Empty Mansions

asked why he was building in Butte, he answered with loyalty, “Because I owe it to Butte. I have made money there.”
    This first Clark mansion was designed to confer social status, and it was easily the most expensive home in town, costing a quarter of a million dollars, or about $6 million today. The plaster on the walls was painted in swirls of gold in the entryway, bronze in the octagonal reception room, silver in the dining room, and copper in the billiard room. The woodwork was of fine oak, Cuban mahogany, sycamore, bird’s-eye maple, and rosewood. W.A.’s silhouette was sculpted above the mantel, and frescoes on the library ceiling represented the arts: literature, architecture, painting, and music. The Clark home didn’t have just a staircase; it had the “staircase of nations,” with each wood panel representing one nation of the world, leading up to jeweled-glass windows large enough for a church. On the third floor was a ballroom sixty-two feet long.
    The house had another special feature, one that was required for anindustrialist in that era. On the second floor, hidden in the second bedroom, known as the family bedroom, was a closet that served as apanic room. This closet had a call box that could be used to alert the police, the fire department, or the hospital. This was no extravagance: Wealthy men received threats of all kinds. In 1889, for example, W.A. received a letter threatening his life if he did not pay the writer $400,000. He didn’t pay, but he was prepared for trouble if it arrived.
    This first Clark mansion, now known as theCopper King Mansion, was located in an area called Uptown, somewhat distant from the worst smoke and fumes from W.A.’s copper smelter, which was called the tallest concrete smokestack in the world. The Butte hill was an industrial moonscape, denuded of trees. Copper was removed from the ore by roasting it in open-air heaps. W. A. Clark’s smelter smokestack dispensed sulfurous smoke packed with arsenic, a toxin despite its use by Victorian women to lighten their complexions. Sometimes the smoke was so thick that two people passing on a Butte sidewalk could bump into each other, as in the London fog.
    “I must say that the ladies are very fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called,” W.A. joked at the 1889 state constitutional convention, when he was the presiding officer, “because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a beautiful complexion.… I believe there are times when there is smoke settling over the city, but I say it would be a great deal better for other cities in the territory if they had more smoke and less diphtheria and other diseases. It has been believed by all the physicians of Butte that the smoke that sometimes prevails there is a disinfectant, and destroys the microbes that constitute the germs of disease.”
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    Kate Clark, the lady of Butte’s finest home, was known as a charming hostess, but she was not often at home. There’s no indication of a lack of affection between Kate and W.A., but she and the children spent most of the years 1884–93 in Europe and New York, seeking better schools and cultural opportunities. W.A., occupied with his business and political career, joined them for vacations, during which he spent much of his time beginning to build his art collection. Well into his forties, W.A.began to learn French and a smattering of German. The westerner with the bushy red beard nearly always wore refined, well-tailored black suits, dressing elegantly in the tradition of the boulevardiers of Paris. During an extended stay in the German cultural capital, Dresden, W.A. and Kate had their portraits painted. They stand proudly in these paintings, dressed as members of the haute bourgeoisie, W.A. with a silk top hat and knee-length Prince Albert coat, and Kate with an enormous hat and a skirt shaped by a prominent Victorian bustle.
    In 1893, while Kate was in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition,she contracted typhoid fever. Amid widespread concern about the poor quality of the city’s water supply,officials had assured fairgoers that the water at the fair was filtered or sterilized. (Officials also promised that summers in Chicago were “invariably cool.”) Kate died in New York on October 19. She was fifty years old.
    W.A. demonstrated his love for Kate by building her a $150,000 mausoleum in the form of a Greek temple. He chose a prominent hillside site, not in Butte but in New York