1858 Grant’s farming ambitions had foundered forever and he auctioned off his stock, crops, and farming equipment. This capped a four-year period of failure so excruciating that Grant skipped over it altogether in his Memoirs. He now paced the St. Louis streets, searching for work, obscure and invisible to the many people he passed, a bleak, defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude. “He walked about like any citizen,” said one woman, “but people made way for him, and he walked through the crowd as though solitary.”121
