Empty Mansions

Helena,” he wrote, “when I met numerous friends and acquaintances. Took board at the International Hotel. I was engaged reading among others ‘Pickwick Papers’ by Dickens.” He spent the next few weeks “at Helena amusing myself sleigh riding, attending theaters, reading, writing and billiards.”
    But Dickens and billiards were not the primary objects of W.A.’s vision. His diary entry for March 6, 1868, reads: “Sent a proposal to convey U.S. Mail from Helena to Missoula for two more years commencing July 1st, ’68, for the sum of $22,400 per annum.” That’s about $400,000 in today’s dollars.
    W.A. had no intention of hauling the mail through Indian country for the rest of his life, however. In the fall of 1868, he subcontracted out the mail delivery business and took a trip east. He boarded a mackinaw flat-bottomed boat at Fort Benton on the Missouri River. He told friends he was going to bring back a wife.
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    * Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish, has long been the standard name in America for this immigrant group, who were the product not of Scottish and Irish parents, but of Protestant families from Scotland and England who settled in the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century and then moved on to the United States.
    † Eight more Clarks were born in Pennsylvania: John Reed, who died in infancy; Joseph Kithcart; Elizabeth; Margaret Johnson, who died in infancy; Mary Margaret; James Ross; George; and Anna Belle.
    ‡ They settled in Van Buren County, near the Missouri border and the Des Moines River village of Bentonsport. The youngest child, Anna Belle, was only six months old. In Iowa, three-year-old George died of whooping cough, and the last child, Effie Ellen, was born. Known as Ella, she was the grandmother of co-author Paul Newell.
    § Named for William Clark (no relation), one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806.

KATE

 
    W.A . HAD SET OFF down the Missouri, intent on seeing a childhood friend back in Pennsylvania. He recalled a girl with dark brown eyes and curly brown hair “who was dear to me when we were children together.” In the fall of 1868, the flat-bottom boat W.A. had boarded at Fort Benton docked in Sioux City, Iowa. There W.A. visited with his parents. He then rode by rail back to Pennsylvania to see this childhood friend. At age twenty-nine, he took his mother along for the courting.
    The courting began in an Odd Fellows Hall in Connellsville, where W.A. asked Katherine Louise Stauffer to a dance. Brown-eyed “Kate” was no longer a girl, but a beautiful, bright young woman of twenty-four. W.A., a worldly veteran of the western mines, Indian territory, and freewheeling commerce, “wooed and won” her. On the morning of March 17, 1869, they were wed at her parents’ large brick house in Connellsville, where her father was a prosperous businessman. A minister of the Church of Christ performed the ceremony. After a morning breakfast reception, everyone went uptown to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The couple boarded a train heading west, stopping in St. Louis for a working honeymoon, as W.A. bought goods to ship west. They continued by train and stagecoach totheir new home, the mining camp of Helena, Montana. When they arrived, they discovered that most of Helenahad been destroyed by a fire. The newlyweds set up housekeeping in a friend’s spare bedroom.

    W. A. Clark’s first wife, Katherine Louise “Kate” Stauffer Clark, a childhood friend from Pennsylvania.
( illustration credit3.1 )
    In addition to a new wife, W.A. had a new business venture. Time and again, he showed great adaptability, switching businesses and cities in search of greater profit. In partnership with a Missouri merchant, he had formed a wholesale mercantile business in 1868.Donnell & Clark shipped groceries and eastern goods to Helena, Montana, by river, rail, and bull or mule teams—a lot of effort for very little profit. After a rough season of drought and poor sales, they consolidated the business in Deer Lodge, a growing town to the west of Helena, in cattle and mining country, and added a third partner, becoming Donnell, Clark & Larabie. In 1870, they adapted to circumstances again, whittling their business down to its most profitable element, banking, which was mostly the business of making the rounds of mining camps, assaying and buying gold dust.
    W.A. was shrewd in business, but he was known, like his father, for fair dealing. “When we first