A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [5]
When he recovered, Grover resumed work on the herd book. Grand Island, where Lewis Allen raised his cattle, is a thirty-three-square-mile land mass in the Niagara River that lies near the international border between Canada and the United States. In those days, Grand Island was reached by a ferry powered by horses on a treadmill. When Grover Cleveland stepped onshore, he found an island blessed with magnificent forests of white oak trees and swarming with geese, ducks, and other game birds. Hawks and eagles patrolled the sky. The water held an inexhaustible source of yellow pike, sturgeon, and bass. For someone with Grover’s appreciation of nature, it was a wonderland.
Lewis Allen’s farm produced more than three hundred tons of hay annually, and the island soil also proved ideal for fruit trees. Indeed, the first peaches to be grown in Western New York were picked on Grand Island. For the farmers who lived there, though, it was an isolating existence; and the wells produced bitter-tasting water high in sulfuric content, which made for “very poor tea.” This was a real problem considering that the inhabitants of Grand Island were of English, Irish, and Scottish descent. Settlers had to resort to building cisterns on their rooftops to store decent drinking water from rainfall.
Grover tended to his uncle’s cattle and kept the books. Eventually, more than 125,000 Shorthorns would be registered in the American Herd Book. But mostly, when he went to Grand Island to put in a full day’s work in the summer and fall of 1855, he ended up fishing with his cousin Cleveland. Even so, Lewis Allen must have been pleased with his nephew’s industry and work ethic because in November, when the first edition of the herd book was completed, he paid Grover $60—$10 more than the arrangement called for—for a job well done.
All this time, Grover kept pressing his uncle for those lawyer connections. Finally, Lewis delivered. Looking at the field of attorneys in the city of Black Rock, Lewis settled on Daniel Hibbard, a justice of the peace who lived on Breckenridge Street and had once served as postmaster. “Grover, you had better go up and see Hibbard,” Lewis told his young charge.
Grover showed up at Hibbard’s Black Rock office just down the street from the Allen house. The interview was a disaster. It seems that Hibbard treated Grover like a supplicant, or some hard-up urchin looking for a handout. Perhaps he questioned Grover’s credentials; after all, the teenager had no college education. Quick to take offense, Grover found Hibbard’s questions to be so “impertinent” he walked right out. When Lewis heard about what had happened, he generously let it go as one of those things. Grover, he was coming to understand, was a “high-spirited boy.”
Lewis tried again. He rode into downtown Buffalo and went to the offices of Rogers, Bowen & Rogers, one of the city’s leading law firms, with a notable history dating back to Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the United States. He wanted to have a word with the fifty-five-year-old senior partner, Henry W. Rogers. In the pecking order of Buffalo citizenry, Rogers ranked as one of the “solid men” of the city. He was witty and acerbic and an outstanding orator before a jury. His family Bible at home chronicled the full record of his distinguished line in America, going back to Thomas Rogers, the eighteenth of forty-one signatories of the Mayflower Compact. When Lewis asked Rogers if he would hire a new boy, the cantankerous Rogers was not very keen on doing this favor, even for Lewis Allen. Then he did say that he was always interested in having “smart boys” around. It was the opening Lewis was