Empty Mansions

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 ofScotch-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:
    What fun we had in winter too as well as summer! There were always the apples stored in the cellar and nuts we had gathered in theautumn.… I do not remember much about cooking by the fire as Mother had one of the first cooking stoves in the neighborhood. Most of the bread was baked in an outdoor oven. There never was anything in the world better than this bread with butter and homemade maple syrup or homemade apple butter!… We lived the outdoor life both winter and summer.… We had sleighing and coasting. We were often taken to school in a big sled with all the neighbors’ children.
    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 aftermore 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 aone-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