Aspasia of the Wilderness
The 1860s were bruising years for Edwin Booth, scion of America’s most prominent theatrical family. First, his beloved wife, the actress Mary Devlin, became ill in February 1863, and Booth, then starring in New York in Richard III, was too drunk to return to their Boston home before she died. Two years later, his younger brother, John Wilkes, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., bringing eternal disgrace upon the family name. Finally, in March 1867, Booth’s own playhouse, the Winter Garden, fell victim to the scourge of nineteenth-century theaters, when an errant spark ignited a fire that burned it to the ground, sparing “not even a wig or a pair of tights,” as Booth glumly observed. 4
Booth responded to this latest calamity with typically dramatic flair, by commissioning the most majestic playhouse New York had ever seen. When finished, Booth’s Theatre occupied almost an entire city block at the intersection of Twenty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue. And it had just the extraordinary effect the actor had sought. Three towers soared 120 feet above street level while flags fluttered from the mansard roof. The inside was better yet, as a lobby of Italian marble gave way to the domed auditorium, festooned with busts, carvings, and frescoes and illuminated by an enormous gaslight chandelier. The real wonders, however, were hidden from view: hydraulic rams that raised and lowered the scenery flats and boilers capable of producing enough steam to power an engine. Booth’s Theatre opened to rave architectural reviews on 3 February 1869, and a heartbreaking decade for the great tragedian thus ended on a triumphant note.5
Booth’s was not, of course, the only great playhouse of the age. Many others were clustered half a mile to the southeast in the city’s first true theater district, the area around Union Square. Among the grandest venues were Wallack’s Theatre (at Broadway and Thirteenth Street), the Academy of Music (at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place), and the Union Square Theatre (at Broadway and Fourth Avenue). Before taking in a performance featuring a star such as Maurice Barrymore or Ellen Terry, theatergoers could dine at one of the countless restaurants that lined the streets—the Maison Dorée for the well-heeled, oyster houses or German Weinstuben for those of more modest means. The area also boasted a variety of ancillary businesses that served the theater industry: printing offices, costume shops, photography studios, and publishing houses. In the period immediately following the Civil War, the neighborhood became one of Manhattan’s most vibrant communities, with a dazzling swirl of entertainment and commerce.6
This was the intoxicating milieu discovered by Helen Clarke in the early 1870s, a far cry from the quiet and stately Minneapolis home of her aunt Charlotte, to which she had temporarily retreated after her father’s murder.7 Precisely when and how she arrived in New York is unknown; like the Winter Garden Theatre, most of Clarke’s personal papers, which included a hefty scrapbook documenting her acting career, were lost to fire.8 Still, a glimpse of her time on the Manhattan stage survives in the recollections of friends and relatives and the occasional newspaper account.
If the details of her stay in New York are elusive, her fitness as a performing artist was obvious to all who knew her. For one thing, her flowing hair and willowy stature drew attention: one acquaintance remembered her as “5 feet and 10 inches of magnificent womanhood,” while another recalled her “strong aquiline nose and sharp black eyes that could sparkle at a joke or become tender at a recollection.”9 In fact, no less a figure than Thomas Meagher, acting governor of Montana Territory, declared her “a singularly amiable and very prepossessing young lady in appearance” when he visited the Clarke ranch in the fall of 1865.10 But it was her “wonderful, deep, thrilling voice, unusually deep and strong for a woman,” that gave her such presence when on the boards.11
Only a sketchy record exists of the theatrical roles Clarke played, but it is clear that she preferred the dramatic fare of the antebellum era—Shakespeare and other classical pieces in the English tradition—to the contemporary melodramas obsessed with the social concerns of the Gilded Age. One of her favorite parts was Meg Merrilies, the soothsaying gypsy in the playwright Daniel Terry’s Guy Mannering, an 1816 drama adapted from the eponymous novel by Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps she was even typecast, for the character required an actress who was, according to a reviewer of the time, “impassioned, awful, and irresistible … [an] indefinable being, tinged with melancholy, clothed with fierce grandeur, and breathing prophecy.”12 Who better to play a mysterious, vengeful nomad than a young woman who had witnessed her father’s horrific slaying and then fled the scene? Clarke enjoyed the part so much that she was still reprising it for friends in Montana more than a decade after she left New York.13
She may also have performed in Europe; reportedly, her scrapbook contained press clippings lauding her work in theaters from London to Berlin, as well as congratulatory notes from royal luminaries no less than Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm I and Sophie of Württemberg, Queen of the Netherlands.14 She may even have shared the stage in a supporting role with the French theatrical star Sarah Bernhardt, widely regarded as “the most famous actress the world has ever known.”15 These claims are difficult to verify. What is sure is that by the fall of 1875, at the age of twenty-seven, Clarke had returned to Montana, although the reasons why she abandoned New York are unclear. One oft-told story relates that she went broke trying to repay the hospitality shown to her by Bernhardt during the Frenchwoman’s first American tour, treating the actress and her producer, Daniel Frohman, to dinner at Louis Sherry’s legendary restaurant.16 Given Clarke’s lifelong financial troubles, this account possesses the ring of truth. And yet upon closer inspection it is almost surely apocryphal: Bernhardt did not make her U.S. debut until 1880 (at Booth’s Theatre, no less), the year before Sherry opened his doors.
More plausible is an explanation allegedly offered by Clarke herself, though its provenance cannot be fixed with certainty. In this telling she explained, “I was too much of self to become great. I could not forget that I was Helen Clarke and become the new being of imagination.”17 If such insecurity clings naturally to a performer, it is particularly easy to imagine its grasp upon Clarke; after all, she was a single woman of mixed ancestry from the rural Upper Missouri, on her own in North America’s brightest metropolis. Like Hal Calthorpe in The Silent Call, who visits England only to experience greater alienation on the London streets than he had ever known in the West, her New York sojourn proved that, whatever its painful associations, Montana was home.
THE MAN WHO BECAME Clarke’s patron upon her return to Montana was Wilbur Fisk Sanders, an outsize character who had served with an Ohio volunteer regiment in the Civil War before moving west with his family in 1863. By the end of that year he had secured an enduring spot in Montana lore, successfully prosecuting George Ives for homicide and thus delivering to the hangmen of the Montana Vigilance Committee their first victim.18 Though renowned for his combativeness and obstinacy, Sanders had a softer side; one friend remembered him as a champion of the downtrodden, citing his pro bono defense of a young Indian charged with murder and another instance in which he won an injunction against a labor union seeking to exclude Chinese workers, perhaps the most despised—and thus most vulnerable—population in the West.19
Whether it was his reflexive support for the underdog or unyielding loyalty to his friend Malcolm Clarke, with whom he and ten other leading citizens had incorporated the Historical Society of Montana in February 1865, Sanders recruited Helen to lead a classroom in the Helena grade school in the spring of 1876.20 To be sure, she was exceptionally well prepared for the job, thanks to her education at Catholic institutions in Cincinnati and Minneapolis and especially her recent stint in charge of the one-room adobe schoolhouse at Fort Benton, a post she had assumed upon her return from New York the preceding autumn. Such strengths, however, were likely beside the point, since she met an even more fundamental qualification for work as a teacher: in Montana and elsewhere throughout the rural West, women were the backbo
ne of the educational system because of their supposed civilizing influence, not to mention the fact that they commanded lower wages than men.21
There was more to Sanders’s machinations on Clarke’s behalf, however, than the dictates of either empathy or benefaction. In truth, he and his wife, Harriet, who were parents to five sons, embraced Helen as the daughter they never had. A glance at the capital city’s residential directory says as much: for the next thirteen years, Clarke orbited the Sanderses’ mansion like a satellite, renting rooms in boardinghouses never more than a block or two from the family’s splendid Victorian home at 328 N. Ewing Street. And she was a frequent visitor, whether stopping by for dinner and a hand of whist, giving dramatic readings in the parlor, or opening presents around the hearth on Christmas Day. She was such a fixture in the Sanders household that their eldest son, James, noted once in his journal—without a trace of irritation—that while visiting Montana on a break from his legal studies at Columbia University, he dropped in on his parents and found “Miss Clarke … here as usual.”22
Obviously, close association with a leading family had tangible benefits for Clarke, but it is also just as evident that she craved the wisdom and affection of “Mr. Sanders,” as she forever called him, who became a surrogate father. This is not to say that she turned her back on her own blood relatives; rather, upon her return from the East Coast, the Sanders family was easily the more proximate, and not only in geographical terms. Horace had married and started a family on a ranch near Highwood, more than a hundred miles away. Their younger sister, Isabel, lived there, too, and both siblings were preoccupied with caring for their mother, who as Horace recalled years later never recovered from the shock of witnessing her husband’s murder and thus lived a broken life until her passing in June 1895.23
Of course, the main reason Helen had so much time for Wilbur and Harriet Sanders is that she had no immediate family of her own, a subject of intense interest to friends and gossips alike. Her single status, however, was hardly for lack of suitors, as is revealed by a sole surviving love letter found among her personal papers.24 Little is known about her paramour, except that his name was Henry and that he wrote to “Nellie,” as she was called by those closest to her, from San Francisco in January 1884. The six-page note speaks to an intense and intimate relationship, as the author repeatedly refers to himself as her “lover,” and in closing calls Helen his “darling Piotopowaka” (her Indian name, which means “the Bird That Comes Home”).25 What became of their relationship thereafter is a mystery. Or maybe not. Rumor had it (though nothing in Clarke’s own hand confirms such speculation) that she remained forever unmarried by choice, because she would not wed an Indian and believed that no white man would ever treat her as an equal.26 What she thought of mixed-blood men as potential romantic partners is unknown.
MANY OTHERS IN Montana, however, had clear feelings about the suitability of mixed-blood men as husbands; that led to another Clarke family catastrophe in the fall of 1872. On 16 September, Nathan Clarke, who in the aftermath of Malcolm’s murder had sworn to avenge his father, was stabbed to death by James Swan during a drunken brawl. At issue was Swan’s daughter: the nineteen-year-old Clarke wanted to court her, but Swan was determined that she marry a white man instead. At the time of the murder Joe Cobell, who had helped guide the Second U.S. Cavalry to Heavy Runner’s slumbering camp on the Marias two and a half years earlier, lived just across a coulee from Clarke’s homestead and thus took on the grim task of collecting the victim’s bloody clothes and interring his corpse at the base of the bluff where he had perished.27
That the Swans were of mixed blood only compounded the tragedy, highlighting that at least some people of mixed ancestry had imbibed the racial prejudice of the day, however self-loathing, which held that white skin bestowed privileges reserved for those of unalloyed racial purity. Such bigotry was gaining ground on Helen Clarke, too. In February 1880 Elizabeth Chester Fisk, a prominent white woman married to the editor of the Helena Herald, the state’s leading Republican mouthpiece, pulled her children from the city’s school, in part because of her dissatisfaction with Clarke. Though Fisk justified her behavior by citing Clarke’s allegedly sour disposition, she noted that Clarke was “a half-breed Indian,” suggesting that race had contributed to her decision. Ironically, Lizzie Fisk was a well-known supporter of various reform causes, and her husband used his journalistic perch to advocate (if fleetingly) for black suffrage in Montana. Evidently, the Fisks saw no inconsistency in taking up the cause of African Americans while refusing instruction for their children by individuals of mixed ancestry.28
Several factors explain the increasingly precarious circumstances facing mixed-blood peoples in Montana in the 1870s and after. First was a surge in native-white violence in the middle of the decade, as the territory’s Indian wars lurched fitfully to a bloody conclusion. On a blistering day in June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer plunged the Seventh U.S. Cavalry into an enormous Indian encampment on the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana. Nearly 275 men in Custer’s command were killed, in fighting, according to one Indian participant, that lasted “no longer than a hungry man needed to eat his dinner.”29 The following summer Chief Joseph and his fugitive Nez Perces engaged the U.S. Army in a series of costly battles along the Montana–Idaho border, before surrendering just miles from the safety of the Canadian boundary.30 Such conflict and the instability it engendered mobilized white rage against all Indians, a category that by virtue of their heritage extended to many mixed-blood people, too, especially those who “looked” native.
More important were Montana’s rapidly changing demographics, which in the space of a decade remade the territory as a white man’s country. Whereas in 1870 Montana’s native and non-native populations were roughly equal, at approximately 20,000 people each, by 1880 the number of whites had doubled even as the native population had begun a dramatic slide. Complicating matters, these white newcomers, like Lizzie and Robert Fisk, who arrived in 1867, had no sense of the relative racial accommodation that had characterized the fur trade era. Instead, as had happened on each successive American frontier—from the Appalachians to the Great Lakes, from Colorado to Texas—white emigrants looked with revulsion upon the mixed-blood communities they discovered, seeing in them a combination of the worst elements of both races: white dissipation on the one hand, and native ignorance on the other. “Half-breed” was perhaps putting it too delicately; in the words of one late nineteenth-century white Montanan, such individuals were “sons of a degenerate ancestry.”31
Insults like these inflicted lasting psychic wounds on their victims, all the more painful for the reminder that to be only part white was in fact to be nonwhite, and maybe something worse. After all, many race scientists of the day believed that pure-blooded individuals, even those of supposedly second-rate stock, like Africans and Asians, were biologically superior to the racially amalgamated offspring of mixed marriages.32 No less a figure than Joe Kipp, who spent his entire adult life serving as an intermediary between Indians and whites (often to the detriment of Montana’s native peoples), suffered grievously from such slights. In a poignant eulogy, a white friend remembered, “Above all things, Kipp hated the word ‘breed,’ generally prefixed by the expletive ‘damn,’ so often used by the ignorant and thoughtless. … None know better than I how hard he tried to live so as to ever have the respect and friendship of the whites, and what fits of terrible depression overcame him when he heard his kind mentioned in terms of contempt or derision.”33
TO HIS MANY DETRACTORS, Wilbur Fisk Sanders was the “Mephistopheles of Montana politics.” While he may have looked the part, with his dark complexion and piercing black eyes, it was his vigorous leadership of the territory’s beleaguered Republican Party that earned Sanders the hatred of his foes. In Montana as in many other western locales, Democrats enjoyed a tenuous majority, having opted to ride out the ideological discomforts of the Reconstruction era as far as geographically pos
sible from the reaches of the federal government. Sanders and his fellow partisans worked tirelessly to stymie their opponents’ best-laid plans. Add to that his natural belligerence and hardball tactics, and it is no wonder that Sanders lost four elections—in 1864, 1867, 1880, and 1886—to serve as the territory’s lone delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.34
He tasted victory, if by proxy, in a historic 1882 campaign. Capitalizing on recent territorial legislation that extended to women the right to vote as well as to stand for election in various school-related contests, Sanders used his influence with the Republican Commission of Lewis and Clark County to get Helen Clarke on the ballot as their candidate for superintendent of schools.35 Local Democrats were so impressed with her qualifications that they set aside their animosity toward Sanders, if only for a moment, and withdrew their own candidate, who promptly endorsed Clarke as “a lady well qualified and eminently worthy of the position.”36 On 7 November 1882 Helen Clarke thus became the first woman elected to public office in the history of Montana Territory (though she shared the distinction with Alice Nichols, who won the same post in Meagher County).
By all accounts Clarke excelled in her position. In his annual reports, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction singled her out for special mention, praising her zeal and efficiency in managing the school system of the territory’s largest and wealthiest county.37 And the job clearly suited Clarke, starting with the $1,000 annual salary, which gave her a welcome measure of financial independence.38 Her success did not stop the Democrats from running their own candidate against her in 1884, but she easily dispatched Edmund O. Railsback, principal of the Helena Business College, winning with 55 percent of the vote.39 She was elected to a third term in 1886.
The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Page 16