Empty Mansions (9 page)
Authors: Bill Dedman
The name was W. A. Clark & Brother, Bankers.
T
HE STREETS OF
B
UTTE
were unpaved and muddy when W.A. brought his banking business there in 1872. The town’s gold rush days had passed. Even if underground veins of silver and copper could be found, it would be hard to make them profitable. The town was four hundred miles from the nearest railroad.
In that depressed environment, W.A. saw the right time for an investment. In 1872, the banker bought four old mining claims of uncertain value. They were called the Original, the Colusa, the Gambetta, and the Mountain Chief. To develop his investments, W.A. didn’t go at the opportunity the same way most men would. He had two obvious options: He could bear all the risk himself, starting immediately to drill into the Butte hill—he knew something about geology and mining, but he was not by nature a gambler. Or he could wait for others to develop mines nearby, letting them chew up their capital and reap the rewards. But W.A. was not much for waiting.
So he created a third option: Recognizing that his single volume of Hitchcock’s
Elements of Geology
was not a sufficient education, he went back to college. Although thirty-three years old and married with two children, the banker took his family east in the winter of 1872–73 to New York, where he studied practical assaying and mineralogy at the School of Mines at Columbia College (now Columbia University). It’s hard to imagine that any student ever got a better return on his investment of a single year’s tuition.
W.A. learned how to field-test metal-bearing quartz with a blowpipe. He learned how to roast and smelt and refine the ore to remove the precious metals. His ore samples from his four claims in Butte tested out to be promising, particularly in copper. Ore that yielded 5 percent copper would have been rich enough to be worth mining, but the Butte samples were testing closer to 50 percent.
• • •
Copper was about to become the essential conductor of modern life. In 1858, the warships HMS
Agamemnon
and USS
Niagara
had laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable. In 1876, Bell would patent his telephone. By 1879, Edison would create the first commercially practical incandescent lightbulb. And in 1882, Eduard Rubin of Switzerland would invent the full metal jacket bullet, increasing the distance one could stand from a man while killing him.
All of these advances in communication, everyday life, and warfare would depend on W. A. Clark’s copper.
Back in Butte in 1873, W.A. began to explore the Colusa and Gambetta claims, shipping the copper ore by wagon to the nearest point on the Union Pacific at Corinne, Utah Territory. Transportation costs ate up most of the mining profits, so Clark built a smelter to use heat and chemicals to extract the copper locally, increasing his profits considerably. When the Utah & Northern Railway arrived in 1881, connecting Butte to the Union Pacific and valuable markets in the East and West, he was there to meet the first train.
W.A. had an advantage over other entrepreneurs. As a shrewd banker, he had the opportunity to see which mining properties were profitable and which were undercapitalized. And if loans weren’t paid, he could foreclose. Although W.A. was not the one who discovered silver in Butte, he found a way into the business. In 1874, a man named Bill Farlin struck silver, and with a loan from Clark’s First National Bank of Deer Lodge, he built a stamp mill to process the quartz.
When Farlin got overextended in 1880, Clark and his partners became the new owners of both the mine and the mill through foreclosure.
Butte would produce 24,000 tons of silver, but its 11 million tons of copper would earn its nickname, “the
Richest Hill on Earth.”
If not already a millionaire, W.A. was well on his way. The thirty-seven-year-old banker and industrialist had an opportunity to see the future in 1876, representing the Montana Territory as its orator at the world’s fair in Philadelphia. Despite another worldwide economic depression, nine million visitors celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence by touring the latest wonders of the world: Bell’s telephone and Remington’s typewriter, Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.
Fairgoers could walk up stairs inside a lookout tower to see the entire grounds of the Centennial Exhibition. The tower was part of an unfinished statue brought from Paris. The artist planned the statue as a gift from the French Republic to the United States, and was seeking subscriptions to pay for a pedestal. The work was to be a colossal metallic structure of a woman, fifteen stories tall, but all that was on display was her gigantic right forearm holding a torch and flame. The artist was Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculpture was
Liberty Enlightening the World
, and this was America’s first glimpse of its Statue of Liberty.
With a fifty-cent ticket, W.A. could climb the stairs to the torch’s balcony, looking out on the industrial wonders of the world, touching Lady Liberty’s smooth French skin of copper.
B
UTTE WAS NO LONGER
a muddy, isolated town. As copper was changing the wider world, it transformed Butte. The same railroad that began taking copper out also brought culture in. By the end of the century, Butte’s Grand Opera House would be visited by Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt. Its Broadway Theatre, one of many in town, claimed to be the largest west of Chicago. W.A. was Butte’s dynamo, building its first water supply system, organizing the electric light company and the street railway, and owning
The Butte Miner
newspaper.
He needed the finest house in town, particularly as he began to seek political office. From 1884 to 1888, he supervised every detail of the construction of a thirty-four-room red-brick Victorian mansion with a steeply sloping French mansard roof and dormer windows. Begun in a time of depressed copper prices, the home was W.A.’s testament to confidence in the copper camp. When asked why he was building in Butte, he answered with loyalty, “Because I owe it to Butte. I have made money there.”
This first Clark mansion was designed to confer social status, and it was easily the most expensive home in town, costing a quarter of a million dollars, or about $6 million today. The plaster on the walls was painted in swirls of gold in the entryway, bronze in the octagonal reception room, silver in the dining room, and copper in the billiard room. The woodwork was of fine oak, Cuban mahogany, sycamore, bird’s-eye maple, and rosewood. W.A.’s silhouette was sculpted above the mantel, and frescoes on the library ceiling represented the arts: literature, architecture, painting, and music. The Clark home didn’t have just a staircase; it had the “staircase of nations,” with each wood panel representing one nation of the world, leading up to jeweled-glass windows large enough for a church. On the third floor was a ballroom sixty-two feet long.
The house had another special feature, one that was required for an
industrialist in that era. On the second floor, hidden in the second bedroom, known as the family bedroom, was a closet that served as a
panic room. This closet had a call box that could be used to alert the police, the fire department, or the hospital. This was no extravagance: Wealthy men received threats of all kinds. In 1889, for example, W.A. received a letter threatening his life if he did not pay the writer $400,000. He didn’t pay, but he was prepared for trouble if it arrived.
This first Clark mansion, now known as the
Copper King Mansion, was located in an area called Uptown, somewhat distant from the worst smoke and fumes from W.A.’s copper smelter, which was called the tallest concrete smokestack in the world. The Butte hill was an industrial moonscape, denuded of trees. Copper was removed from the ore by roasting it in open-air heaps. W. A. Clark’s smelter smokestack dispensed sulfurous smoke packed with arsenic, a toxin despite its use by Victorian women to lighten their complexions. Sometimes the smoke was so thick that two people passing on a Butte sidewalk could bump into each other, as in the London fog.
“
I must say that the ladies are very fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called,” W.A. joked at the 1889 state constitutional convention, when he was the presiding officer, “because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a beautiful complexion.… I believe there are times when there is smoke settling over the city, but I say it would be a great deal better for other cities in the territory if they had more smoke and less diphtheria and other diseases. It has been believed by all the physicians of Butte that the smoke that sometimes prevails there is a disinfectant, and destroys the microbes that constitute the germs of disease.”
• • •
Kate Clark, the lady of Butte’s finest home, was known as a charming hostess, but she was not often at home. There’s no indication of a lack of affection between Kate and W.A., but she and the children spent most of the years 1884–93 in Europe and New York, seeking better schools and cultural opportunities. W.A., occupied with his business and political career, joined them for vacations, during which he spent much of his time beginning to build his art collection. Well into his forties, W.A.
began to learn French and a smattering of German. The westerner with the bushy red beard nearly always wore refined, well-tailored black suits, dressing elegantly in the tradition of the boulevardiers of Paris. During an extended stay in the German cultural capital, Dresden, W.A. and Kate had their portraits painted. They stand proudly in these paintings, dressed as members of the haute bourgeoisie, W.A. with a silk top hat and knee-length Prince Albert coat, and Kate with an enormous hat and a skirt shaped by a prominent Victorian bustle.
In 1893, while Kate was in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition,
she contracted typhoid fever. Amid widespread concern about the poor quality of the city’s water supply,
officials had assured fairgoers that the water at the fair was filtered or sterilized. (Officials also promised that summers in Chicago were “invariably cool.”) Kate died in New York on October 19. She was fifty years old.
W.A. demonstrated his love for Kate by building her a $150,000 mausoleum in the form of a Greek temple. He chose a prominent hillside site, not in Butte but in New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, north of Manhattan. The stone exterior is of white granite, with intricate mosaics inside. The bronze doors were sculpted by an American living in Paris, Paul Wayland Bartlett, who also designed the pediment for the House wing of the U.S. Capitol. W.A. corresponded endlessly with the artist over every detail. From the massive bronze doors, a portrait of Kate’s face looks out mournfully.
W.A. was a fifty-four-year-old widower with five children between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three, all old enough to be away at boarding school or beyond. Soon he was looking for a site for a grand new home in New York City. The only question was, who would be the mistress of the manse?
T
HE WIDOWER
W. A. Clark gained a reputation as one ever ready to help develop young artistic talent, particularly the female sort. Or, as one contemporary said, he was “an ardent admirer, if that’s what one wishes to call it, of the fair sex.”