Empty Mansions (11 page)
Authors: Bill Dedman
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 grown
sons, 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 the
Montana Ranch. By 1897, they had planted a thousand acres in sugar beets and had built a state-of-the-art sugar refinery in Rancho Los
Alamitos. 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.
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illustration credit3.2
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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 interests, with Harriman in the shadows and
Clark out front as president. It took a while for the news to reach their men, however, and even as the
two tycoons were shaking hands on the armistice and toasting each other, their men in the mountains were still battling over every inch of ground.
The Clark Road began operation in May 1905, with brass bands and gifts of flowers for the passengers slowing down the first run so much that it arrived in Salt Lake four hours late.
W.A. threw a rolling party, inviting Salt Lake notables, including two apostles of the Mormon Church, for a return trip to Los Angeles. The
Los Angeles Times
headline read, “Saints and Elders Greet Us—Handclasps for Our Salt Lake Friends.” The visitors wore red badges with this inscription: “We just arrived on the brand new track. You’ve a hot old town but we’re going back.” W.A. was honored at a banquet, with one of the visitors toasting him: “The two cities are wedded, and Senator Clark has provided the ring.”
• • •
In the Nevada desert, the Clark Road needed a maintenance point for switching railcars and storing water and fuel. W.A.’s men found a working ranch in the right spot, an abandoned Mormon missionary camp.
W.A. had more land than he needed after the railroad opened, and saw an opportunity for profit. In 1905, he subdivided 110 acres to create a small town of 1,200 lots. People came from Los Angeles on a special Clark train for the auction, held on May 15 in desert heat above 100 degrees. Bidders paid as little as $100 for residential lots and as much as $1,750 for the corner commercial lots on the main street, called Fremont. At the end of the second day, W.A.’s auction company had sold half of his properties, pocketing more than $250,000.
The missionary camp became Los Vegas Rancho (deliberately spelled differently from Las Vegas, New Mexico). Then it was Stewart Ranch. Clark called the new town Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite, but everyone else left off the Clark name, calling it Las Vegas, which eventually became the glittering gambling capital of the world. W.A. traveled to Las Vegas in February 1905, riding in the luxury of his new private Pullman car with its two apartments, a dining room for twelve, and an observation room finished in English oak and brass. He told the citizens they
would soon have a decent town with schools, churches, water, and roads. In 1909, a new Clark County was carved out with Las Vegas as its seat, one of the few lasting memorials to the Clark name.
Owner of the railroad that established the town of Las Vegas in 1905, W. A. Clark greets the town’s citizens from his private railcar that year. His company auctioned off the lots that became downtown Las Vegas, now in Clark County.
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illustration credit3.3
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• • •
From the time that his mother and siblings relocated to Los Angeles, W.A. visited at least once a year, generally staying in his mother’s Victorian home on South Olive Street, a few blocks from the current location of the Biltmore hotel and Pershing Square. He continued his visits after his mother died in 1904 and then threw himself into a philanthropic project there named for her, a group residence for young working women called the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home.
W.A.’s sister Ella had proposed that they create a memorial to their mother, in anticipation of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth coming up in 1914. W.A. said he preferred something practical, rather than a park or a statue. They agreed on building an affordable place where young, single women pursuing a career could live in a safe and wholesome environment. Now into his seventies, W.A. selected the site
on Crown Hill, west of downtown Los Angeles, hiring an architect and taking a hands-on interest in the design and materials, much as he had with his own mansions.
The Clarks donated the massive 150-room French château to the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which operated it from 1913 as a dormitory for stenographers, office assistants, saleswomen, dressmakers, nurses, artists. The rules were strict—no men allowed upstairs, no slacks or curlers at dinner.
After dinner at Ella’s home when W.A. would visit, the Clark family would tell stories while enjoying their dear departed mother’s favorite dessert,
île flottante
, or floating island, a meringue floating on custard.
Ella’s son, Paul Clark Newell, Sr., recalled years later those family dinners, and a demonstration of the power held by someone owning a railroad.
Among the more vivid recollections of my boyhood, growing up in Los Angeles in the early part of the century, were the occasional visits to our home of my uncle. During the years that I knew him W.A., as the family called the senator, came out to Los Angeles about once a year, usually in the fall, arriving in his private railcar on his own railroad. He came out from his palatial home on Fifth Avenue in New York, his private railcar linked to other rail lines, by way of Butte, and on to the connection point in Salt Lake City.
I remember his visits to our house most, perhaps, because of his eccentricities. On two occasions upon his departure he headed for the hall closet door, instead of the front door, which was considerably larger. This amused me, and suggests some absent-mindedness, resultant perhaps from his intense concentration of thought.
On occasions when he dined with us, following the saying of grace by my minister father, W.A. would remove from his vest pocket a small flask of whiskey, pour out two tablespoons full, and enjoy a drink. My parents and my aunts were all teetotalists, except for Aunt Elizabeth, who had joined her brothers in Montana in the early days.
On one of these visits, W.A. was relishing warm family reminiscences with his sisters, his brother Ross, and their spouses, when his valet appeared at the living room door, nervously to announce that the train W.A. was boarding for the East that evening had already been held up for an hour for his accommodation. W.A., in only
slightly disguised irritation, informed his valet that the train could wait. And wait it did for an hour or longer.
The train happened to be the evening departure of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, bound for Salt Lake City, to the rear of which was attached W.A.’s private car, and of which he was builder, president, and principal owner. It seemed obvious that to my uncle, being a railroad president was the ultimate power and glory.
I
N
J
ULY
1904, Senator W. A. Clark, one of the richest men in the world, sent a telegram containing an announcement so surprising, so incredible, that his own newspaper got scooped. The editor of
The Butte Miner
delayed publishing the news, fearing that W.A.’s political opponents had planted the preposterous story as a hoax.
W.A.’s telegram explained that he and his ward, Anna LaChapelle, had been secretly married in the Mediterranean port of Marseille. The wedding hadn’t happened that week, or even that year, but three years earlier, on May 25, 1901. On that wedding day, W.A. was sixty-two years old, and Anna was twenty-three. That must have been a busy year for W.A., as he was sponsoring the actress Kathlyn Williams and dealing with newspaperwoman Mary McNellis’s paternity suit, as well as the publicity over temperance lecturer Hattie Rose Laube’s campaign for an engagement.