Empty Mansions (8 page)
Authors: Bill Dedman
I was entertained while drinking my tea by this young Welshman, whom I employ to take care of this station on account of the
massacre at Ft. Phil Kearney, he having been there at the time, Dec. 21st, 1866, 94 men were massacred within 3 miles of the Post. All were scalped save two and all save one were stripped of their clothing, turned with their faces downward and their backs stuck full of arrow. No bows were found and the arrows were recognized by their peculiar shape to belong to the Sioux, the Arapaho, and the Cheyenne. One was not scalped because of his baldness, but in lieu thereof they took his whiskers and mustache, and another for some reason was not scalped, was left with his face upward, was not stripped of his clothing, and was covered with a buffalo robe. It is supposed they knew him and perhaps had received some act of kindness from his hands, and thus thanked him with respect.
The news of the massacre was fresh in his mind as he traveled through the wilderness, often hearing sounds in the trees. “
The weather is very cold and frosty,” he wrote in his journal, “and as I rode along solitary through this dense forest of pines I was frequently startled by a loud report near me like the explosion of a blast.” It was not gunfire, but was instead “caused by the expansion bursting of the wood or bark of the trees by the frost.” Relieved, he stopped at a way station “and took my supper cheerfully by a sparkling fire.”
• • •
Indian massacres were not the only dangers W.A. faced. On January 30, 1868, he stepped into a situation that nearly cost him his life.
Clear and cold morning, reached crossing of Deer Lodge river at McCarthy’s ferry at 10. Found the river frozen over and a beaten track on both sides of the river that led me to believe it a regular crossing. I therefore got off my horse and led him on, feeling carefully and trying to test the ice with my heel.
It gave no indication of breaking and perhaps would have borne me safely over, but no sooner had my horse stepped his whole weight upon it than down we went in five feet of water.
I was fortunate enough to catch on the edge of the ice and prevented myself being swept down by the current and endeavored to raise myself out, but loaded down with overshoes, overcoat and muffler my efforts were futile and in vain did I cry for help.
The ice being very slippery, it was with difficulty I retained my hold until I succeeded in pulling my gloves successively from each hand with my teeth. At this moment my poor horse came up close behind, and placing one foot against his shoulder I made a desperate effort and scrambled out upon the ice next to the shore where it was very thick and firm. My horse again came up to me, nothing being visible except his head and the top of my saddle. I plunged my arm down by the water, uncinched the saddle and threw it off with cantinas on the pommel which contained seven or eight hundred dollars.
Knowing of no means by which I could rescue my horse I began to realize my situation and danger of freezing, being thoroughly drenched in a temperature of 10 degrees below zero. I started to run back one-quarter mile to a house and met two men who had heard my cries and were coming to my relief. They were in time to save my horse, … drawing him on the ice with a rope.
I reached the fire just in time as my legs began to get benumbed and my feet were frozen tight in my shoes. Here I remained until evening drying myself and clothes and had a log fire built near which I stood my horse to get warm and dry.
Meticulous as ever, W.A. recorded in his ledger book the cost of his near-death experience:
Paid for getting horse out, $4.00.
• • •
After his narrow—and rather expensive—escape, W.A. was ready for a vacation. His journal reveals his growing interest in the arts, as well as his talent for spotting new sources of revenue.
“
Arrived in Helena,” he wrote, “when I met numerous friends and acquaintances. Took board at the International Hotel. I was engaged reading among others ‘Pickwick Papers’ by Dickens.” He spent the next few weeks “at Helena amusing myself sleigh riding, attending theaters, reading, writing and billiards.”
But Dickens and billiards were not the primary objects of W.A.’s vision. His diary entry for March 6, 1868, reads: “
Sent a proposal to convey U.S. Mail from Helena to Missoula for two more years commencing July 1st, ’68, for the sum of $22,400 per annum.” That’s about $400,000 in today’s dollars.
W.A. had no intention of hauling the mail through Indian country for the rest of his life, however. In the fall of 1868, he subcontracted out the mail delivery business and took a trip east. He boarded a mackinaw flat-bottomed boat at Fort Benton on the Missouri River. He told friends he was going to bring back a wife.
*
Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish, has long been the standard name in America for this immigrant group, who were the product not of Scottish and Irish parents, but of Protestant families from Scotland and England who settled in the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century and then moved on to the United States.
†
Eight more Clarks were born in Pennsylvania: John Reed, who died in infancy; Joseph Kithcart; Elizabeth; Margaret Johnson, who died in infancy; Mary Margaret; James Ross; George; and Anna Belle.
‡
They settled in Van Buren County, near the Missouri border and the Des Moines River village of Bentonsport. The youngest child, Anna Belle, was only six months old. In Iowa, three-year-old George died of whooping cough, and the last child, Effie Ellen, was born. Known as Ella, she was the grandmother of co-author Paul Newell.
§
Named for William Clark (no relation), one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806.
KATE
W.A
. HAD SET OFF
down the Missouri, intent on seeing a childhood friend back in Pennsylvania. He recalled a girl with dark brown eyes and curly brown hair “
who was dear to me when we were children together.” In the fall of 1868, the flat-bottom boat W.A. had boarded at Fort Benton docked in Sioux City, Iowa. There W.A. visited with his parents. He then rode by rail back to Pennsylvania to see this childhood friend. At age twenty-nine, he took his mother along for the courting.
The courting began in an Odd Fellows Hall in Connellsville, where W.A. asked Katherine Louise Stauffer to a dance. Brown-eyed “Kate” was no longer a girl, but a beautiful, bright young woman of twenty-four. W.A., a worldly veteran of the western mines, Indian territory, and freewheeling commerce, “
wooed and won” her. On the morning of March 17, 1869, they were wed at her parents’ large brick house in Connellsville, where her father was a prosperous businessman. A minister of the Church of Christ performed the ceremony. After a morning breakfast reception, everyone went uptown to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The couple boarded a train heading west, stopping in St. Louis for a working honeymoon, as W.A. bought goods to ship west. They continued by train and stagecoach to
their new home, the mining camp of Helena, Montana. When they arrived, they discovered that most of Helena
had been destroyed by a fire. The newlyweds set up housekeeping in a friend’s spare bedroom.
W. A. Clark’s first wife, Katherine Louise “Kate” Stauffer Clark, a childhood friend from Pennsylvania.
(
illustration credit3.1
)
In addition to a new wife, W.A. had a new business venture. Time and again, he showed great adaptability, switching businesses and cities in search of greater profit. In partnership with a Missouri merchant, he had formed a wholesale mercantile business in 1868.
Donnell & Clark shipped groceries and eastern goods to Helena, Montana, by river, rail, and bull or mule teams—a lot of effort for very little profit. After a rough season of drought and poor sales, they consolidated the business in Deer Lodge, a growing town to the west of Helena, in cattle and mining country, and added a third partner, becoming Donnell, Clark & Larabie. In 1870, they adapted to circumstances again, whittling their business down to its most profitable element, banking, which was mostly the business of making the rounds of mining camps, assaying and buying gold dust.
W.A. was shrewd in business, but he was known, like his father, for fair dealing. “
When we first knew him he was a ragged, dirty, lousy miner,” Montana’s
Missoula Gazette
recalled in 1888. “But beneath those rags and gray-backs there was industry, energy, determination and brains, and behind all a resolute, fixed, determined purpose to succeed in the struggle for wealth and honorable distinction.”
He had become a family man, too. Kate bore a daughter that January, named Mary Joaquina, usually called May or Maizie. She was followed by Charles Walker, or Charlie, in 1871. In 1874, an unnamed son died at only eight days old. Twin girls, Jessie and Katherine Louise, were born in 1875; the twin Jessie died at age two. William Andrews, Jr., called Will, was born in 1877, and Francis Paul followed in 1880. They were then a family of seven, with W.A., Kate, and the five surviving children.
The Clarks were now prosperous, at least by Deer Lodge standards.
The federal census of 1870 shows W.A. as a grocer and banker, with a net worth of $15,000, equal to about $275,000 today. That made him the fourth-wealthiest banker in Deer Lodge, a town of 788 people. The young family lived on a side street in a white frame house with five rooms. Attached to the house was a log lean-to that W.A. used for his assay office. The Clarks traveled the dirt streets in a little
horse-drawn buggy.
His wealth began to afford him social status, even a short-term military commission in an Indian war. During the Nez Percé War of 1877, W.A. raised three companies of volunteers and was assigned the rank of major. The fight was then taken over by regular U.S. Army soldiers, who drove Chief Joseph and his band of four hundred warriors off their ancestral lands, in violation of a U.S. treaty with the Indians. The soldiers captured the largest group of Nez Percé refugees near the Canadian border. Although W.A. saw no fighting, his son Charlie recalled watching his father ride off toward the Bitterroot Mountains “
to sound the alarm about the Indians,” sitting atop a horse called Wild Bill.
In 1872, W.A. gained greater respectability as a banker when he and his partners organized the
First National Bank of Deer Lodge, capitalized at $50,000. They soon opened a branch forty miles to the south in Butte, Montana, a failed gold camp with the beginnings of a rebirth as a mining camp for silver and copper. Two of W.A.’s younger brothers, Joseph and Ross, eventually joined him in Butte. After they arrived, W.A. bought out his other partners. It was now solely a Clark operation. Although he may have been something of a loner, his feelings toward family members were deep and affectionate, generously inducting his brothers into his enterprises as soon as they were of age. Joseph worked in the mining operations, and Ross in banking.
There was never any doubt, however, about which Clark was the boss. Their bank, for example, was not called Clark Brothers Bank.
Nor was it W.A. and J. Ross Clark Bank.