In an April 12 story in our Sunday Life section, Columbian reporter Tom Vogt wrote of an astonishing number of Civil War officers — Union and Confederate — who served at Vancouver either before or after the war.
The most famous, of course, was Ulysses S. Grant, a former supply officer who re-enlisted after the start of the war and rose to command the troops who defeated Robert E. Lee.
A 30-year-old with the rank of brevet captain, Grant arrived here on Sept. 20, 1852, as a quartermaster with the 4th Infantry. He was just starting to grow his famous beard. According to HistoryLink, an online encyclopedia of Washington history, Grant enjoyed his time here. He spent his free time playing cards, socializing with other officers and taking long horseback rides out to Fourth Plain or along the Columbia River.
In his “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant,” he recalls that inflation was rampant along the Pacific Coast then, during the later years of the California gold rush.
“It would have been impossible for officers of the army to exist upon their pay,” he wrote, if they hadn’t been able to pay New Orleans wholesale prices for goods purchased at the post commissary.
As for local wages, “A cook could not be hired for the pay of a captain,” Grant wrote. “The cook could do better.”
With prices so high, “I with three other officers concluded that we would raise a crop for ourselves, and by selling the surplus realize something handsome. I bought a pair of horses that had crossed the plains that summer and were very poor. They recuperated rapidly, however, and proved a good team to break up the ground with.
“I performed all the labor of breaking up the ground while the other officers planted the potatoes. Our crop was enormous. Luckily for us, the Columbia River rose to a great height from the melting of the snow in the mountains in June, and overflowed and killed most of our crop. This saved digging it up, for everybody on the Pacific Coast seemed to have come to the conclusion at the same time that agriculture would be profitable. … The only potatoes we sold were to our own mess.”
Grant also mentioned the Native American population around Vancouver was rapidly dying as a growing white settlement brought their diseases to the region.
“The measles and the small-pox were both amazingly fatal,” Grant wrote. “During my year on the Columbia River, the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially.”
Grant’s posting in Vancouver ended in the fall of 1854, when a death in Humboldt Bay, Calif., opened a captain’s position, and Grant was promoted to it.
Incidently, he never lived in the building on Officers Row that bears his name today. In those days, the Grant House served as a regimental headquarters. Its original log walls can still be seen in a rear hallway of the restaurant.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
