Empty Mansions

how to field-test metal-bearing quartz with a blowpipe. He learned how to roast and smelt and refine the ore to remove the precious metals. His ore samples from his four claims in Butte tested out to be promising, particularly in copper. Ore that yielded 5 percent copper would have been rich enough to be worth mining, but the Butte samples were testing closer to 50 percent.
    • • •
    Copper was about to become the essential conductor of modern life. In 1858, the warships HMS
Agamemnon
and USS
Niagara
had laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable. In 1876, Bell would patent his telephone. By 1879, Edison would create the first commercially practical incandescent lightbulb. And in 1882, Eduard Rubin of Switzerland would invent the full metal jacket bullet, increasing the distance one could stand from a man while killing him.
    All of these advances in communication, everyday life, and warfare would depend on W. A. Clark’s copper.
    Back in Butte in 1873, W.A. began to explore the Colusa and Gambetta claims, shipping the copper ore by wagon to the nearest point on the Union Pacific at Corinne, Utah Territory. Transportation costs ate up most of the mining profits, so Clark built a smelter to use heat and chemicals to extract the copper locally, increasing his profits considerably. When the Utah & Northern Railway arrived in 1881, connecting Butte to the Union Pacific and valuable markets in the East and West, he was there to meet the first train.
    W.A. had an advantage over other entrepreneurs. As a shrewd banker, he had the opportunity to see which mining properties were profitable and which were undercapitalized. And if loans weren’t paid, he could foreclose. Although W.A. was not the one who discovered silver in Butte, he found a way into the business. In 1874, a man named Bill Farlin struck silver, and with a loan from Clark’s First National Bank of Deer Lodge, he built a stamp mill to process the quartz.When Farlin got overextended in 1880, Clark and his partners became the new owners of both the mine and the mill through foreclosure.Butte would produce 24,000 tons of silver, but its 11 million tons of copper would earn its nickname, “theRichest Hill on Earth.”
    If not already a millionaire, W.A. was well on his way. The thirty-seven-year-old banker and industrialist had an opportunity to see the future in 1876, representing the Montana Territory as its orator at the world’s fair in Philadelphia. Despite another worldwide economic depression, nine million visitors celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence by touring the latest wonders of the world: Bell’s telephone and Remington’s typewriter, Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.
    Fairgoers could walk up stairs inside a lookout tower to see the entire grounds of the Centennial Exhibition. The tower was part of an unfinished statue brought from Paris. The artist planned the statue as a gift from the French Republic to the United States, and was seeking subscriptions to pay for a pedestal. The work was to be a colossal metallic structure of a woman, fifteen stories tall, but all that was on display was her gigantic right forearm holding a torch and flame. The artist was Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculpture was
Liberty Enlightening the World
, and this was America’s first glimpse of its Statue of Liberty.
    With a fifty-cent ticket, W.A. could climb the stairs to the torch’s balcony, looking out on the industrial wonders of the world, touching Lady Liberty’s smooth French skin of copper.
A PALACE AND A TEMPLE

 
    B UTTE WAS NO LONGER a muddy, isolated town. As copper was changing the wider world, it transformed Butte. The same railroad that began taking copper out also brought culture in. By the end of the century, Butte’s Grand Opera House would be visited by Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt. Its Broadway Theatre, one of many in town, claimed to be the largest west of Chicago. W.A. was Butte’s dynamo, building its first water supply system, organizing the electric light company and the street railway, and owning
The Butte Miner
newspaper.
    He needed the finest house in town, particularly as he began to seek political office. From 1884 to 1888, he supervised every detail of the construction of a thirty-four-room red-brick Victorian mansion with a steeply sloping French mansard roof and dormer windows. Begun in a time of depressed copper prices, the home was W.A.’s testament to confidence in the copper camp. When