Empty Mansions (7 page)

One of these three gold miners in Central City, Colorado, in 1863, would, by the end of the century, own banks, railroads, timber, newspapers, sugar, coffee, oil, gold, silver, and the most profitable copper mines in the world. William Andrews Clark, at right, was about twenty-four here.
“There was no lack of opportunities,” he said, “for those who were on alert for making money.”
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The trip from Denver to Bannack, through more than seven hundred miles of wilderness, took sixty-five days. From Fort Bridger they traveled over the Teton Range, up the Snake River, and across the Continental
Divide. Only fifteen or so of the party continued all the way on the Montana Trail to Bannack, others being diverted by news of gold in the Boise area. As a reminder of the constant danger on the trail, W.A. “
saw the newly made graves of several recently murdered emigrants.”

The evening before the Fourth of July 1863, their first night in Idaho Territory, the young men got into a keg of “old rye” whiskey and got to feeling pretty lively, dancing around the campfire. “
This we began after supper time,” W.A. recalled, “with rattling our tin pans, blowing an old horn, and singing occasionally a few strains of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ to which we had some very enthusiastic responses from the coyotes in the surrounding hills.” The young men called out for any Indians who might be listening to join them: “Come on, you red devils, we are ready for you!” Yet these brave young men were missing the real fight. The Battle of Gettysburg, with some 46,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, was ending in W.A.’s native Pennsylvania that day.

• • •

Despite his ambition, his energy, and his book-learning, W.A. proved to be no genius at prospecting. He described himself as naïve when he arrived in Bannack, where men were streaming out, not in, flocking instead to a new gold strike to the east at Alder Gulch. A group of men hiding from Crow Indians had happened upon gold there, swearing to keep their discovery a secret. That secret hadn’t lasted long.

“
We found some stampeders already on the way,” W.A. later said self-deprecatingly, “some of them afoot, others on horseback, and all we had to do was to follow the crowd.” All the claims had been staked out, and W.A.’s group wandered the desolate ridges, hoping to spot quartz veins with gold locked up in the rock, and searching the inside bends of creeks where gold dust might have been deposited. They found nothing promising, but a man named Baugh, for whom they had hauled some whiskey, did them the good turn of staking them in on his claim on a dry gulch, setting aside about two hundred feet for each man to work. An ex-Confederate, Baugh named the area Jeff Davis Gulch. When W.A. went into Bannack to buy grub and lumber for sluice boxes, used for separating gold from the auriferous sands, he was soon down to his last fifty cents. W.A. wrote:

His fortunes soon reversed. “
During our prospecting trip I had found a very fine pair of elk antlers, which I brought into Bannack, and for which Cy Skinner, who kept a saloon … offered to give me ten dollars, and this I readily accepted.” W.A. would never again need to ask for credit.

• • •

Sorting out gold on the surface, known as placer (pronounced PLASS-ur) mining, is hard work, and has been since before the Bronze Age, particularly as far from water as these souls were. The idea is to use water to separate the dirt from the gold. To mine their dry Jeff Davis Gulch, W.A. and his pals had to strip off about four feet of the dirt and rock with picks and shovels to reach gold-infused loose sediment near the bedrock. Then they had to haul the sediment half a mile in a cart they had built from the front wheels of their Schuttler wagon. The water of nearby Colorado Creek ran through their handmade sluice boxes, the tiered channels creating eddies that allowed the heavier gold nuggets and gold dust to separate from the dirt and rock, or tailings. The men lived in a cabin they built themselves, with a roof of poles covered with dirt, and worked through the summer and fall until October, as the early snows approached.

They paid off their debts, sold their oxen, and had several thousand dollars each in gold dust to last them the winter in Bannack. “
There I found a very lively place,” W.A. said. “The gambling houses were open, where they were running a Spanish game with expert Spanish women.”

W.A. now had enough money for a warm coat. He wasn’t a fop, but
he was on his way to being a dandy. Long before he had a valet to tend to his wardrobe, he kept wearing one long coat even after he burned off one of the tails by standing too close to a campfire.

Although W. A. Clark became known as the Midas who got rich in the mines, he actually made his first killing in eggs. As in gold rushes before and since, it wasn’t the miners but the merchants who had the best odds. A man might find twenty dollars a day in gold but spend twenty-five dollars on food, axes, and boots, not counting gambling and female company.

The idea of merchandizing did not come to W.A. immediately. He began the winter of 1863–64 working for a hotel owner, cutting firewood at two dollars a day plus meals. “
The third day I was caught in a fearful blizzard on the mountain, where myself and the horses lost our way, and came very nearly perishing in the storm. I concluded that this was not a good winter job, so I suggested … that we each buy a team and wagon and go to Salt Lake and take a look at the Mormons, concerning who we had heard many interesting stories, and to buy something appropriate to the mining camp.”

After a ride of nearly four hundred miles into Utah Territory, the men saw the blocks of granite quarried for the Salt Lake Temple and heard preaching by
Brigham Young. W.A. later met Young and recorded being “struck with the force of his mentality.” W.A. also observed that the Mormon whiskey called “Valley Tan” was “abominable” but that “many of the Mormon girls were very pretty.”

In Salt Lake, he loaded up his wagon with flour, butter, tobacco, and eggs. He took a great deal of risk by investing in the eggs, paying a wholesale price of twenty cents a dozen and knowing they would freeze on the return trip north to Bannack. The men shoveled snow for seven days solid on the journey and saw the cattle of other travelers freeze to death in their yokes. When they reached Bannack, W.A. sold the eggs to miners for use in a brandy and eggnog concoction called a Tom and Jerry, each dozen eggs now worth three dollars retail.

• • •

On his way back from Salt Lake City, W.A. met a man who had gotten into a gunfight with robbers, including one robber suspected to be a man
named Dutch John. A few days later on the trail,
W.A. saw the body of Dutch John, who had been hanged, or, as W.A. put it, “suspended.”

This was W.A.’s first contact with the Vigilantes, who carried out a series of executions after brief trials, clearing this part of the Rocky Mountains of a reputed gang of thieves. One of history’s best-known incidents of extralegal justice, the Montana Vigilante episode shows the danger of the times in which W.A. made his fortune, and the moral compromises sometimes required. There’s no indication that W.A. participated in the hangings—he was away on his moneymaking trip to Salt Lake when the trials and executions began—but he knew several of the actors in this Wild West drama on the American frontier.

Montana was a mostly lawless territory. Although there were miners’ courts for settling petty disputes, the nearest courts of law were nearly four hundred miles away in Lewiston, Idaho Territory. Few of those who went west for gold planned to stay long. The aim of many miners was to make a stake and then head back “to the States.” Carrying their gold dust home involved a stagecoach ride from Virginia City to Salt Lake, a route that in 1863 was plagued by robbers.

W.A. was acquainted with the suspected leader of the robbers, a gunslinger named Henry Plummer, who also happened to be the newly elected sheriff. Most evenings in Bannack, W.A. would play billiards for an hour, then meet his friend Lloyd Selby at a saloon. Selby preferred to play cards, and his game was Old Sledge, akin to whist, sometimes called All Fours or Seven Up.

“One evening I went to get Selby to go home and found that he was drunk,” W.A. recalled. “He had a large amount of gold dust with him in buckskin pouches. I was wearing a blue army overcoat and had my gold in my boots. A pouch of gold dust lay on the table. Henry Plummer, who was present, reached over and picked it up. Thereupon Selby pulled out his revolver and caressing it said, ‘There’s a friend that has never forsaken me.’ Plummer laid down the pouch. Somehow I got Selby home.… Ever since that night
I have thought it a mystery that we were not robbed on the way home.”

After Plummer and his associates were hanged, W.A. came to know many of the Vigilante leaders, who included the leading men of that territory. In early 1864, he became a Mason, joining the ancient fraternal
organization’s lodge in Virginia City, where
the Masonic leader was also the president of the first group of Vigilantes. As the state lodge’s longtime secretary, Cornelius Hedges, told it, “
We will not say that all the Vigilantes were Masons, but we would not go astray to say that all Masons were Vigilantes.” W.A. would rise in 1877 to be the state grand master, or president, his first elected position of leadership.

Although the Vigilante trials swiftly established law and order in the region, their actions are controversial today. The guilt or innocence of Sheriff Plummer is still debated, and many of the later executions, carried out by successors to the original Vigilantes, may have been little more than murder.

But to W.A. and his friends, the morality of the early Vigilante trials was clear. “
They had undoubted proof,” he told a reunion of the Montana Pioneers in 1917, “of the criminal action of all these men.” In a speech the year before in Virginia City, at a Masonic reunion, W.A. joked about the violent period, suggesting that some of his listeners had been far more active participants: “
While I had considerable knowledge of the bandits then in the country … I did not personally know as much about them as some of you people did.” He praised the Masons, among other early members of the Vigilantes, for making the uncivilized Montana Territory safe so honest men like him could earn a living.

“I BEGAN TO REALIZE MY SITUATION”
 

“T
HERE WAS NO LACK
,” W.A. wrote in his journal, “of opportunities for those who were on the alert for making money.”

W.A.’s striving and a good head for figures began to pay off as he bought and sold in dizzying fashion whatever a miner might need. He “
traded tobacco at ten dollars a pound for boots at sixteen dollars a pair,” earning from the miners such insulting monikers as “Tobacco Billy.” When he sold flour, they called him “Yeast Powder Bill.”

Here was a man prospering by his wits in the rough high country in winter, trading on his reputation as an honest businessman. He lent money at
rates of about 2 percent per month, which would be usurious today but was not out of line in that time and place. His ledgers show him keeping track of every expenditure—at breakfast how much for molasses and butter, in the evening how much for tea. He would open a store, then close it, travel over mountains for new goods, and return to open a new store. When his peaches froze solid on the journey, he sold them as “chilly peaches.” He bought tobacco at $1.50 a pound in Boise, Idaho, “
with every dollar I had,” and sold it in Helena, Montana, at “$5 to $6 a pound.” A contemporary marveled at W.A.’s entrepreneurship, saying, “He never touched a dollar except twenty came back in its place.”

• • •

In 1867, W.A. found that he could
earn a bigger profit by hauling the U.S. mail from the headwaters of the Columbia River, near Missoula in western Montana, through northern Idaho to Walla Walla, then the largest community in Washington Territory, a distance of more than 450 miles. As a subcontractor of the U.S. government, he organized a system of ponies, riders, boats, and way stations that provided mail delivery three times a week.

The dangers of these mountain trails were real and present, but at age twenty-eight, W.A. was courageous—or headstrong. In 1868, he spent days riding his Cayuse pony, a cheap working horse, on his turn on the
trail. W.A. followed the Clark Fork
^§
through Indian country, then along the northeast flank of the Bitterroot Mountains into Idaho Territory. At night, he wrote in his journal, marveling at the scenic beauty, grumbling about the difficulty of finding a decent book to read in the wilderness, and calmly recording the dangers.

At one stop, he wrote: