Empty Mansions

be called, was imbued with his parents’ ambition, striving “to better my condition.”In 1860, he enrolled in the study of classics and law atIowa 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, andno 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 onhis passport applications, his family and friends described him asfive 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 isnow 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