(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Copper King Clark loved Montana only because of what he could take from it – Daily Montanan [1] ['Kim Briggeman', 'More From Author', '- October'] Date: 2023-10-23 “Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves.” – Sen. William A. Clark, U.S. Senate, Feb. 23, 1907 Butte would not be the unvarnished soul of Montana if not for William Andrews Clark. The state wouldn’t be so cocky and self-possessed, so vulnerable and beguiling if not for the Old Man, the Copper King, the 5-foot-7, 140-pound-soaking-wet, redheaded, beady-eyed bantam billionaire (by today’s dollars) of the Gilded Age. W.A. Clark (1839-1925) had a knack for making a splash, here and far beyond these borders. So when he took the floor of the U.S. Senate chambers in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 23, 1907, to speak his mind as his lone term wound down, it raised barely a stir among the press corps of the day. You and I, our socio/enviro antennae on high alert, are shocked or maybe stirred when historians like the late Michael Malone revisit the speech and pluck this pearl from it: “In rearing the great structure of empire on the Western Hemisphere, we are obliged to avail ourselves of all the resources at our command. The requirements of this great utilitarian age demand it. Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves.” The great structure of empire … this great utilitarian age … There is so much about the man and the times, then and now, tucked into those few sentences at the end of a 25-minute diatribe against Teddy Roosevelt’s and Gifford Pinchot’s U.S. Forest Service. Understand, this was the man who came all but penniless to Montana before it was Montana. Forty-four years later he was the wealthiest of the Senate’s many millionaires and rivaled John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan as the richest in the country. He got there by the sweat of his brow, the nimbleness of his brain and the heel of a boot that stood on throats of any who opposed him, assuming it could reach them. Clark did it by buying or helping himself to the vast store of natural resources that made Montana the Treasure State, long before we saw it as Big Sky Country. “Each state and territory knows better than the government the conditions existing within its borders,” he said that winter day, “and is more capable than the government to make a proper and satisfactory disposition of public lands. … The people of the West are tired of this long-range government of its most important interests.” Here was the Butte smelter owner who at the 1889 state constitutional convention championed the oppressive smoke in the city’s air as not only OK, but beneficial. It kills germs, not people, Clark implied. Moreover, “there is just enough arsenic there” that the ladies of Butte “are renowned wherever they go for their beautiful complexions.” Laugh now, but well into the 20th century, the likes of Sears Roebuck were peddling the notions of Dr. Rose’s French Arsenic Complexion Wafers. They were “simply magical … on even the coarsest and most repulsive skin and complexion.” History, like literature, craves its villains. W.A. Clark, you are ours. “There is craft in his stereotyped smile and icicles in his handshake. He is about as magnetic as last year’s bird’s nest. His suavity suggests the sinuosity of a serpent,” Butte editor Warren G. Davenport wrote in 1908. Davenport was a classic muckraker in a town of miners and muckers. But don’t say that’s not a wonderful turn of phrase. See what the one-term Senator from Montana inspired? We all went to school with someone like that. Deservedly or not, scoundrels like Clark make us feel better about ourselves. It’s a consolation prize because we can’t be so rich and famous. And yet … There were Clark’s Columbia Gardens (1899-Labor Day 1973), with its miles of trails and flowers and a merry-go-round that makes your heart stop to remember it. Children’s days on Thursdays, free streetcar and bus rides to the park. Picking pansies. Evenings as the sun went down at the top of Montana. That awesome wooden roller coaster with its hard maple runners. Groves of weeping willows. Sinful hot buttered popcorn. The biggest dance pavilion you ever saw or needed. The smell of new-cut grass, a couple of miles outside a town that had virtually none. Clark built the Copper King Mansion in Butte, one of the state’s few surviving testimonials that reflect his vast influence. He developed the fabulously rich United Verde copper diggings in Arizona and founded the company town of Clarkdale nearby. He bought and sold newspapers to advance his agendas. He was a giant in the sugar beet industry of Southern California, one of the world’s great art collectors, and the engine behind many a town’s entrance into the electrical age. A famous picture from 1920 exists of Clark, standing with daughter Huguette, handing a deed for 135 acres over to create the nation’s first Girl Scouts camp in New York. It was called, and still is, Camp Andree Clark, in memory of a daughter who died the year before of meningitis at age 16. And yet… “The Columbia Gardens is my monument,” Clark said before he died. “Of my many business enterprises it is the one that I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money.” “Is it to be held that a forest is something sacred, never to be disturbed?” Sen. Clark posed the rhetorical question to the Senate that day in 1907, months after he was exonerated by the U.S. Supreme Court for buying up some 50 homesteads on public lands for their timber. As related by Malone in “The Battle for Butte,” the majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes “reasoned incredibly … that Clark had not been aware of the tricks his subordinates played upon Uncle Sam through fraudulently acquired homesteads.” “I know that it is a beautiful thing to look out upon a great forest. There is something inspiring about it. … It awakens our highest sense of identity when we look up at a great and noble forest.” In 1905, newspapers ran a story written by Nebraska journalist J.A. Edgerton that noted, offhandedly, that Clark was raking in more than $1 million a month, nearly $35 million by 2023 standards. That was the year Clark and brother Ross were selling lots for a townsite on a ranch in Nevada along their Salt Lake City-to-Los Angeles railroad. The ranch was called the Las Vegas, and it’s no coincidence the city of the same name is in the county of Clark. “When civilization sprang up and spread out over the world men began to cut down the forests, to utilize them in providing shelter for themselves, in building homes and cities, in building ships and for the general use of an industrial people.” Also in 1905, construction was well underway on Clark’s amazingly ostentatious 131-room mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It came to be known as “Clark’s Folly.” The Senator from Montana showed no signs of giving a damn. Building began before he was in the Senate and wasn’t completed until five years after he left. Determined to outstrip the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts, Clark kept coming up with new embellishments such as oaken panels from Sherwood Forest in England. “One panel in the main dining room has a big iron stain on it,” a newspaper account said when the mansion was sold to be torn down after the Old Man’s death. “Clark always believed that the stain was from an iron ring sunk into the tree by Robin Hood when he was the master of Sherwood Forest, and that merry old Robin tied his horse to it.” “So it is in Wisconsin and Michigan and elsewhere. The forests are gone, but they have instead magnificent cities all over those states. The timber was taken and utilized as fuel, in the construction of railways and construction of vessels that ply on every lake and stream.” It’s ironic that, with all that money and all those material possessions, few had as much a stake in “future generations” as W.A Clark did in 1907. At 68, he was father to six children by two wives, the youngest child less than a year old. Huguette Clark’s death in 2011 at age 104 sparked nationwide fascination and two books — “Empty Mansions” by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr., in 2013, and “The Phantom of Fifth Avenue” by Meryl Gordon in 2014. The disposition of her $300 million fortune became a litigious and nasty American tale of its own. “In building up of these great cities, and in subserving the requirements and needs of a progressive and civilized people, they have the land left, and … land is sometimes more desirable and valuable than timber.” “We bide our time in a materialistic and utilitarian age,” the French novelist Honore de Balzac wrote in 1833, six years before William Clark was born in Pennsylvania. “We are all rated, not at our just worth, but according to our social importance. People will scarcely look at an energetic man if he is in shirt-sleeves.” Clark was 14 when Englishman Charles Dickens weighed in on the subject in the essay, “Frauds On the Fairies.” “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected,” Dickens wrote. “Every one who has considered the subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun.” Flash forward to the Senate floor, 1907, where Clark was winding up. He’d been a major player in bringing coal-powered electricity to Butte, as well as Canyon Ferry and Hauser hydroelectric dams. His plant that came to be known as the Milltown Dam near Missoula was in the works. Electricity, Clark argued, held the key to the future. “I believe that although the forests may disappear and the coal deposits may become exhausted during the coming century, the genius of man will provide methods for developing economically both heat, light and power through the medium of electricity that will supply all the needs and requirements of the coming generations.” Forests would be cut “only as demanded” in the interests of industrial progress, he asserted. “As a nation we have advanced further than any other nation in the world, and we are going to keep the lead.” *** (Editor’s note: Excerpts from Clark’s 1907 speech came from the Congressional Record, available on Google Books) [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/10/23/20548/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/