Empty Mansions

gallows frames, employing the dark humor of workers toiling in a deadly environment. But they are the symbols of Butte as surely as the Eiffel Tower is Paris.
    Butte is still paying for its copper past. The Clark Fork is today America’s largest Superfund environmental disaster site. The Clark Fork ends its 479-mile journey at the Pend Oreille River, where W.A. hauled the mail, exclaiming at the beauty, “The firmament sheweth His handiwork.” It begins that journey as Silver Bow Creek, near the Butte mines. Water and wind spread the copper arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and lead, from the mines and smelters of Butte and Anaconda more than a hundred miles downstream, killing fish and fouling drinking water.Remediation of the watershed has been under way for thirty years, at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. One can still find blue-green sediment alongside the river.
    Some locals lay more of the blame on Marcus Daly and his Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which remained in business longer and left more reminders. There’s “the Stack,” a massive brick smokestack built in 1919 and still standing in Anaconda, northwest of Butte, a relic nearly sixty stories tall and easily large enough to fit the Washington Monument inside it. Today the Stack is the centerpiece of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, a monument too toxic to allow any visitors close by.
    The successor to Daly’s Anaconda Company turned several Butte neighborhoods into an open strip mine, the Berkeley Pit, in 1955. After W.A.’s Columbia Gardens burned in a suspicious fire in 1973, the pit expanded, gobbling up the gardens so dear to W.A. and the community. The new owners, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), shut down the mine in 1982 in the face of foreign competition, but the Berkeley Pit remained, slowly filling with water contaminated with sulfuric acid, arsenic, and lead. Now it’s a massive lake, a Superfund disaster site with a viewing stand for tourists. Hundreds of migrating snow geese died after landing in the pit, so recorded gunfire is played at intervals to keep birds away.
    W.A. had his own smelter smokestack, the tallest in the world, spreading its arsenical debris far from his “smoky city.” Worse for his reputation, he moved to New York, selling most of his Montana mining interests to the Standard Oil men in 1910.
    “The cumulative sentiment here,” said Keith Edgerton, a professor of history at Montana State University who is researching a Clark biography, “is that he made a fortune off of the state’s resources in the freewheeling laissez-faire times of the late nineteenth century, prostituted the political system with his wealth and power, exploited the working class for his own gain, left an environmental wreck behind, and took his millions to other places to benefit a handful of others. And in some ways, the state has never really recovered from it all.”
    Clark never acknowledged any awareness of such resentments. He described himself as one of “those men, those brave pioneers who have come out here and made the wilderness bloom as the rose, and opened up these great mountains and brought their hidden wealth to light.”
THE GODDAUGHTERS, LEONTINE AND ANN

 
    W ITH ONE DAUGHTER DECEASED and the other occupied with her painting,Anna befriended other children, two goddaughters, who came to her apartment for weekend lunches and chamber music concerts.
    The first goddaughter, Leontine Lyle, was also known as Tina. She was born in 1926, twenty years after Huguette, and was the daughter of the family physician, Dr. Lyle, who had attended to Andrée and W.A. at their deaths.
    The second, Ann Ellis, born in 1928, was the daughter of the family attorney, George Ellis, of Clark, Carr & Ellis, a law firm that had represented the Clarks for many years.
    Anna invited Leontine and Ann, usually one at a time, over for Sunday lunches or private chamber music concerts. The girls would put on their party dresses and shiny black patent leather shoes for an afternoon among the Renoirs. Both goddaughterscalled Anna “Lani” (LAH-nee), which she fancifully told them meant “godmother” in Hawaiian.
    They ate in the formal dining room, with place cards in silver holders to mark their spots. Water was poured into crystal glasses from a Tiffany pitcher. Bread was served in a double-ended sterling silver barge engraved “W.A.C.” and stamped on the bottom with the Clark crest (the lion, anchor, and Gothic C).
    They loved Anna, both