that he had loaned a fellow officer some money to set up a store. “The business proved so profitable that I got $1500 to leave the concern.” And yet he kicked himself. “I was very foolish for taking it, because my share of the profits would not have been less than three thousand per year.” Even so, he couldn’t complain. “I have every confidence that I shall make more than five thousand within the year.”
His next speculation was already afoot. “I have been up to the Dalles of the Columbia”—rapids where the river entered a narrow gorge and where immigrants from the East rested before the final push to the Willamette Valley. “I there made arrangements for the purchase of quite a number of oxen and cows.” The immigrants sold the animals cheap, needing the cash, and Grant intended to sell them dear, for export to California. “I have in addition to cattle some hogs from which I expect a large increase soon, and have also bought a horse upon which I have been offered an advance of more than one hundred dollars.”
Autumn rains failed to dampen Grant’s speculative spirits. “About pecuniary matters, dear Julia,” he wrote in early December, “I am better off than ever before, if I collect all that is due me, and there is about eighteen hundred dollars that there is but little doubt about.… I have got a farm of about one hundred acres, all cleared and enclosed, about one mile from here which I am going to cultivate in company with Captains Brent Wallen & McConnell.… We expect to raise some thirty acres of potatoes which may safely be put down at one dollar and fifty cents per bushel, and may be twice that, and the yield in this country is tremendous.”
The week before Christmas brought the frigid winds that blast down the Columbia in winter. “The snow is now some ten inches in depth, and still snowing more, with a strong probability of much more falling,” Grant wrote. “The thermometer has been from eighteen to twenty-two degrees for several days. Ice has formed in the river to such an extent that it is extremely doubtful whether the mail steamer can get back here to take off the mail by which I have been hoping to send this.” He could scarcely leave his quarters. Yet he remained as enthusiastic as ever about the promise of the Oregon country. “So far as I have seen it, it opens the richest chances for poor persons who are willing and able to work, either in cutting wood, sawing logs, raising vegetables, poultry or stock of any kind, of any place I have ever seen. Timber stands close to the banks of the river free for all. Wood is worth five dollars a cord for steamers. The soil produces almost double it does in any place I have been before, with the finest market in the world for it after it is raised.”
The cold persisted unusually, freezing the Columbia from bank to bank. “Captain Ingalls and myself were the first to cross,” Grant wrote Julia on the third day of the new year. But a wind shift to the west brought warm rain that caused the ice to vanish—“so you need not feel any alarm about my falling through.” Grant assured his wife he was keeping snug. “I am situated quite as comfortable as any body here, or in the Territory. The house I am living in is probably the best one in Oregon.” He shared the place with two other officers, their two clerks and a civilian. A cook fed them and a hired man did the chores. “Everyone says they are the best servants in the whole Territory.”
The country continued to amaze. “The climate of Oregon is evidently delightful,” Grant wrote in late January. “Here we are north of 45 degrees, and though the oldest inhabitants say it has been about the most severe winter they have ever known here, yet it would surprise persons even as far south as St. Louis to be here now and witness our pleasant days. Farmers are ploughing and some sorts of vegetables have been growing all winter, and will continue to grow.” His neighbors were pictures of health. “I believe the usual effect of an Oregon climate is to make a person grow stout; at least I should judge so from the appearance of every body that I see here.”
He joined the general activity and shared the positive effect. “I am farming extensively and I work myself as hard as any body,” he wrote in early March. “I have just finished putting in barley, and I am glad to say that I put in every grain with my own hands. By the end of the coming week myself and partners will have planted twenty acres of potatoes and an acre of onions. In a week or two more we will plant a few acres of corn.” The exercise was building his muscles. “I have grown out of my clothes entirely and am still getting larger.”
Oregon was ideal in all respects but one. “I have my health perfectly and could enjoy myself here as well as at any place I have ever been stationed at, if only you were here,” he wrote Julia. “If you, Fred, and Ulys”—the second child had turned out to be a boy and was duly named Ulysses—“were only here, I would not care to ever go back, only to visit our friends.” He pondered how he might bring them out. “I am first for promotion to a full captaincy,” he explained. “Capt. Alden, it is said, intends to resign in a few months.” When this happened, Grant said, he would give up his position as regimental quartermaster. “I shall then apply for orders to go to Washington to settle my accounts as disbursing officer, and when I return bring you with me.”
The Columbia River retarded Grant’s design for family reunification. A decade hence Grant would become painfully familiar with the vagaries of large rivers; an early lesson occurred in the spring of 1853. Melting snow in the Canadian Rockies sent a torrent of water south and west. “The Columbia is now far over its banks, and has destroyed all the grain, onions, corn, and about half the potatoes upon which I had expended so much money and labor,” he wrote Julia dejectedly.
Much of what the floodwaters didn’t sweep away, in terms of his dreams for material success, an erstwhile partner absconded with. “Poor fellow, he could not stand prosperity,” Grant said charitably, speaking of the man who owed him money from their earlier joint speculation. “He was
making over $1,000.00 per month and it put him beside himself. From being generous, he grew parsimonious and finally so close that apparently he could not bear to let money go to keep up his stock of goods. He quit and went home with about $8,000.00, deceiving me as to the money he had and owing me about $800.00.” This was particularly distressing, Grant acknowledged to Julia, as the sum in question was money “which if you had would educate our dear little boys.”
Yet he refused to be discouraged. “I have now had a chance of looking at matters and I find that we will have a crop of several thousand potatoes,” Grant wrote Julia after the flooding subsided. “According to the opinion of old settlers, they will bring from three to five dollars per bushel. This is in consequence of so many being drowned out.” Certain other speculations fared well. He had traveled to San Francisco on army business. “While in California I purchased a quantity of pork, its being low there, and knowing the price here, I made in partnership with another gentleman about four hundred dollars upon it. I have still another lot to arrive, and the article having risen we will clear about six hundred.” He also speculated in stock on the hoof. “I made arrangements below”—in California—“for the sale of pigs and hogs. I have out now a man buying them and I am confident of clearing, for my share, a thousand dollars in the next four weeks.” Being quartermaster provided valuable opportunities, as he discovered in San Francisco. “A large business firm, from whom I have purchased flour &c., wanted me to watch the markets here (they are very changeable), and when any article was, in my opinion, a speculation, to inform them. They would furnish the capital, me make the sales, and divide the profits.” Grant told Julia that he had accepted the offer, and was prepared “to do a handsome business in the commission way!”
The sudden peopling of the West on account of the gold discovery in California prompted national interest in a railroad linking the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific. The obvious western terminus for such a railroad was the San Francisco Bay, but the challenges of western geography—notably the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada—caused surveyors to look well beyond the most direct line west. Some hoped to skirt the highest peaks by swinging south, others by looping north. The army, under orders from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, made itself useful by leading the surveys.
