Empty Mansions

mine their dry Jeff Davis Gulch, W.A. and his pals had to strip off about four feet of the dirt and rock with picks and shovels to reach gold-infused loose sediment near the bedrock. Then they had to haul the sediment half a mile in a cart they had built from the front wheels of their Schuttler wagon. The water of nearby Colorado Creek ran through their handmade sluice boxes, the tiered channels creating eddies that allowed the heavier gold nuggets and gold dust to separate from the dirt and rock, or tailings. The men lived in a cabin they built themselves, with a roof of poles covered with dirt, and worked through the summer and fall until October, as the early snows approached.
    They paid off their debts, sold their oxen, and had several thousand dollars each in gold dust to last them the winter in Bannack. “There I found a very lively place,” W.A. said. “The gambling houses were open, where they were running a Spanish game with expert Spanish women.”
    W.A. now had enough money for a warm coat. He wasn’t a fop, buthe was on his way to being a dandy. Long before he had a valet to tend to his wardrobe, he kept wearing one long coat even after he burned off one of the tails by standing too close to a campfire.
    Although W. A. Clark became known as the Midas who got rich in the mines, he actually made his first killing in eggs. As in gold rushes before and since, it wasn’t the miners but the merchants who had the best odds. A man might find twenty dollars a day in gold but spend twenty-five dollars on food, axes, and boots, not counting gambling and female company.
    The idea of merchandizing did not come to W.A. immediately. He began the winter of 1863–64 working for a hotel owner, cutting firewood at two dollars a day plus meals. “The third day I was caught in a fearful blizzard on the mountain, where myself and the horses lost our way, and came very nearly perishing in the storm. I concluded that this was not a good winter job, so I suggested … that we each buy a team and wagon and go to Salt Lake and take a look at the Mormons, concerning who we had heard many interesting stories, and to buy something appropriate to the mining camp.”
    After a ride of nearly four hundred miles into Utah Territory, the men saw the blocks of granite quarried for the Salt Lake Temple and heard preaching byBrigham Young. W.A. later met Young and recorded being “struck with the force of his mentality.” W.A. also observed that the Mormon whiskey called “Valley Tan” was “abominable” but that “many of the Mormon girls were very pretty.”
    In Salt Lake, he loaded up his wagon with flour, butter, tobacco, and eggs. He took a great deal of risk by investing in the eggs, paying a wholesale price of twenty cents a dozen and knowing they would freeze on the return trip north to Bannack. The men shoveled snow for seven days solid on the journey and saw the cattle of other travelers freeze to death in their yokes. When they reached Bannack, W.A. sold the eggs to miners for use in a brandy and eggnog concoction called a Tom and Jerry, each dozen eggs now worth three dollars retail.
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    On his way back from Salt Lake City, W.A. met a man who had gotten into a gunfight with robbers, including one robber suspected to be a mannamed Dutch John. A few days later on the trail,W.A. saw the body of Dutch John, who had been hanged, or, as W.A. put it, “suspended.”
    This was W.A.’s first contact with the Vigilantes, who carried out a series of executions after brief trials, clearing this part of the Rocky Mountains of a reputed gang of thieves. One of history’s best-known incidents of extralegal justice, the Montana Vigilante episode shows the danger of the times in which W.A. made his fortune, and the moral compromises sometimes required. There’s no indication that W.A. participated in the hangings—he was away on his moneymaking trip to Salt Lake when the trials and executions began—but he knew several of the actors in this Wild West drama on the American frontier.
    Montana was a mostly lawless territory. Although there were miners’ courts for settling petty disputes, the nearest courts of law were nearly four hundred miles away in Lewiston, Idaho Territory. Few of those who went west for gold planned to stay long. The aim of many miners was to make a stake and then head back “to the States.” Carrying their gold dust home involved a stagecoach ride from Virginia City to Salt Lake, a route