Ulysses Grant's connection to St. Louis began with his arrival at Jefferson Barracks in September, 1843, as a new West Point officer. In 1848, he married Julia Dent of St. Louis County at the Dent family's city home at Fourth and Cerre Streets. After resigning from the U.S. Army in 1854, he began civilian life in St. Louis, farming part of the Dent estate on Gravois Road until 1858 without success. In January, 1859, he moved into the home of Harry and Louisa Boggs at 209 South Fifteenth Street, entered a real estate partnership with Harry Boggs, and walked on weekends to White Haven. In the spring of 1859, his family joined him in a rented house at Seventh and Lynch Streets in Soulard, and in July they bought a small cottage on Barton Street at Ninth, where they lived until April, 1860. After the Boggs-Grant venture failed and he narrowly lost appointment as Engineer of St. Louis County, the Grants left for Galena, Illinois, where he worked in his father's harness shop. Grant returned to St. Louis in May, 1861, while recruiting men for Illinois regiments, and on May 10 he was at the federal arsenal in South St. Louis as Union troops prepared to move against Camp Jackson, resulting in the first bloodshed of the Civil War west of the Mississippi. Later that year, after service in Missouri, he was summoned to St. Louis by Gen. John C. Fremont on August 28, 1861, and soon took command of Union troops in southeast Missouri. Because of Dent property that he would eventually own, Grant returned to St. Louis many times during and after his presidency. The account also follows the steamboat Nebraska, the last civilian vessel to travel from New Orleans to St. Louis before wartime closure of the Mississippi River to commerce, when Union gunners near Jefferson Barracks fired on it on May 21, 1861, before allowing it to continue after inspection. Among those aboard was Samuel Clemens, whose life on the Mississippi ended that month; after briefly joining the Missouri State Guard in 1861 and later becoming Mark Twain, he eventually encouraged Grant to write his memoirs and published them on favorable terms after Grant had lost his fortune, with the book's proceeds supporting Julia Grant after his death in 1885.
