William Andrews Clark

• Born: January 8, 1839
• Birthplace: Connellsville, Pennsylvania
• Died: March 2, 1925
• Place of death: New York, New York

American copper mining and railroad magnate and politician

In building a financial empire in the West during more than thirty years of ruthless business negotiations involving mining, banking, and the railroad, Clark epitomized the aggressive capitalist spirit and unabashed greed of the Gilded Age. Clark, who saw wealth as entitlement to political power, admitted that he bribed Montana lawmakers so he could obtain a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Sources of wealth: Mining; railroads

Bequeathal of wealth: Children; museum

Early Life

William Andrews Clark was born in a log cabin in the coal fields of southwestern Pennsylvania on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Little is known of his childhood; as his influence grew and his wealth accumulated, he worked to keep his early years from public scrutiny. His parents were first-generation Scottish and Irish immigrants, who, hoping for a better life, homesteaded west to Iowa in 1856, when Clark was seventeen. With little taste for farming, Clark, a bright student, considered a career in teaching.

After completing studies at Iowa Wesleyan College, a small Methodist institution, Clark taught school in Missouri and became interested in law. During his time in Missouri, Clark came to believe deeply in the importance of states rights and of controlling the power of a centralized, federal government. Consequently, he enlisted in the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil War, but he either deserted or was discharged in 1862.

First Ventures

Restless and eager to make his mark, Clark headed west to take advantage of the area’s mining boom. After briefly mining quartz in Colorado, in 1863 he arrived in Bannack, then the capital of the Montana Territory. He had modest success, earning an estimated $1,500 from his gold discoveries in the area’s rivers. He made his initial fortune by developing supply lines to Salt Lake City, and later to St. Louis, in order to outfit mining camps with equipment and food. He then used the capital from this venture to invest in banks that owned the land rights to mining stakes in the vast Montana Territory, and, in turn, he took over the rights to this land when the mining companies went bust. Over the next decade, Clark, gifted with uncanny business savvy and driven by an uncomplicated love of accumulating wealth, expanded into numerous mining operations, as well as newspapers, smelting plants, banks, lumbering and ranching interests, utilities, and railroads.

By the early 1870’s, when Montana’s gold rush appeared to be over, the territory was electrified by news of a massive copper strike. Given the reach of Clark’s holdings and his interest in smelting, the copper strike proved his long-anticipated financial bonanza. By the mid-1880’s, Clark and Marcus Daly, who had made a fortune in silver and headed a mining conglomerate, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, became the dominant financiers (and chief rivals) of the cooper-rich Montana Territory.

Mature Wealth

To Clark, it was natural—even inevitable—that wealth brought political power. Using the influence of his newspapers, Clark emerged during the 1880’s as a powerful and charismatic voice for Montana statehood. He chaired two conventions, in 1884 and 1889, where participants worked to draft a state constitution. For Clark, however, politics was always an extension of his own interests. He worked most diligently to secure restrictions on the amount of money that the federal government could tax mining interests. A fiery orator, Clark sought election as the territorial representative to Congress in 1888, only to lose to a virtual unknown, raising suspicions that Daly had tampered with ballots.

After Montana was admitted to the union in 1889, Clark, a Democrat, ran unsuccessfully in both 1889 and 1893 for a seat in the U.S. Senate. At this time, state legislators chose senators, and when Clark ran again in 1899, the Democratic-controlled Montana legislature selected him, only to have the selection immediately challenged when evidence of Clark’s massive bribery came to light. Characteristically, Clark admitted that he had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, but he argued that influence peddling was an inevitable part of a democratic system. By the time Clark arrived in Washington, D.C., the Senate had already voted to unseat him. He then attempted a backhanded maneuver to return by relinquishing his Senate seat and, after waiting for the governor to be out of state, having the lieutenant governor, a crony of his, appoint him to fill his own vacated seat, only to have the governor nullify the appointment when he returned. Clark was finally elected on his own in 1901, although accusations of fraud were raised involving the powerful miners’ bloc. Clark served a single term in the Senate, distinguished only by his fierce fight against federal government protection of the mineral-rich Western lands.

While in office, Clark still worked to extend his business interests, developing new railroad lines to connect the burgeoning populations in Nevada, Arizona, and California with Salt Lake City, as well as speed transportation of his copper ore. Along with the help of his younger brother, a banker, Clark saw the potential for Western development. In contentious rivalry with other financiers, notably Edward H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, Clark purchased thousands of acres of ranch land and water rights critical to a transportation system and created a line, the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad, which not only placed him among the wealthiest men in America but also helped guarantee the economic development of the Southwest. Clark is credited with establishing what would become Las Vegas, now the seat of a Nevada county that bears his name. Perhaps Clark’s most lasting legacy isClarkdale, Arizona, founded in 1912 as the site for his vast smelting operations. Clark helped design the town, laying out streets and investing in a cutting-edge communications network of telephones and telegraphs, electricity, medical facilities, and sewer systems, making Clarkdale a prototype of a planned community.

Rich beyond measure, after the end of his Senate term in 1907 Clark left the West entirely and moved to a spacious mansion with more than one hundred rooms on fashionable Fifth Avenue in New York City, where over the next fifteen years he spent lavishly to outfit the house. He also invested in more than seven hundred pieces of European art, ranging from ceramics and tapestries from antiquity to canvases by the Old Masters and French Impressionists. Upon his death in 1925, at the age of eighty-six, his entire collection was bequeathed to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., along with a sufficient contribution to construct a wing to house the artworks.

At his death, Clark’s fortune was estimated at $200 million. After his wife’s death in 1893, Clark financed the career of an aspiring starlet, whose unexpected pregnancy the year Clark was elected to the Senate compelled him to marry her. Although his will bequeathed $2 million to her, the bulk of the estate was distributed among the children of his first wife. The children variously sold the assets and diversified their inheritance. After the demolition of Clark’s ostentatious Manhattan home in 1928, little remained of his fortune.

Legacy

Clark had the keen eye of a consummate capitalist entrepreneur. As a first-generation Westerner, he was positioned to take advantage of a frontier culture, with its virtually limitless resources ripe for exploitation and little in the way of regulation to disturb the steady aggrandizement of personal wealth. However, his vast wealth left little imprint. For all his political endeavors, he is remembered in the twenty-first century as a cautionary tale of corruption, specifically for the fiasco of his attempt to get appointed to the Senate after he had resigned. His fortune was made largely from his manipulation of two industries—mining and the railroad. By the time of his death, his mining enterprises were exhausted and the railroad had lost its central economic position. Because he saw wealth only in personal terms—endorsing no charity, endowing no university, and supporting no public cause—his legacy extended little beyond his death.

Bibliography

Glasscock, Carl B. The War of the Copper Kings. 1935. Reprint. Powell, Wyo.: Western History, 2002. Landmark account of the era in which Clark made his fortune. Vivid and highly readable. Includes a detailed account of Clark’s feud with Anaconda.

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Montana: High, Wide. and Handsome. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Important account of Montana’s history that includes a helpful summary of Clark’s economic and political impact.

Land, Barbara, and Myrick Land. A Short History of Las Vegas. 2d ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004. One of the few histories of Las Vegas to include its first decade and the visionary work of Clark and his railroad.

Malone, Michael P., and William L. Lang. The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Fascinating account of Clark’s era. Argues that the economic wealth of first-generation mineral entrepreneurs was essential to the West’s political spirit of independence and pride.

Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Part of a highly respected multivolume history of California. Chronicles the whirlwind development of Southern California and the impact of Clark’s railroad interests and his son’s cultural philanthropy.