Chapter 5
Miracle’s Surprise Guest

About an hour later—after most folks were done with their fried chicken and baked ham and turkey and rolls and all the other stuff that had been brought, and the kids were off yelling and romping again, and most of the men were standing around with tins of coffee in their hands—we heard horses coming through town.

At first the sound was just in the background. As it came closer and closer, folks started turning their heads to look. The horses and riders were coming right toward us, and everybody got up and started making their way in the direction of town.

I didn’t recognize the name Grant at first, though after I thought about it, I did seem to remember hearing it someplace before that day. But at the time it was just a name, nothing more. My first reaction to the man leading the small procession of soldiers wasn’t on account of recognizing his name, but because of the look and bearing of the man himself.

He sat up tall and straight on his horse, a rugged, almost stern man with a short sandy beard. Wide-eyed sixteen-year-old girl that I was, I was impressed. I didn’t exactly fall in love, but I sure stared a lot. Then he got down off his horse and began shaking hands with the men, and there was lots of talking and laughing. The women hung back and the kids just gawked.

Most of us had never seen men in uniform before. The bright blue shirts and trousers, with yellow stripes down the side, and their yellow scarves and big wide hats—it was a sight to remember! I was already starting to think I should make another sketch of that picnic day to include the army riders and their horses!

Then the handbell started ringing again. I looked around and saw Sheriff Rafferty swinging it, trying to quiet everyone down. When he finally had folks’ attention, he shouted out so he could be heard.

“This here’s our special guest!” he called out loudly. “My friend, Captain Ulysses Grant! I’m sure most of you men heard of him from the fracas with Mexico a few years back, where he and I served together.”

A few cheers went up, followed by everyone clapping their hands in welcome.

“Well, Captain Grant wanted to see some of the gold fields in California, and I invited him up here to see ours.”

More applause and shouts.

“ . . . so after a bit we’ll all gather round and listen to what Captain Grant might have to say to us!”

The noise and hubbub broke out again. The captain and the eight or ten soldiers with him got down and tied up their horses. Several of the women went over and invited them to sit down and eat, and that didn’t take much persuasion! For the next thirty minutes the whole sound of the picnic changed. The high-pitched shouts of small children running and playing were gone. Now the kids were standing around just watching the men talk. I was real curious, but I didn’t dare get too close. I could see Pa in the center of the crowd, and once or twice I saw him talking to Mr. Grant himself.

A while later everyone started moving toward the edge of the meadow. The sheriff jumped up onto the back of the wagon Mr. Weber had brought, then Captain Grant joined him, and all the folks gathered around in front of the wagon and sat down on the grass.

“Well, folks,” the sheriff said, “the captain’s just been promoted from being a lieutenant in the Mexican campaign, and he’s now on his way to a new duty up north of here.”

He turned and spoke to Grant for a minute, then faced us again.

“He’s going with the 4th United States Infantry to be stationed up overlooking Humboldt Bay. That’s where he’s headed. But now I’m going to let him tell you what it’s like being a genuine army hero!”

Some cheers went up while Sheriff Rafferty stood back and Captain Grant took his place.

“I ain’t much at speechmaking,” he said, “and I ain’t going to get up here and pretend to be a politician! And if Simon here hadn’t saved my life once down in Mexico, I wouldn’t have agreed to do this at all. But I would like to visit some of your mines and like I said, I owe your sheriff my life, so here I am!”

He was a shorter man than I’d figured from seeing him on his horse, three or four inches shorter than Pa, who was six feet. But he was so stout and rugged that he seemed big. His nose was large and straight, his eyes firm and steady.

“What’s up north that they need an important man like you?” shouted out Uncle Nick. “I ain’t heard of no gold up there.”

“No gold,” he answered, “just Indians. There’s a lot of trees up there as good as gold, some folks think. So they built a fort to protect this little lumber port town, and I guess they figure I’ll be able to keep the Indians from burning it down.”

The talk and the questions went on for a while, mostly settling around the captain reminiscing about the Mexican War during ’46 and ’47. After a while I wasn’t paying much attention to the words anymore. I heard them off in the background but wasn’t focusing on what they were saying. Instead, I was trying to sketch the scene on my paper.

On one side of it I tried to draw the captain and his men as they had ridden up on horseback. I’d practiced a lot on horses, and could draw a decent one. But a group of eight or ten, with men on them, with people gathering around as they came, was harder. It wasn’t much good as a drawing, but at least it would remind me what the scene had looked like when I wanted to remember it. Then on the other side of my paper, I drew Mrs. Parrish’s wagon with the sheriff and the captain on it, talking to everyone sitting around on the grass.

Well, the day went on, the speeches, music and ice cream ended, and we didn’t get back to the cabin until nearly dark. The three younger ones were sound asleep in the back of the wagon even before we got there, because it had been a long, long day. I was wide awake though, and lay in my bed later for two more hours with my eyes open, thinking about lots of things, none of which was going to sleep! Mrs. Parrish had had her talk with me later in the day, as she’d promised at church, and I was so excited I could think of nothing else.

But before I say what she asked me, I want to tell what happened to the sketch I’d made. I showed it to Mrs. Parrish a few days after the picnic.

I knew it wasn’t a great picture. But when she saw it she got all in a dither over it. I figured she was just trying to make me feel good. But then she asked if she could put it up on the board outside her office, for the men to see who hadn’t been to the picnic or those from out in the hills who hadn’t heard about Captain Grant’s visit.

“And, Corrie,” she said, “why don’t you write something brief on the bottom of it. Just explaining the picture, you know. You have such pretty writing. It’ll make it all the nicer.”

Well, if Mrs. Parrish was trying to make me feel good, she sure was doing a good job of it! Who can turn away a nice compliment like that? I tried to act nonchalant about it, but inside I was happy that she liked my picture.

I asked her if I could borrow Mr. Ashton’s desk for a minute, seeing as he wasn’t there, and a pencil. She cleared a place for me, and then I sat down.

I wrote on the bottom of my drawing:

On September 17, at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, the mining town of Miracle Springs, California, was honored by a visit from United States Army Captain Ulysses Grant, shown here on his horse with his men. The visit took place during the town picnic in honor of the newly completed church and school building. Captain Grant spoke for a while to the people in attendance, also shown in this picture. The Captain was on his way to his new duty at Fort Humboldt, at the northern California lumber town of Eureka.

I couldn’t help adding at the bottom of that, but in smaller letters: Picture by Cornelia Belle Hollister.

It was sure no photograph. But we didn’t have photograph machines in Miracle like they did in Sacramento. Mrs. Parrish liked it all the same, and she marched outside with my picture and tacked it up with a hammer right then for the whole town to see.

Mr. Singleton saw it the next time he was in town and asked Mrs. Parrish who wrote the brief article on the Grant visit. I laughed when she told me about it—him calling it an “article”! And I do have to admit that he treated me a little more like a grown-up next time we talked about my working on something for his paper.

For the time being, about all that came of it was that every once in a while Mrs. Parrish’d ask me to draw something for her board—sometimes just for fun, sometimes showing the men some new mining contraption she had for them to buy. And always she’d ask me to write something to go along with the picture.

Pretty soon the writing part of it got to be more than the drawing part. She’d ask me to just write up a notice about such and such a thing for the board, with no picture. And by the time she thought about printing up a little flyer about her company, well I guess I was the natural one she thought about to do most of the writing for it, even though she told me what to say.

So as it turned out, my first chance to see my words in a real newspaper was in an advertisement for the Parrish Mining and Freight Company. And by the time Mr. Singleton and I talked again about real article-writing, he’d gotten used to my being someone who could write a little, even if up until then it had just been little advertisements.

Captain Grant, I read later in one of the San Francisco papers, hated the cold and wind and rain and fog at Fort Humboldt so much that he got despondent, and some folks said he started drinking real bad. The Alta article in 1854 ended by saying, “Captain Ulysses Grant resigned at thirty-two years of age. He has now left the army, apparently for good, and returned to his family in Ohio.”

Ever since his first visit to Miracle, whenever I saw news about Mr. Grant, I copied it down. And, of course, he didn’t stay out of the army forever, but came back to become one of President Lincoln’s generals in the Union army. But I didn’t know that would happen when I read of his resignation in the Alta in 1854, and the news made me sad.