Grant: A Novel (16 page)

B
ENJAMIN LOUIS EULALIE DE BONNEVILLE—NAME LIKE
sweet French brandy, fairly curls around your flat American tongue, does it not?

Eulalie de Bonneville was born in Paris in 1796—an eighteenth-century man by the skin of his teeth. His family fled Napoleon for the New World shortly after his birth, and the boy, without much schooling or influence, somehow ended up at West Point, class of 1815; somehow after that was assigned, despite manifest incompetence, to lead an exploring party through fur-trap and Indian country, up the Columbia River to Hudson’s Bay, object: Fort Vancouver.

Never mind that he got so completely lost that he never managed to find Vancouver; or that he got lost again in the next few years, repeatedly, in the Cascade Mountains and then the Rockies, and only emerged into dim mediocrity when he fought alongside
Scott in the Valley of Mexico. Bonneville had the comic French touch for strutting self-display. He refused to wear military headgear, sported instead an enormous stiff white beaver stovepipe hat that made him look tall and imposing, not short and bald; he sought out newspaper reporters to write about his supposed adventures, including the nostalgic rumor that he was secretly the illegitimate son of the Marquis de Lafayette. That fat-bottomed New York–Dutch journalist Washington Irving swallowed his story whole and wrote a book that made our Frenchman famous. Last time I looked, a grateful and gullible nation had even named some arid, godforsaken stretch of scrub desert after him, out near the Great Salt Lake.

But in the year 1852 Bonneville was still in the army, not on the maps, a flap-jowled, petulant little infantry lieutenant colonel; and much to his disgust and dismay one fine day in the spring of that pleasant year he was put in charge of the U.S. Fourth Infantry, Sackets Harbor, New York, and ordered to take it at once across the Isthmus of Panama and up the Pacific coast to California.

Now this was welcome news to Lieutenant Grant. California was in the grip of a gold-and-land rush such as never had been seen, the place was one great big golden throbbing nerve, and the army was frantically needed to keep the Indians and displaced Mexicans calm and maintain a semblance of general order. Opportunities for promotion here. And if not promotion, numerous soldiers sent to California had already dropped out of rank, bought a pickax and a pan, and struck it rich, and as long as I have known Grant he has entertained the fantasy that sooner or later he too will stub his toe on a rock or scratch at some dirt and likewise strike it rich.

Add to that the fact that life at Sackets Harbor had become as blank as a bowl of water.

The drawback was that Julia was in the family way again and she and the baby boy couldn’t go with him. And the second drawback was that Colonel Bonneville for unknown reasons took an instant, permanent, and querulous dislike to Grant and tried to have him demoted from his regimental quartermaster post. (Flamboyant people, Sherman excepted, often don’t like Grant.) The other officers protested: Grant was quiet and inconspicuous but he got his job done. Bonneville waved his hand airily, Frenchily. All right, then let the quartermaster work out how to
transport seven hundred soldiers and a hundred or so wives and children on a steamship built for three hundred and fifty, let the quartermaster manage the trip.

The quartermaster built a set of clever berths and bunks on the outer decks, measured and paced and sawed and hammered and actually squeezed them all aboard. Bonneville snorted, disappeared into his own private cabin. On July 5th, the U.S. Fourth Infantry cruised out of New York harbor and set off down the Atlantic toward the Gulf of Mexico.

I happened one day at City Point, Virginia, summer of 1864, to make the acquaintance of the former captain of that little paddle steamer, an elderly party named J. Finley Schenck, then employed on the army hospital ships that crawled up and down the James. Schenck remembered that Quartermaster Grant, if you ever got past the diffidence and shyness, was a thoughtful but high-strung man; talkative, not phlegmatic. Everything to do with the voyage devolved on him. Schenck wrote it up in a note for me—“Most conscientious. Grant never went to bed before three in the morning, after he had seen to everybody’s needs. He paced the decks and soothed people’s nerves; he smoked cigars eternally. I told him the first day if he needed a drink to stop by my cabin anytime. Every night after that, after I turned in, I would hear him, once or twice, sometimes more, open the door and walk softly over the floor, so as not to disturb me; then I would hear the clink of a glass and a gurgle and he would walk softly back.”

They docked at a town called Aspinwall, on the Gulf side of the Isthmus, July 13th, and stepped down the gangplank into a green, wet, and scummy hell. I have a copy somewhere of Dante’s
Inferno
, translated by H. W. Longfellow, about which chiefly I remember that I was surprised that Dante thought Hades was going to be as cold as ice, not hot as … Panama, I suppose. Nobody who hasn’t been there can imagine the heat, the dripping orange flame-colored sky, the daily equatorial rain that hits your bare skin like drops of scalding oil—they get twelve
feet
of rain a year in that part of Panama. The sidewalks in Aspinwall were all eight inches under water. You waded through mud and slime, mosquitoes, sandflies, snakes—the town was built on a stinking marsh where the railroad construction crews had hauled loose fill—up to the edge of the jungle. There the great but unfinished Panama Railroad waited, steaming and sweating, for its passengers.

Bonneville was no help. Took off his high beaver hat, wiped his jowls; climbed in the nearest railroad carriage and waited. Quartermaster Grant got them all out of Aspinwall without incident, twenty-five miles of rickety one-track vertigo, up the Chagres River to the end of the line. At a little town named Barancos they clambered into a fleet of dugout canoes,
bungoes
, poled by naked Indians and Negroes. At an even smaller town upriver called Gorgona, most of the able-bodied troops swung out of their
bungoes
and said good-bye to the civilians. According to the War Department’s plan the soldiers were to march twenty-five miles or so, straight from there to the Pacific and Panama City and a waiting troopship. Wives and children were to travel farther upstream to the village of Cruces, where the army had arranged for mules to carry them and the regiment’s surplus equipment down an easier path to Panama City.

What the army hadn’t foreseen was the absence of actual mules in Cruces.

Or the presence of cholera.

Here is what happens when you take sick with cholera.

First comes the diarrhea that wrings you out like a filthy rag. Then vomiting, violent and constant. After that, cramps begin in the legs and torture their way up to the belly. Then a thirst like burning sand starts in your throat. Your skin turns blue toward the end, your voice gives way to a hoarse, gagging croak that the medics call “vox cholerica.” Healthy on Monday, sick on Tuesday; dead and buried Wednesday.

The promised mules of Cruces had all been hired away earlier, free-market style, at inflated prices to California-bound miners coming through first. The best that Grant could do was to round up what few beasts remained, at double the authorized prices, and find some native bearers who would carry boxes or sling canvas hammocks between their shoulders for the weakest women and children. And even this took time. The army buried some of their number right at Cruces. At the end of a week, when everybody and everything that could be hired was hired, Grant gathered them all at the edge of the village. One hundred and twenty guards, women, children. They started off single file, heading west.

A two-day trip, normally. In July, a walking, sweltering, endless nightmare. The jungle crowded in like a hot green blanket. The sides of the path, one-mule wide, were on fire with flowers.
Monkeys and parrots screeched and chattered overhead in the coconut palms. Where there was water it was covered with thick gray slime—Grant warned them not to touch it, told them to drink the colonel’s wine or nothing, but such was the heat that few listened. When the Americans stopped for the night they would wearily watch the native cooks chewing sugarcane, then spitting into a pot for sweetener. Rains came daily. Cholera victims would suddenly slide off their mules or tumble from their hammocks. Sometimes they buried their dead in the mire, in the roots and blossoms tangled along the foot of the path. Sometimes the native bearers would simply fling them back across the donkeys, or roll them like logs into a hammock.

More than a third of the party died before they reached Panama City—of twenty children, only three survived—and many more died soon after that. The idiot Colonel Bonneville had already hustled all his people aboard the troopship, even the ones who were showing sick. Grant and the regimental doctor were horrified, and Grant hurried back to shore, where he leased (unauthorized) the unused hulk of an abandoned clipper ship out in the harbor. The shore authorities had by now quarantined the Americans, so Grant and the regimental doctor carried the sick and dying over to the hospital ship in dinghies and then organized shifts of volunteers to tend them. Bonneville thought this was an excess of authority and threatened the doctor with court-martial (ignored).

Grant supervised the move and the fumigation of the troopship. He somehow also talked more medical supplies out of the Panamanians. And every other day for two weeks he took his turn with the other volunteers nursing the sick in their beds. An unexpected image: the Butcher of Cold Harbor sits down on a stool next to a dying soldier, feeds him his meal with a spoon, tenderly wipes his lips with a cloth.

On the fifth of August the survivors heard the anchor chains rattle up, and the nicely named ship, the
Golden Gate
, set sail for California.

Now flip the coin over.

From the tropical rainforests and cholera plagues of Panama, move north, above the forty-five-degree latitude line, all the way up to the present-day border of Washington State and Oregon. If you have an old map, slide your finger to the rugged little village
of Portland, five or six hundred dreary souls perched on a bare hill looking down at the fast-moving, iron-gray Columbia River (no shiny green jungle scum here, no dugout
bungoes
; just salmon and fog, fog and rain).

Fifteen or twenty miles farther north, stop at Fort Vancouver, the biggest army outpost in all the Northwest, a dozen makeshift buildings behind a wooden stockade and a fifty-foot watchtower with holes for cannon they don’t have; beyond the stockade, impenetrable spruce and fir woods, silent and dark as a cave. When Grant walks out on his porch in the early morning, a tin cup of coffee in his hands against the chill, his boots clump on rough wood planks. In the distance a horse neighs. Nothing else stirs. Down by the river a waterfowl slaps its wings a few times, then the silence drifts back like the fog.

Actually, Grant and the
Golden Gate
stopped first in San Francisco, for medical supplies, and Grant went ashore on leave for twenty-four hours to what was then, in the middle of the Gold Rush, without a doubt the closest thing to Babylon or Babel the planet had to offer.

In 1848 San Francisco enjoyed a quiet population of under twenty thousand people, mostly fishermen and timber traders. Then, over on a fork of the American River, a laborer named James Marshall bent down one afternoon and started to pick up gold nuggets, so they claimed, as big as a baby’s head. A year later there were a hundred thousand people in San Francisco, from every nation on earth, and Mars and Venus as well. In 1852, when Quartermaster Grant stretched his legs out on the Long Wharf, the city had been burnt down and rebuilt three times already, each time gaudier and grander than before, and people said it had reached a quarter million at least, with no sign of stopping.

The single day he was there Grant strolled along the docks and admired the polyglot
bagnios
and brothels and gold assay offices set up right among the ships. He took a carriage ride out past the hills the Chinese coolies were digging up and dragging down for landfill, all the way to the sand dunes that made up the western shore of the city. He won forty dollars in a faro house and spent the better part of it on drinks and a meal in one of those splendiferous and gaudy gold-blown hotels on Market Street, and if friends are to be believed, almost quit the military then and there—I say it again and again, nobody ever believes it. He looks
like the mildest, quietest little man in the world, no mystery about him, no steam coming out of his ears like Sherman, no show-off ways like “Old Brains” Halleck or that insane Young Napoleon George McClellan (about to turn up again one page later)—but Grant is a nervous, volatile person,
inside
. And outside, he craves excitement. Give him a plague to fight or an isthmus to cross—but routine bores him. Monotony drives him back in his shell.

What he got in Fort Vancouver was monotony squared. A room in a two-story house next to the wood-fence stockade. A quartermaster’s office with barrels for chairs and unpainted walls and order forms and account books and military purchase manuals. One lumpish day after the other of gray skies and gray rain and humdrum routine.

And he handled it about as badly as a man could do.

Once at City Point late in the war I remember watching from my tent while Grant and Lincoln tried to settle some matter of routine paperwork, about which neither of them was ever much good. Grant stood there emptying his coat pockets one after the other, each one a worse rat’s nest of crumpled papers and flimsies, while he tried to find his document. Meantime Lincoln had pulled off his old black stovepipe hat and was holding it up to look inside, where
he
filed
his
papers.

“From the kitchen where I worked,” Grant’s old Vancouver cook, a lady named Sheffield, wrote me, “I could see him every day walking back and forth on the porch, smoking and thinking for hours at a time, or else he would order his horse and ride till sundown by himself in the woods.”