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Recollections of Grant.
Looking over my diary to-day, kept when a corporal in Company B, I find this half-faded entry: “This day our corps, the Seventeenth,
McPherson commanding, marched from the
Mississippi river up to
Fort Gibson.”
While I was standing by the pontoon bridge watching the boys cross the bayou, I heard somebody cheering, and, looking round, saw an officer on horseback in a major general's uniform.
He dismounted and came over to the very spot where I was standing.
I did not know his face, but something told me it was
Grant Ulysses Grant, at that moment the hero of the Western army.
Solid he stood-erect; about five feet eight, with square features, thin closed lips, brown hair, brown beard, both cut short and neat.
“He must weigh one hundred and fifty pounds; looks just like the soldier he is. I think he is larger than
Napoleon, but not much-he is not so dumpy; looks like a man in good earnest, and the rebels think he is.”
And this was the first time I saw
Grant.
I think I still possess some of the feeling that overcame me at that moment as I stood so near to one who held our lives and, possibly, our country's in his hands.
I heard him speaker: “Men, push right along; close up fast, and hurry over.”
Two or three men mounted on mules attempted to wedge past the soldiers on the bridge.
Grant noticed it, and quietly said, “
Lieutenant, send those men to the rear.”
Every soldier passing turned to gaze on him, but there was no further recognition.
There was no
McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged to. There was no
