While working as an engineer overseeing the building of a federal customs house in Galena, Illinois, 29-year-old Ely Parker dropped in to a store and met a dissatisfied ex-military officer, Ulysses S. Grant employed as a clerk by his father and bored out of his skull. The meeting was chance and friendly, but did not…
Tag: US Grant
God forbid that I should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses. ~R.B. Cunninghame Graham, letter to Theodore Roosevelt, 1917
US Grant was the greatest equestrian president. Everyone says so! “He was a great horseman and sat his horse as if he were part of the horse, all one figure. There was never a movement of any description that was not masterful and graceful. No one ever saw him disturbed in any way, that is,…
Books I’ve Known And Loved
Oh, to write fiction as well as Geoffrey C writes non! Imagine, you ancestry.com enthusiasts, finding a fun, troublemaker great-grandfather. Now imagine one who took down Wall-Street with his shenanigans. A Disposition To Be Rich kept me up late nights delighting in the exploits of a man with no conscience, but a fair bit of…
When Trusting Others Goes Terribly Wrong
“Without a word, the general turned and slowly stumped his way back out of the office, past the silent reporters, into the elevator that carried him upstairs to his office at the Mexican Southern Railroad. He stayed there all alone, till five o’clock, when he called for George Spencer, Grant &Ward’s clerk. “Spencer found him…
Books I’ve Known And Loved
A moving, sad and brilliant account of US Grant, this biography gave me such sympathy for Grant the man. So flawed, so misunderstood and so melancholy–I dream of writing fiction as satisfying. Don’t assume that because you’re not into politics or the military that this book would bore you. If you like exploring the complexity…
