The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1903-02-28
CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY.
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK.
Br HENRY a. KNAPP, IN THE COSMOPOLITAN
FOR FEBRUARY.

so much OF uncertainty, and records
SO many failures, that the few sue
cesses stand as distinct as does the
general from the private
Sixty-three years ago, there was
born Of Scotch-Irish ancestry boy
who today owns the richest copper
mine on the globe. Luck had no
part in its requirement. A boys life
on a Pennsylvania farm is we'll calcu-
lated to develop muscle, and seven
teen years of it gave to William An
drews Clark physique, which,
though slight, is a marvel Of endur
ance and virility. At sixty-three he
is as full of energy and ''go" as men
of thirty. Yet he has seen hardships,
and, amidst them, has battled his
way upward through the resisting
and wearisome ''life of the frontier"
when those words meant absence of
civilization, abundance of bad Indians
and worse white men.
In 1862, then twenty-three years
old, with an academic education, and
a certificate in his pocket permitting
him to practise law, Clark hired as
teamster, and drove an emigrant
wagon from his parents home at
Mount Pleasant, Iowa, to Central
City, Colorado. Seven hundred and
fifty miles on foot in forty five days
graduates tenderfoot, and it evolves
a pioneer.
Clark's object in going to Colorado
was gold. He was disappointed in
not finding it lying ready to garner
in streams bed and canon's bottom.
He had been Jared to his backbone
when the plow-handles punched his
ribs back on that Pennsylvania farm,
but he had finished the furrow. In
Central City, he became miner,
swung sledge and pick, and in eigh-
teen months learned the A B G of
mining. But he did not uncover any
bonanzas. Iowa now offered pleas
Montana, still further west, embrac-
ed hardships tinged with the hope of
gold.
1t was characteristic of Clark that
he chose Montana. His maternal an
cestry had left France for Scotland,
because it was Huguenot. His father
had chosen America, instead of Ire
land, because of unsatisfed ambition.
So Clark drove an ox-team, n
1863, to Montana. This OK team was
Scottish thrift. 1t took oxen sixty
five days to plod the seven hundred
miles to Virginia City. Horses would
have done it in forty. But beef was
high in the new mining-camps oxen
would bring more per pound than
horses. The trip from the Missouri
to the Rockies was perilous. Che
yenne and Arapahoe resented intru-
sion. Burnt wagons and coyote-pol-
ished skeletons were the guide-posts.
To travel from Colorado to Montana
was hazardous. Every mountain
stream was lure to death. Every
bunch of stunted fir was an ambush.
Even the swift-pony express felt the
sting of deadly arrows, and the over
land stage dreaded the war -whoops of
the Sioux. 1t was a contrast to a
Pullman limited and fifty miles per
hour. Then it was trip that re-
quired nerve and courage, yet Clark
made the trip safety. 1t developed
grit. He has never lacked it since.
At Virginia City, he bought claim
with his oxen and nine months of
back breaking work, knee-deep in icy
water, yielded him, in the year 81,
fifteen hundred dollars. Others had
been more successful. Some had
cleaned up as many thousands. They
spent theirs. Clark drove three hun
dred miles to Salt Lake, and bought
goods, and became trader. Then
he opened a store. Flour was one
hundred and fifty dollars per fifty
pound sack. Ham was a dollar
pound. The great expense was the
freight. Clark was his own freighter.
He made money, and in year his
fifteen hundred dollars was seventy
five hundred dollars. The fall of '65
saw an impending tobacco-famine at
Last Chance Gulch (now Helena. }
The last tobacco-laden steamer up the
Missouri river had snagged, and her
cargo found market in the rivers bot
tom. On horseback, Clark rode two
hundred and fifty miles of plain and
mountain to Boise City. Other men
knew of the tobacco famine. But to
them log hut was preferable to a
minus-twenty temperature, punctua-
ted by snow-driven blizzard. On
January first, Clark drove into Helena
with two thousand barrels of tobacco
on his wagon. 1t cost him three
thousand dollars. 1t sold for ten
thousand dollars, and he was the
most popular man among those ten
thousand miners.
The next year saw him with
wholesale supply-house that controll-
ed the trade of central Montana.
Then his office became the depository
of miner and teamster, and SO he
drifted into banking.
In 1872, he boughta mine at Butte.
1t was supposed to carry high values
in gold. But it did not, and it look
ed like a total loss. For ten years,
Clark had lived and breathed mining.
He realized now that no man could
be a successful miner without some
knowledge of the technical. That
winter he was at Columbia College,
where he graduated in assaying and