​The Copper King and the Corrupted Senate:

William Andrews Clark and the Making of Modern Montana

Early Life and Western Migration

William Andrews Clark was born on January 8, 1839, in a log cabin near Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the son of John Clark and Mary Andrews, both of Scotch-Irish descent. The family relocated to Iowa in 1856, where the young Clark taught school and briefly studied law at Iowa Wesleyan College. His aspirations, however, pointed toward the trans-Mississippi West, where the mid-nineteenth-century mining frontier offered opportunities inaccessible through conventional professional channels. In 1862, Clark traveled to Colorado and worked in quartz mines near Central City. A year later, he pushed north to the Montana Territory, arriving in Bannack during the gold rush of 1863. His initial earnings from placer mining were modest, estimated at roughly $1,500, but Clark possessed an aptitude for recognizing more durable forms of profit than the gold fields themselves offered.

Perceiving that the real money lay in supplying rather than extracting, Clark organized a freighting operation between Salt Lake City and the mining camps of Virginia City and later Butte, hauling groceries, tobacco, and sundry goods that isolated miners valued intensely. He then leveraged proceeds from that trade into banking in Deer Lodge, extending credit to miners who used their claims as collateral. When borrowers defaulted, Clark absorbed those land rights. It was a cycle of accumulation that the historian Michael P. Malone, writing in his foundational study The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906, described as characteristic of Clark’s method: a “plunger’s genius for comprehending the rewards to be had in gambling on a large scale” (Malone 199). By his early thirties, Clark held banking interests, wholesale and retail merchandise operations, a mail contract between Missoula and Walla Walla, and an expanding portfolio of mining properties. He had begun accumulating the capital base that would allow him to transform Butte from a fading gold camp into one of the world’s leading industrial mining centers.

Building a Copper Empire in Butte

By the early 1870s, the easily accessible gold in the Butte region was substantially exhausted, but Clark had already identified the coming transition to copper and silver. He provided financing to the prospector William Farlin to develop silver and copper claims in Butte’s quartz formations, and simultaneously purchased and began developing his own set of claims in the district. The timing proved consequential. Thomas Edison’s development of electrical infrastructure in the late 1870s and 1880s created an enormous industrial demand for copper wiring, and Butte sat atop some of the richest copper deposits in the world. Clark, who had studied metallurgy at the Columbia School of Mines in New York to better understand ore reduction, was positioned to capitalize on this demand. He invested in smelting operations and reduction works, converting Butte from a modest silver camp into an industrial city supplying American and international markets with copper.

The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives records Clark as one of the Copper Kings who was born in Pennsylvania in 1839 and “after working in quartz mines in Colorado in 1863, made his way to new gold fields to find his fortune in the Montana gold rush” before transforming his banking and trading profits into a mining empire. By the mid-1880s, Clark and Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant who controlled the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, had emerged as the two dominant financiers of copper production in the Montana Territory. Their relationship deteriorated into sustained personal and commercial rivalry. One account held that Clark had angered Daly by acquiring water rights that Daly needed to operate his new Anaconda smelter; another pointed to an offensive remark Clark allegedly made about Daly’s business associate, James Ben Ali Haggin. Whatever its origin, the feud between the two men shaped Montana politics and economics for nearly two decades.

Between 1884 and 1888, Clark constructed a thirty-four-room mansion on West Granite Street in Butte, furnished with Tiffany stained glass and incorporating then-current electrical and mechanical technologies. The structure, which survives today as the Copper King Mansion, announced Clark’s ambitions beyond the mine and the counting house. He owned the Butte Miner newspaper and used it as a vehicle for advancing his political and business positions. Clark was also building operations beyond Montana: he acquired the United Verde copper deposit in Jerome, Arizona, at a moment when competitors dismissed it as too remote to be profitable; within a few years, that property alone had yielded him $60 million. He purchased coal mines, ranching interests, utilities, lumbering operations, and eventually a railroad — the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad — that connected Salt Lake City to Los Angeles and incidentally established a watering stop for steam locomotives in the desert that became Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County, Nevada, bears his name to this day.

The War with Marcus Daly and the Politics of Statehood

The rivalry between Clark and Daly extended far beyond their individual corporate interests. When Montana achieved territorial statehood in 1889, both men understood that the new state’s two U.S. Senate seats would be determined by the state legislature, and each worked to dominate that body. Clark had served as president of both the 1884 and 1889 Montana constitutional conventions, establishing himself as an influential figure in the formal structures of territorial governance. He had also championed the selection of Helena as the state capital over Anaconda, a campaign laden with cultural tensions — Daly’s base was the Catholic, Irish-immigrant community centered on Anaconda and the Copper Company’s company town; Clark’s coalition drew on Protestant, Masonic, and anglophone networks in Helena and Butte. The capital election of 1894, which Clark won, deepened the antagonism between the two camps and illustrated how thoroughly Clark integrated political strategy with commercial interest.

The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives notes that “Clark’s crafty business sense caused him to anticipate Marcus Daly’s need for water for his new smelter and Daly found that Clark had meantime bought up these rights. Thus began the battle of the copper kings.” In an era before direct election of senators, both men spent vast sums attempting to control the state legislature. The U.S. Senate’s own historical account of the subsequent scandal describes how “enormous sums of money changed hands in Montana as Clark and his chief rival, Anaconda Company copper magnate Marcus Daly, sought to influence the economic structure of the state, the location of the capital, the direction of Democratic politics, and the selection of a United States senator” (United States Senate, “The Election Case of William A. Clark of Montana”).

The 1899 Bribery Scandal and Senate Expulsion

Clark’s first serious campaign for the Senate, in 1890, failed. He persisted through the decade, and in 1899 organized a bribery operation that would become one of the most extensively documented cases of legislative corruption in American history. On December 4, 1899, Clark presented his credentials to the United States Senate as Montana’s newly elected senator. Opponents filed a petition on the same day charging that he had secured election through bribery, and the Senate referred the matter to the Committee on Privileges and Elections.

The committee heard testimony from ninety-six witnesses. Its investigation revealed what the Senate’s own published case history describes as “a dazzling list of bribes ranging from $240 to $100,000.” Coordinated by Clark’s son, the scheme involved paying mortgages, purchasing ranches, retiring debts, financing banks, and delivering envelopes of cash directly to legislators. The Montana History Portal at the Montana Historical Society holds photographs of thousand-dollar bills in an envelope bearing the initials “W.A.C.” — reportedly used to bribe state legislators — along with notations identifying the intended recipient as Henry Lee Myers, a state senator from Ravalli County. These physical artifacts provide tangible evidence of the scale and organization of the operation.

On April 23, 1900, the committee returned a unanimous report concluding that Clark was not entitled to his seat. The Daily Montanan, drawing on archival research, notes that the scandal “eventually led to the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, mandating the direct election of U.S. Senators.” On May 15, 1900, aware that he lacked the votes to retain his seat, Clark rose on the Senate floor, disputed the committee’s findings, complained of Marcus Daly’s counter-manipulation, and then resigned his seat. In a maneuver that testified to his political resourcefulness, Clark immediately arranged for Montana’s lieutenant governor — while the governor was conveniently absent from the state — to appoint him to fill his own vacancy. The governor returned, repudiated the appointment, and designated a different senator to fill the seat, effectively ending Clark’s scheme.

Clark returned to Montana, ran again in 1900, and was elected to the Senate by the legislature in 1901. He served a single term from 1901 to 1907. He was not a productive legislator; his Senate colleague Robert La Follette of Wisconsin identified him as one of the one hundred men who effectively owned America, a characterization that suggested power exercised outside formal channels rather than within them. In a Senate floor speech on February 23, 1907, near the end of his term, Clark articulated a philosophy of western resource exploitation that placed state and corporate prerogative above federal regulation, arguing that states knew better than the federal government how to dispose of public lands. Malone, in The Battle for Butte, observed that this speech coincided with Clark’s recent exoneration by the U.S. Supreme Court for acquiring dozens of homesteads on federal land for their timber through agents who had engaged in fraudulent filings — a decision written by Justice David Josiah Brewer that strained credibility by accepting that Clark had been unaware of his subordinates’ conduct.

The Man and His Legacy

Clark’s personal life attracted sustained press attention. His first wife, Kate Stauffer, whom he married in 1869 after meeting her again in Pennsylvania, died in 1893. In the years following her death, Clark became entangled in multiple legal and personal controversies involving women. He had evidently sent a young Butte woman named Anna LaChapelle to Paris at the age of sixteen to study the harp; by the early 1900s she had given birth to a daughter, Andrée. Clark reportedly married LaChapelle — thirty-nine years his junior — in Europe in 1901, though the marriage was not publicly disclosed until 1904. A second daughter, Huguette, was born in 1906. The younger Clark daughters became subjects of national press interest in the following decades; Huguette Clark, a reclusive heiress, died in 2011 leaving an estate whose disposition remained in dispute for years.

Architecturally and culturally, Clark’s imprint on Butte was substantial. He developed Columbia Gardens, a recreational park on the eastern slope above the city that operated from 1899 until 1973, providing free or low-cost access to amusements, gardens, a dance pavilion, and a roller coaster for Butte’s working-class population. In New York, he constructed a 131-room mansion on Fifth Avenue at 77th Street at a cost estimated at $5 million, furnishing it with European art, oak paneling reportedly salvaged from Sherwood Forest in England, and decorative objects sourced from across the continent. The structure was demolished after his death, but a gilded salon from the mansion, the Salon Doré, survives at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., along with the broader Clark collection: European and American paintings, Near Eastern carpets, Greek and Roman antiquities, tapestries, and decorative arts assembled with the assistance of the French painter Raphael Collin and curators from the Louvre.

Clark died in New York City on March 2, 1925, at the age of eighty-six. His estate was valued at approximately $200 to $300 million, placing him among the wealthiest Americans who ever lived. Unlike his contemporaries Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, Clark established no major philanthropic foundations, endowed no universities bearing his name, and left no lasting institutional monuments to his wealth in Montana. His son William Andrews Clark Jr. founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic and donated the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library to UCLA; the father’s own legacy remained embedded in the ore-stripped hills of Butte, in the Senate proceedings that contributed to the constitutional reform of senatorial elections, and in the complicated story of a state whose political and economic structures he had done as much as any individual to shape.

Clark occupies an ambiguous position in Montana historiography. He was an enormously capable accumulator of capital whose banking, trading, and metallurgical operations contributed materially to Montana’s early economic development. He was also a man who treated democratic institutions as tools available for purchase and who extracted resources from the public domain and from his workers with little concern for their broader social costs. His 1907 Senate speech — in which he declared that future generations could take care of themselves — encapsulated an extractive philosophy that defined the relationship between Gilded Age industrial capital and the western landscape it consumed. What the historian Michael Malone wrote of the copper era in Montana applies with particular force to its most financially successful practitioner: the political economy of Butte was not incidental corruption but the systemic result of industrial power operating without effective constraint.

Works Cited

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. “William A. Clark.” Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, buttearchives.org/william-a-clark/. Accessed 15 May 2026.

Edgerton, Scott. “William Clark, The Copper King.” Montana Professor, vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 2014, mtprof.msun.edu/Spr2014/edger.html. Accessed 15 May 2026.

Malone, Michael P. The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906. University of Washington Press, 1981; reprint, Montana Historical Society Press, 1995.

Malone, Michael P., Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. Rev. ed., University of Washington Press, 1991.

Montana History Portal. “Bribe Money for Members of the 6th Montana Legislature, 1899.” Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/74159. Accessed 15 May 2026.

United States Senate. “The Election Case of William A. Clark of Montana (1900).” United States Senate Historical Office, www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/electing-appointing-senators/contested-senate-elections/089William_Clark.htm. Accessed 15 May 2026.

University of North Texas Libraries. “A Critical Study of the Political Campaigns of William Andrews Clark.” Digital Library, digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5251/. Accessed 15 May 2026.

Dedman, Bill, and Paul Clark Newell Jr. Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. Ballantine Books, 2013.

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Montana: High, Wide and Handsome. Yale University Press, 1943; reprint, University of Nebraska Press, 2003.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​