slips in a hat, with the understanding that the child should receive
the first two names drawn from that receptacle. This resulted in
the selection of Hiram and Ulysses, and the boy was accordingly
called Hiram Ulysses Grant until the United States government
re-christened him in a curious fashion many years later. To his
immediate family, however, he was always known as Ulysses, which
his playmates soon twisted into the nickname "Useless," more or
less good-naturedly applied.

Grant's father moved to Georgetown, Ohio, soon after his son's
birth, and there his boyhood days were passed. The place was not
at that time much more than a frontier village and its inhabitants
were mostly pioneers--not the adventurous, exploring pioneers who
discover new countries, but the hardy advance-guard of civilization,
who clear the forests and transform the wilderness into farming
land. Naturally, there was no culture and very little education
among these people. They were a sturdy, self-respecting, hard-working
lot, of whom every man was the equal of every other, and to whom
riches and poverty were alike unknown. In a community of this sort
there was, of course, no pampering of the children, and if there
had been, Grant's parents would probably have been the last to
indulge in it. His father, Jesse Grant, was a stern and very busy
man who had neither the time nor the inclination to coddle the boy,
and his mother, absorbed in her household duties and the care of a
numerous family, gave him only such attention as was necessary to
keep him in good health. Young Ulysses was, therefore, left to
his own devices almost as soon as he could toddle, and he quickly
became self-reliant to a degree that alarmed the neighbors. Indeed,
some of them rushed into the house one morning shouting that the
boy was out in the barn swinging himself on the farm horses' tails