Empty Mansions

knew him he was a ragged, dirty, lousy miner,” Montana’s
Missoula Gazette
recalled in 1888. “But beneath those rags and gray-backs there was industry, energy, determination and brains, and behind all a resolute, fixed, determined purpose to succeed in the struggle for wealth and honorable distinction.”
    He had become a family man, too. Kate bore a daughter that January, named Mary Joaquina, usually called May or Maizie. She was followed by Charles Walker, or Charlie, in 1871. In 1874, an unnamed son died at only eight days old. Twin girls, Jessie and Katherine Louise, were born in 1875; the twin Jessie died at age two. William Andrews, Jr., called Will, was born in 1877, and Francis Paul followed in 1880. They were then a family of seven, with W.A., Kate, and the five surviving children.
    The Clarks were now prosperous, at least by Deer Lodge standards.The federal census of 1870 shows W.A. as a grocer and banker, with a net worth of $15,000, equal to about $275,000 today. That made him the fourth-wealthiest banker in Deer Lodge, a town of 788 people. The young family lived on a side street in a white frame house with five rooms. Attached to the house was a log lean-to that W.A. used for his assay office. The Clarks traveled the dirt streets in a littlehorse-drawn buggy.
    His wealth began to afford him social status, even a short-term military commission in an Indian war. During the Nez Percé War of 1877, W.A. raised three companies of volunteers and was assigned the rank of major. The fight was then taken over by regular U.S. Army soldiers, who drove Chief Joseph and his band of four hundred warriors off their ancestral lands, in violation of a U.S. treaty with the Indians. The soldiers captured the largest group of Nez Percé refugees near the Canadian border. Although W.A. saw no fighting, his son Charlie recalled watching his father ride off toward the Bitterroot Mountains “to sound the alarm about the Indians,” sitting atop a horse called Wild Bill.
    In 1872, W.A. gained greater respectability as a banker when he and his partners organized theFirst National Bank of Deer Lodge, capitalized at $50,000. They soon opened a branch forty miles to the south in Butte, Montana, a failed gold camp with the beginnings of a rebirth as a mining camp for silver and copper. Two of W.A.’s younger brothers, Joseph and Ross, eventually joined him in Butte. After they arrived, W.A. bought out his other partners. It was now solely a Clark operation. Although he may have been something of a loner, his feelings toward family members were deep and affectionate, generously inducting his brothers into his enterprises as soon as they were of age. Joseph worked in the mining operations, and Ross in banking.
    There was never any doubt, however, about which Clark was the boss. Their bank, for example, was not called Clark Brothers Bank.
    Nor was it W.A. and J. Ross Clark Bank.
    The name was W. A. Clark & Brother, Bankers.
ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD

 
    T HE STREETS OF B UTTE were unpaved and muddy when W.A. brought his banking business there in 1872. The town’s gold rush days had passed. Even if underground veins of silver and copper could be found, it would be hard to make them profitable. The town was four hundred miles from the nearest railroad.
    In that depressed environment, W.A. saw the right time for an investment. In 1872, the banker bought four old mining claims of uncertain value. They were called the Original, the Colusa, the Gambetta, and the Mountain Chief. To develop his investments, W.A. didn’t go at the opportunity the same way most men would. He had two obvious options: He could bear all the risk himself, starting immediately to drill into the Butte hill—he knew something about geology and mining, but he was not by nature a gambler. Or he could wait for others to develop mines nearby, letting them chew up their capital and reap the rewards. But W.A. was not much for waiting.
    So he created a third option: Recognizing that his single volume of Hitchcock’s
Elements of Geology
was not a sufficient education, he went back to college. Although thirty-three years old and married with two children, the banker took his family east in the winter of 1872–73 to New York, where he studied practical assaying and mineralogy at the School of Mines at Columbia College (now Columbia University). It’s hard to imagine that any student ever got a better return on his investment of a single year’s tuition.
    W.A. learned