San Francisco Municipal Reports.
San Francisco Municipal Reports, for the Fiscal Year 1864-5, Ending June 30, 1865. Published by Order of the Board of Supervisors. San Francisco: Printed by Towne & Bacon, 1865.
[together with:]
San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Year 1874-5, Ending June 30, 1875. Published by Order of the Board of Supervisors. San Francisco: Spaulding & Bart, Printers, 1875.
Two volumes; 8vo.; full navy morocco stamped in gilt; ornate spine design; edges gilt.
First edition, with three engraved folding plates. Presentation bindings, gilt-lettered: “San Francisco to Lieut. Gen’l. U.S. Grant” and “His Excellency U.S. Grant,” respectively, on the front covers.
After the Mexican War Grant spent four years shuttling back and forth between postings at Detroit and Sackets Harbor, New York. In 1852 the army sent him on a disastrous expedition across the Panamanian isthmus, during which a third of the soldiers, and many of their wives and children, died from cholera. He was tremendously relieved to return to San Francisco in August 1852, where he stayed four weeks before heading for his new assignment at Fort Vancouver, in the Oregon Territory. California and the West excited him.
In a letter to Julia he wrote, “There is no reason why an active energetic person should not make a fortune evry year.” The abundance of opportunities in the new state convinced him that “I could quit the Army to-day and in one year go home to with enough to make us comfortable” for the rest of their lives. Those exuberant first impressions soon soured after Grant’s transfer to dismal Fort Humboldt in northern California, in February 1853. Like many other army officers, Grant tried to supplement his income with odd jobs and small business ventures, and in keeping with his lifelong commercial losing streak, everything Grant touched in California turned to mud. A potato farm drowned in a flood. He found no buyers for a small herd of cattle and some pigs, but when he gave them away one sow produced a dozen pigs that fetched forty dollars each for the new owner. Several friends welched on their debts to him. Chickens were no more cooperative than the men and pigs had been: when Grant bought a truckload to sell in San Francisco, they all died en route.
These failures stirred up the monster of depression that periodically stalked Grant. Bleak spirits always led to the bottle and he was soon caught in a vicious cycle: he wanted to earn money to pay for Julia and the children to come west and stay with him; his failures insured more lonely days and nights in his bachelor room, more drinking, more depression, and more failure. “Liquor seemed a virtual poison to him, and yet he had a fierce desire for it,” said fellow officer Robert MacFeely. Grant loyalists have always argued that he never drank as much as his detractors claimed. He was a modest sized man, friends pointed out, who did not hold his liquor well and even small amounts had disastrous results. Yet even his most ardent defenders concede that Grant drank heavily during his bleak months in California. “All the rivers of alcohol,” biographer William McFeely wrote, “flow down from the Fort Humboldt days.” George B. McClellan saw him drunk on the street one night and never forgot it. The reputation he acquired in California dogged his career ever afterward.
The wild extremes of California were unnerving Grant. For every 49er that made his fortune there were dozens of failures, down and outers on the bum, leading wretched lives of decidedly unquiet desperation in the bar rooms, pool halls and dives of San Francisco. He saw himself shambling down towards them as one business venture after another failed, and his progress in the army stalled. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!” Grant wrote to Julia from Fort Humboldt. The infrequency of her letters heightened his distress, and he dreamt of her dancing with other men. “The state of suspense that I am in is scarsely bearable. I think I have been from my family quite long enough and sometimes I feel as though I could almost [desert and] go home.” He was careening toward a crack-up. Something had to give. On April 11, 1854 he resigned his commission, effective July 31.
These Municipal Reports from 1865 and 1875 could not have made for riveting reading. He likely had little interest in statistics on tax revenues and sewage disposal. The volumes may have stayed on Grant’s shelves as reminders of this desperate chapter in his biography. Perhaps, also, he wondered what would have happened if he had tried to make a go of it in the Golden State. Returning to the city after his post-Presidential world tour in 1879, Grant told a reporter that, “it had always been the dream of his life to live in California.”