by Bill Dedman
During his later years, W.A. engaged the British School of Heraldry to trace his ancestry, with results he had the good humor to say were disappointing, for no famous people were found in his lineage. W.A.’s parents were of Scotch-Irish heritage,* a group that arrived in America with little in possessions aside from the Calvinist beliefs of their Presbyterian Church, pride in their work ethic, and the ability to distill a good grade of whiskey. The Clarks had come to Pennsylvania after the American Revolution from county Tyrone in the north of Ireland. W.A.’s father, John, was born in Dunbar in 1797, a few months after George Washington handed the presidency to John Adams, ensuring that America would not return to monarchy. W.A.’s mother, Mary Andrews Clark, was descended from Huguenots, French Protestants who emigrated from France to Scotland to escape religious persecution and then moved on to Ireland and America. W.A.’s red hair was inherited from his mother and shared by all his siblings.
A large family was necessary to work a farm, and John and Mary Andrews Clark had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Their first child was a girl, Sarah Ann, born in 1837 and named for Mary’s mother. A little over a year later, on January 8, 1839, came William Andrews, or Will.† His sister Elizabeth, also known as Lib, described in a memoir the family’s tiring but joyous farm life:
What fun we had in winter too as well as summer! There were always the apples stored in the cellar and nuts we had gathered in the autumn.… I do not remember much about cooking by the fire as Mother had one of the first cooking stoves in the neighborhood. Most of the bread was baked in an outdoor oven. There never was anything in the world better than this bread with butter and homemade maple syrup or homemade apple butter!… We lived the outdoor life both winter and summer.… We had sleighing and coasting. We were often taken to school in a big sled with all the neighbors’ children.
Will’s schooling was limited to three months in the winter, because farmwork came first. The Clark children attended the public school, Cross Keys, in Dunbar. As the two oldest, Sarah and W.A. had an advantage over the younger children, going on at age fourteen to Laurel Hill Academy, a selective private school at the Presbyterian church in town. Such academies offered a meager college preparation course: a little algebra, basic Latin, a taste of history and literature, and public speaking.
The Clarks were not in that log cabin for long. With money Will’s father made mostly from harvesting trees, they moved into a larger wood-frame farmhouse on the property. When Will was about eleven, he helped his father build a handsome, two-story Federal-style brick residence, which stands today after more than 160 years.
John Clark passed on to his children great energy. He was proud of his fruit trees, prouder still of being a Presbyterian elder for forty years, and he was an advocate of hard work and fair dealing. Mary Andrews Clark gave her children boldness, ambition, and kindness. “Such good common sense,” sister Elizabeth said of their mother, “such beauty of body and soul, such refinement, very religious in a tolerant way, progressive with a good sense of fun.”
In 1856, at age sixty-two, perhaps a dubious age to start a new venture, John sold the Pennsylvania farm and moved his family west, traveling more than seven hundred miles by rail, steamboat, and stagecoach to the deep, loamy soil of Iowa. Seventeen-year-old Will drove a team of horses by himself the full distance ahead of the family.‡
Will was “about grown up,” Elizabeth recalled, “or at least thought he was.” His great shock of wavy hair was dark auburn, matching his florid complexion. He was growing a mustache, which was also red. His eyes were a bluish steel gray, with a piercing stare.
Choosing brains over brawn, Will taught winter school in Iowa in 1857, then enrolled in an academy in Birmingham, Iowa, the following year. In 1859–60, he taught in a one-room school in Missouri. His sister Anna recalled W.A. telling of a man who took one look at the small, twenty-year-old schoolteacher and said, “Young man, you are a failure.”
But W.A., as he preferred now to be called, was imbued with his parents’ ambition, striving “to better my condition.” In 1860, he enrolled in the study of classics and law at Iowa Wesleyan University, a Methodist Episcopal institution in Mount Pleasant. The tuition was twenty-five dollars a year. W.A. was taking classes both as a college freshman and a first-year law student, studying Latin, Greek, and geometry along with his legal contracts. He began a second year of the two-year course. In the spring of 1862, however, he dropped out of school, abandoning any hope of practicing law. Suffering from gold fever, an affliction sweeping the nation, he decided he was not cut out to “sit around in offices and wait for clients.”
W.A. was by no means the first of the tens of thousands of men who traveled west in search of El Dorado. Gold had been found in 1848 in California, sparking the 1849 gold rush. The latest strike was in Colorado’s Front Range, first at Pikes Peak in 1858 and then more substantially the next year near Central City and Black Hawk, about forty miles west of Denver. Moved, he said, by “a spirit of adventure,” W.A. went west to Atchison, Kansas. From there he drove a six-yoke bull team of oxen across the Great Plains to Manitou Springs, near present-day Colorado Springs, a journey of more than eight hundred miles over five months.
Something besides gold may have spurred W.A. and others westward. The first mortars fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, when W.A. was twenty-two years old, launched the Civil War. The Confederacy began drafting soldiers in April 1862, about the time W.A. headed west, and the Union followed suit in March 1863. After W.A. died, a biography written by a bitter former employee claimed that W.A. had fought with the Confederates before deserting, but this idea is contradicted by the available evidence. His home states of Pennsylvania and Iowa both stayed in the Union, and no W. A. Clark of his age and county appears in any service roster, muster roll, or other record for either the Union or Confederate army. If W.A. had any Confederate sympathies, he kept them to himself. Years later, he recalled hearing, near the end of the war, what he referred to as the sad news of President Lincoln’s assassination.
W.A. chose three books for his journey west: Parsons on Contracts, Hitchcock’s Elements of Geology, and Poems of Robert Burns, “the Ploughman Poet” and favorite son of Scotland. He went on to use all three, becoming in the West a sharp negotiator, a prescient judge of the mineral wealth underground, and a lover of the romantic arts.
BANNACK OR BUST
IN THE SOUVENIR PHOTOS of tenderfoot gold miners from Colorado in the 1860s, with six-shooters on their hips, there is no reason to think that twenty-four-year-old W. A. Clark stands out from the pack. Though he later listed his height at five feet eight inches to five feet ten on his passport applications, his family and friends described him as five feet five, maybe five feet six in his boots. He weighed 120 to 125 pounds, never as much as 130, with a pipe-cleaner physique, giving the impression of endurance rather than strength.
He also had a lot of nervous energy. He spoke confidently, pointing his long, thin fingers for emphasis. His gait was more a run than a walk. His hands were constantly in motion. W.A. was a dynamo of alert intelligence.
In Colorado in the winter of 1862–63, he started at the first rung of the mining industry, as a hired hand on a small claim at Bobtail Hill, near Central City. “With three others I helped sink a shaft with a windlass, to a depth of 300 feet,” he recalled. At most, he made three dollars a day.
News of another gold strike to the northwest spread through the mining camps of Colorado that winter. Gold had been found in what is now Montana, on the banks of a mountain stream called Grasshopper Creek. “The report got into the papers and caused a great deal of excitement,” W.A. recalled.
He and two prospector friends left Colorado with two yokes of cattle, a light Schuttler wagon, picks, shovels, gold pans, fresh vegetables, and the certainty that they’d get rich if anyone would. They were headed for a corner of Idaho Territory, for the high, desolate land that would become southwestern Montana. “Our motto then,” W.A. r
ecalled, “was Bannack or Bust.”
Starting out on May 4, 1863, while the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville was being fought in Virginia, W.A. and his friends traveled into the Wyoming Territory, following the Overland Trail to Fort Bridger, where they were stopped by word of trouble with Shoshone Indians ahead on the Oregon Trail. For safety, they waited to join a long train of twenty-five covered wagons pulled by ox teams. The wagon train consisted of about one hundred people, including a few families with women and children.
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.” (illustration credit2.2)
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:
Upon my arrival at Bannack I found five letters from home that anticipated me and had been carried from Salt Lake by a private express which had been established between that place and Bannack. The price of the transportation of a letter at that time was $1.00 each, and I had just $5.00.… I had, besides, a fractional greenback currency of the denomination of fifty cents. I gladly dispensed with the $5.00 for the letters, therefore, I was obliged to endeavor to get credit for the lumber and some few other articles which we needed, and this I readily obtained.
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 s
everal 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.”