Empty Mansions (6 page)

Though often chosen as a leader because of his intelligence, resolve, and deep pockets, he was not blessed with a magnetic disposition. W.A. was introverted and extremely private, a closemouthed man who acted as if he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. If people didn’t like what he did, they were wrong. And yet he did give a damn about some things, including family, art, and social prominence. He was a seeker of public attention, not a great orator but a persistent one.
He
cheerfully took center stage to lead the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at public events and didn’t limit himself to the familiar first stanza.

In the pocket of his cutaway coat, W.A. carried two grades of cigars, fine ones for himself and lesser ones to give away.

“TO BETTER MY CONDITION”
 

W. A. C
LARK COULD HONESTLY SAY
he rose from a log cabin to the most magnificent mansion on Fifth Avenue, a handy trajectory in America’s tradition of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. Yet W.A.’s beginnings were not so impoverished as he let on.

Will Clark, as W.A. was known as a boy, was indeed born in a four-room log cabin on January 8, 1839, but his grandfather owned a 172-acre farm in a remote corner of southwestern Pennsylvania called Dunbar Township. That’s southeast of Pittsburgh, about two miles outside the small city of Connellsville, then known for its iron furnaces. This area was becoming connected to a wider world. One of Will’s chores was to
haul farm produce into town to sell to travelers
who were leaving by flatboat on the Youghiogheny River, which led to the Monongahela, then the Ohio, and westward into the expanding nation.

Those were hard times. The nation had fallen into a seven-year economic depression beginning with the panic of 1837. It was not easy to see that the world was on the cusp of the second industrial revolution, when America would begin to take its place as a great power. In 1838, the year before W.A.’s birth, Samuel Morse demonstrated the first long-distance telegraph. A year after his birth, the first customer bought one of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reapers for harvesting grain. The number of stars on the American flag had doubled from the original thirteen, reaching twenty-six with the addition of Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan in 1837. The people of Dunbar Township were buying their first books written by Americans. Will’s father had obtained an account of the westward journey fifty years earlier by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (no relation).

“The scenes of my joyous childhood,” W.A. reminisced some seventy-five years later, were “outlined then by a very limited horizon. Nevertheless, I can recall ambitious speculations engendered in my mind when on winter evenings my father read the thrilling adventures
of Lewis and Clark’s explorations.… This had the effect of strengthening my preconceived but ill-defined idea of adventure. And I recall telling my mother one day at luncheon hour, when I had returned from hoeing corn, and the weeds were really bad, that when old enough I would seek my fortune in the great West.”

During his later years, W.A. engaged the British School of Heraldry to trace his ancestry, with results he had the good humor to say were disappointing, for no famous people were found in his lineage. W.A.’s parents were of
Scotch-Irish heritage,
^*
a group that arrived in America with little in possessions aside from the Calvinist beliefs of their Presbyterian Church, pride in their work ethic, and the ability to distill a good grade of whiskey. The Clarks had come to Pennsylvania after the American Revolution from county Tyrone in the north of Ireland. W.A.’s father, John, was born in Dunbar in 1797, a few months after George Washington handed the presidency to John Adams, ensuring that America would not return to monarchy. W.A.’s mother, Mary Andrews Clark, was descended from Huguenots, French Protestants who emigrated from France to Scotland to escape religious persecution and then moved on to Ireland and America. W.A.’s red hair was inherited from his mother and shared by all his siblings.

A large family was necessary to work a farm, and John and Mary Andrews Clark had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Their first child was a girl, Sarah Ann, born in 1837 and named for Mary’s mother. A little over a year later, on January 8, 1839, came William Andrews, or Will.
^†
His sister Elizabeth, also known as Lib, described in a memoir the family’s tiring but joyous farm life:

Will’s schooling was limited to three months in the winter, because farmwork came first. The Clark children attended the public school, Cross Keys, in Dunbar. As the two oldest, Sarah and W.A. had an advantage over the younger children, going on at age fourteen to Laurel Hill Academy, a selective private school at the Presbyterian church in town. Such academies offered a meager college preparation course: a little algebra, basic Latin, a taste of history and literature, and public speaking.

The Clarks were not in that log cabin for long. With money Will’s father made mostly from harvesting trees, they moved into a larger wood-frame farmhouse on the property. When Will was about eleven,
he helped his father build a handsome, two-story Federal-style brick residence, which stands today after
more than 160 years.

John Clark passed on to his children great energy. He was proud of his fruit trees, prouder still of being a Presbyterian elder for forty years, and he was an advocate of hard work and fair dealing. Mary Andrews Clark gave her children boldness, ambition, and kindness. “
Such good common sense,” sister Elizabeth said of their mother, “such beauty of body and soul, such refinement, very religious in a tolerant way, progressive with a good sense of fun.”

In 1856, at age sixty-two, perhaps a dubious age to start a new venture, John sold the Pennsylvania farm and moved his family west, traveling more than seven hundred miles by rail, steamboat, and stagecoach to the deep, loamy soil of Iowa. Seventeen-year-old Will drove a team of horses by himself the full distance ahead of the family.
^‡

Will was “
about grown up,” Elizabeth recalled, “or at least thought he was.” His great shock of wavy hair was dark auburn, matching his florid complexion. He was growing a mustache, which was also red. His eyes were a bluish steel gray, with a piercing stare.

Choosing brains over brawn, Will taught winter school in Iowa in 1857, then enrolled in an academy in Birmingham, Iowa, the following year. In 1859–60, he taught in a
one-room school in Missouri. His sister Anna recalled W.A. telling of a man who took one look at the small, twenty-year-old schoolteacher and said, “
Young man, you are a failure.”

But W.A., as he preferred now to be called, was imbued with his parents’ ambition, striving “to better my condition.”
In 1860, he enrolled in the study of classics and law at
Iowa Wesleyan University, a Methodist Episcopal institution in Mount Pleasant. The tuition was twenty-five dollars a year. W.A. was taking classes both as a college freshman and a first-year law student, studying Latin, Greek, and geometry along with his legal contracts. He began a second year of the two-year course. In the spring of 1862, however,
he dropped out of school, abandoning any hope of practicing law. Suffering from gold fever, an affliction sweeping the nation, he decided he was not cut out to “
sit around in offices and wait for clients.”

W.A. was by no means the first of the tens of thousands of men who traveled west in search of El Dorado. Gold had been found in 1848 in California, sparking the 1849 gold rush. The latest strike was in Colorado’s Front Range, first at Pikes Peak in 1858 and then more substantially the next year near Central City and Black Hawk, about forty miles west of Denver. Moved, he said, by “a spirit of adventure,” W.A. went west to Atchison, Kansas. From there he drove a six-yoke bull team of oxen across the Great Plains to Manitou Springs, near present-day Colorado Springs, a journey of more than eight hundred miles over five months.

Something besides gold may have spurred W.A. and others westward. The first mortars fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, when W.A. was twenty-two years old, launched the Civil War.
The Confederacy began drafting soldiers in April 1862, about the time W.A. headed west, and the Union followed suit in March 1863.
After W.A. died, a biography written by a bitter former employee claimed that W.A. had fought with the Confederates before deserting, but this idea is contradicted by the available evidence. His home states of Pennsylvania and Iowa both stayed in the Union, and
no W. A. Clark of his age and county appears in any service roster, muster roll, or other record for either the Union or Confederate army. If W.A. had any Confederate sympathies, he kept them to himself. Years later,
he recalled hearing, near the end of the war, what he referred to as the sad news of President Lincoln’s assassination.

W.A. chose three books for his journey west:
Parsons on Contracts
, Hitchcock’s
Elements of Geology
, and
Poems of Robert Burns
, “the Ploughman Poet” and favorite son of Scotland. He went on to use all three, becoming in the West a sharp negotiator, a prescient judge of the mineral wealth underground, and a lover of the romantic arts.

BANNACK OR BUST
 

I
N THE SOUVENIR PHOTOS
of tenderfoot gold miners from Colorado in the 1860s, with six-shooters on their hips, there is no reason to think that twenty-four-year-old W. A. Clark stands out from the pack. Though he later listed his height at five feet eight inches to five feet ten on
his passport applications, his family and friends described him as
five feet five, maybe five feet six in his boots. He weighed 120 to 125 pounds, never as much as 130, with a pipe-cleaner physique, giving the impression of endurance rather than strength.

He also had a lot of nervous energy. He spoke confidently, pointing his long, thin fingers for emphasis. His gait was more a run than a walk.
His hands were constantly in motion. W.A. was a dynamo of alert intelligence.

In Colorado in the winter of 1862–63, he started at the first rung of the mining industry, as a hired hand on a small claim at Bobtail Hill, near Central City. “
With three others I helped sink a shaft with a windlass, to a depth of 300 feet,” he recalled. At most, he made three dollars a day.

News of another gold strike to the northwest spread through the mining camps of Colorado that winter. Gold had been found in what is
now Montana, on the banks of a mountain stream called Grasshopper Creek. “
The report got into the papers and caused a great deal of excitement,” W.A. recalled.

He and two prospector friends left Colorado with two yokes of cattle, a light Schuttler wagon, picks, shovels, gold pans, fresh vegetables, and the certainty that they’d get rich if anyone would. They were headed for a corner of Idaho Territory, for the high, desolate land that would become southwestern Montana. “
Our motto then,” W.A. recalled, “was Bannack or Bust.”

Starting out on May 4, 1863, while the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville was being fought in Virginia, W.A. and his friends traveled into the Wyoming Territory, following the Overland Trail to Fort Bridger, where they
were stopped by word of trouble with Shoshone Indians ahead on the Oregon Trail. For safety, they waited to join a long train of twenty-five covered wagons pulled by ox teams. The wagon train consisted of about one hundred people, including a few families with women and children.