One visitor in particular, has held my interest over the course of this past decade. He was—and is—a military man and, when I met him he was royally sour he had arrived to late in California to see any action in the Mexican War. For just what purpose had he gone to West Point, anyway? And to graduate at almost the very top of his class to see nothing! No action! He did, however, have the curious distinction of being the commanding officer present to confirm the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill.

More recently, he mentioned me in his memoirs!

William Tecumseh Sherman paid me a visit in the summer of 1848, when I was newly married and he was a young man who had never known a comb. That other Tecumseh was also from Ohio. We were born mere months apart and not quite 50 miles apart in the same central region of the state. We each stood a full 6'1" and were aching for more than our fair share of adventure.

But if this long list of coincidences was unusual, one thing Sherman and I had in common failed to surprise me at all: neither one of us was immune to the charms of my wife.

[The fiddler perhaps strikes up "Loop #8, Soldier's Joy."]

She induced him to stay for an early supper; he accepted the invitation before the final syllable had left her lovely mouth. As we ate, Sherman raved about the Madeira chez Sutter—I shared his enthusiasm. He told me he had just about catalogued the entire cellar in his journal because he doubted anyone back East would believe it.

Sherman also, of course, raved about Charlotte's cooking, comparing it favorably to a point of reference I could not share, an establishment recently opened in lower Manhattan called Delmonico's. He went on for so long about the place, I told him he ought to write a guide; he gamely replied he would take that as a compliment coming from me.

"Darling," I said across the table, "can you imagine a feast that would put Sutter's banquets to shame? Shouldn't you like to dine in such an establishment, to taste such food?"

Sherman added that surely she would be the toast of the room!

His eyes glinted a soft, dark, mossy hazel as he said so, not the screeching, hell-reflecting black one might find in any Mathew Brady photograph of the man. His hair was a mess and the beard was short, equally red, and equally unruly, though he hadn't the moustache just yet (as was the unfortunate style of that decade).

The kindness in his expression jars me to recall. Though still in his 20s—exactly my age—his skin was prematurely weathered, as many a white man's was on the Frontier, but his nose—the beaky proboscis that cawed doom in so many wartime lithographs—his nose was oddly angular and just homely enough to be somehow disarming.

I choose that word with both the gravest sense of irony and the absolute certainty of the truth of the feeling it set off in me when he said to my young, California-born wife without the slightest hint of irony that she would be the most beautiful woman in all of Delmonico's—which, I was given to understand, was as good as being the most beautiful woman in all of Manhattan.