The Man Who Saved the Union (11 page)

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.”

T
he 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!”

T
he 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.

The survey team assigned to seek a northern route was headed by an officer of the engineer corps named George McClellan, a West Point graduate three years behind Grant. He had served with distinction in Mexico among the engineers of
Winfield Scott, who happened to be
a friend of McClellan’s father, a famous Philadelphia doctor. He subsequently explored and mapped the sources of the Red River and the harbors of Texas, translated (from the original French) a manual on the proper use of the bayonet, and earned a reputation as the most promising of the younger generation of officers except for
Robert E. Lee.

McClellan and his survey team launched into the northern Cascade Mountains from Fort Vancouver, where Grant had the task of arranging transport. “
I have purchased for them within a few days some two hundred horses besides other property and still have more to get,” he told Julia. “The present state of the Columbia”—he wrote during the flood that drowned his crops—“makes transportation very difficult so I have to get Indians to pack, on their backs, all the provisions of one of these parties over the portage at the Cascades”—a turbulent stretch of river where the Columbia breached the Cascade Mountains—“about forty five miles above here.” Grant found the horses and hired the Indians, and McClellan set off into the mountains, where his actions (or rather inaction) embroiled him in a dispute with the governor of the newly created
Washington Territory, who detected in McClellan a penchant for promising more than he delivered.

G
rant’s hopes for bringing Julia and the boys to Oregon foundered upon the army’s decision to reassign him to northern California. The death of an officer ahead of him opened a captaincy at Fort Humboldt, a recently established post on Humboldt Bay that served the northern gold mines—the town near the fort was called Eureka—and the growing timber industry. Getting to the post required Grant to return to San Francisco, which had grown even wilder since his last visit. “
Besides the gambling in cards there was gambling on a larger scale in city lots,” he remembered later. “These were sold ‘On Change,’ much the way stocks are now sold on Wall Street. Cash, at time of purchase, was always paid by the broker; but the purchaser had only to put up his margin. He was charged at the rate of two or three per cent a month on the difference, besides commissions. The sand hills, some of them almost inaccessible to foot-passengers, were surveyed off and mapped into fifty-vara lots—a vara being a Spanish yard. These were sold at first at very low prices, but were sold and resold for higher prices until they went up to many thousands of dollars. The brokers did a fine business, and so did many such
purchasers as were sharp enough to quit purchasing before the final crash came.”

Grant reached
Fort Humboldt in January 1854, in the dreariest season on that rainy coast. “
I cannot say much in favor of the place,” he wrote Julia. “Imagine a place closed in by the sea having thrown up two tongues of land, closed in a bay that can be entered only with certain winds.” A more isolated post was hard to imagine, and there was little to keep the soldiers busy. “
I do nothing here but set in my room and read, and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.” Some of the officers entertained themselves by hunting the ducks, geese, deer, elk and bears that surrounded the fort, but Grant disliked the killing. The mail came infrequently and irregularly. “I got one letter from you since I have been here,” he wrote Julia in February, “but it was some three months old.… The only way we have of getting letters off is to give them to some Captain of a vessel to mail them after he gets down”—to San Francisco. “In the same way mails are received. This makes it very uncertain as to the time a letter may be on the way.”

The isolation aggravated the disappointment he experienced at not being able to bring his family west. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!” he wrote. “I feel again as if I had been separated from you and Fred long enough, and as to Ulys, I have never seen him. He must by this time be talking about as Fred did when I saw him last. How very much I want to see all of you. I have made up my mind what Ulys looks like, and I am anxious to see if my presentiment is correct. Does he advance rapidly? Tell me a great deal about him and Fred, and Fred’s pranks with his Grandpa.”

The gloomy weather darkened his mood and increased his sense of isolation. Psychologists of a subsequent era would describe a syndrome called seasonal affective disorder, a depression that afflicts some people when winter sunshine is scarce. Winter sunshine is scarcer on the northern coast of California than just about anywhere else outside the polar regions, and Grant seems to have fallen victim. “
I have not been a hundred yards from my door but once in the last two weeks,” he moaned in March. “I get so tired and out of patience with the loneliness of this place.” When no letters arrived from Julia he couldn’t tell whether they had been delayed or lost or she just hadn’t written. “I have had only one letter from you in three months, and that had been a long time on the way.… I sometimes get so anxious to see you, and our little boys, that I
am almost tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions, for a living where I can have you and them with me.” He wondered if she was forgetting him. “How do I know that you are thinking as much of me as I of you? I do not get letters to tell me so.” He blamed the army and his fate for their long separation, but he didn’t wholly absolve her. “I could be contented at Humboldt if it was possible to have you here, but it is not. You could not do without a servant, and a servant you could not have. This is too bad, is it not? But you never complain of being lonesome so I infer you are quite contented.” A recent dream made him worry the more. “I thought you were at a party when I arrived, and before paying any attention to my arrival you said you must go; you were engaged for that dance.… If I should see you, it would not be as I dreamed, would it, dearest?”

Additional weeks passed with no letters, and he grew more miserable. “I do not feel as if it was possible to endure this separation much longer,” he wrote. “By the time you receive this, Ulys will be nearly two years old and no doubt talking as plainly as Fred did his few words when I saw him last. Dear little boys—what a comfort it would be to see and play with them a few hours every day!”