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 especially 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, inOregon 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; theIndians 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
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, inOregon 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; theIndians 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
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