Empty Mansions

push the population of Los Angeles to 50,000 by 1890 and then to 100,000 by the turn of the century.
    The Clark business empire was spreading far beyond its roots in Butte. The United Verde mine in Arizona was the biggest moneymaker. W.A. also owned all or part of one of the largest coffee plantations in Mexico; the Colorado Smelter; coal lands in Wyoming; the United States’ largest lead mine in Idaho; other mines in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; thousands of head of cattle; and Shoshone Falls (“the Niagara of the West”) on the Snake River in Idaho, where in 1883 he built a ferry and a tourist hotel.
    The Clark family was no longer centered in Montana. By 1890, all five of W.A.’s sisters had settled in Los Angeles.His brother Ross soon followed. After W.A. was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1899, then moved to New York, the only remaining Clarks in Montana were his two grownsons, Charlie and Will. Even that connection wouldn’t last long, with both sons moving to California by 1907. Although the Clarks still had major mines and other enterprises in Montana, they had become absentee landlords.
    W.A. found new investment opportunities wherever he went, and in Los Angeles he went into business again with his brother Ross. Although Joseph died in 1903, Ross was W.A.’s loyal and effective associate for the rest of their lives. W.A. had groomed his brothers in careers that enabled both of them to become very wealthy via their separate enterprises. In the 1890s, they bought land between Los Angeles and its southern neighbor, Long Beach, ten thousand acres they named theMontana Ranch. By 1897, they had planted a thousand acres in sugar beets and had built a state-of-the-art sugar refinery in Rancho LosAlamitos. W.A. saw a grander future in Los Angeles than sugar beets. He and Ross entertained the idea of getting into the steamship business.

    W. A. Clark is pictured here in Los Angeles with most of his siblings, as well as other relatives. This was in 1908, a year after he left the U.S. Senate. He had opened the railroad connecting Los Angeles and Salt Lake City in 1905. W.A., age sixty-nine, stands second from the left. His second family, including two-year-old Huguette, is not in the picture. See the appendix on this page for a key to people in this photo.
( illustration credit3.2 )
    In 1900, W.A. unveiled an ambitious plan. He acquired several small railroads in the Los Angeles area as the nucleus of a major new rail line connecting San Pedro, which served as the tiny port for Los Angeles, with Salt Lake City, stretching through a thousand miles of desert. W.A. announced that he was putting $25 million into developing the railroad as the last major link in the rail grid that covered the West. At the time, the shortest rail route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was by way of San Francisco. Clark’s railroad would shorten the trip by four hundred miles. The name of the new line was a mouthful: the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad, often abbreviated as the Salt Lake Route. Informally, it was known as the Clark Road.
    This may be the only example in history of an individual financing an entire railroad of significance out of his own pocket. Clark sought to issue bonds through the New York banks, but the response was less than enthusiastic. A railroad to Los Angeles was inevitable, but Los Angeles, still less than one-third the size of San Francisco, was not yet the business center of the West Coast. And there was competition, with the Union Pacific planning its own line to Los Angeles. W.A. replied, “Very well then, gentlemen, I’ll build the railroad from my own purse, and I can do it from my income stream alone, without touching my principal.”
    The Clark Road sparked a bitter railroad war with E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific. The only efficient route was through a narrow gorge in southwest Nevada called Clover Creek Canyon, and there was room for only one set of tracks. While Clark and Harriman were fighting over the issue in the courts, their competing construction crews were battling it out in the dirt. In one skirmish, two hundred Harriman men pushed their way through Clark’s forces, “driving their horses back with shovels.” In another, Clark’s men scattered Harriman’s men into retreat with picks. Harriman and Clark tried to buy the loyalty of the opposing workers, raising wages from $1.75 a day all the way up to $2.50.
    The two owners soon settled the railroad war by merging their