Grant’s Memoirs contain a very famous passage, when he talks about his first near-encounter with a Civil War enemy.  The enemy was Brig. Gen. Thomas Harris of the Missouri State Guard.  The place was near Samuel Clemens’ birthplace, the town of Florida in Monroe County.

Here is what Grant said:  “As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on….The troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view…I had never taken before; but was one I never forgot afterwards.”

We don’t think its any accident that Mark Twain wrote a short story in 1885 – the same year he published Grant’s Memoirs – that related Twain’s experiences in Northeast Missouri in 1861.  Twain’s story was published in Century Magazine and is called “The Private History of the Campaign that Failed.”