U. S. Grant and Julia Dent were married August 22, 1848, when he was twenty-six, and began a life of affection and helpfulness, which grew brighter till the end came on Mt. McGregor. There was reason why the affection lasted through all the years; in the best sense they lived for each other. Those who find their happiness outside the home are apt to find little inside the home. Devotion begets devotion, and men and women must expect to receive only what they give. Affection scattered produces a scanty harvest. The winter of 1848 was spent at the post at Sackett's Harbor, New York; the next two years at Detroit, Michigan. In 1852, Grant was ordered to the Pacific coast. And now the young husband and wife must be separated; she to go to her home in St. Louis, and he to the then unsettled West. When Aspinwall was reached the streets of the town were a foot under water, in a blazing, tropical sun. Cholera broke out among the troops, as it had among the inhabitants, and a third of the people died. The crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, on the backs of mules, was tedious and trying. San Francisco was reached early in September. The gold-mining fever was at its height. Soon the troops passed up to Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, and a quiet and dull life began. Measles and small-pox were killing the Indians so rapidly that the gun of the white man was superfluous as an agent of destruction. In 1854, six years after Grant's marriage, despairing of supporting his wife and two children on the Pacific coast with his pay as an army officer, he resigned. His prospects now were not bright. Without a profession, save that of arms, he was to begin, at thirty-two, a struggle for support, which must have tested the affection of the woman who married the young officer in her hopeful girlhood. She owned a farm in St. Louis, and thither they moved as their home. He says of the farm: "I had no means to stock it. A house had to be built also. I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather, and accomplished the object in a moderate way. If nothing else could be done, I would load a cord of wood on a wagon and take it to the city for sale. I managed to keep along very well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague. I had suffered very severely and for a long time from this disease while a boy in Ohio. It lasted now over a year, and, while it did not keep me in the house, it did interfere greatly with the amount of work I was able to perform. In the fall of 1858 I sold out my stock, crops, and farming utensils at auction, and gave up farming."