Thursday, July 02, 2009

A brief follow-up to the query posted here last Saturday

-- whether our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, visited California suffragette Sarah Wallis's (Mayfield, now Palo Alto) farm in 1877: Mary Lyon, author of this article on Sarah Wallis for "California Historian," pointed me to several of her sources, including Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California (Santa Clara University, 2004), page 314.


Next, we'll see what Dorothy Regnery's article in The Californian offers by way of substantiation. Separately, I'll query Grant authority Brooks Simpson on the chance that he can resolve the question in one fell swoop.


2 comments:

Bob Pollock said...

Hi David,

The 1877 date still seems unlikely to me. Do you have access to the book the quote is from to see what the original source is?

Bob

dw said...

Bob, I agree. 1879 is far more likely, since we can place Grant in San Francisco then. "Unsettling the West" can be viewed in part at Google Books: http://tinyurl.com/me6hgj -- searching for the keyword "Wallis" brings up the p. 314 I excerpted for the blog entry.

The author gives an in-text citation for an article in "The Californian," a historical society publication. I've asked someone to check that back-issue for me, but may have to take a little drive to view it myself.