Free Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman Page B

Exposition in New Orleans.There he toured the display from Arizona Territory, seeing samples of ore from a particular mine, samples rich in copper, gold, and silver. He made note of it, and promptly forgot about it. But later, in checking the books of a bankrupt ore refinery that he had taken control of, he saw the name of the mine again: the United Verde.
    In early 1888, W.A. went to Arizona to visit this mine near the remote town of Jerome. This was high in Yavapai County, at 5,400 feet on the eastern slope of the Black Hills mountains, overlooking the Verde River. It had been operated since 1876, but when miners encountered a leaner ore in 1884, they were no longer able to operate profitably. United Verde’s prospects were limited by the lack of access to water or a railroad to transport the copper ore. For a while, the nearest railroad station was three states away, in Kansas. But even after the Santa Fe railroad pushed through Arizona in 1882, worldwide copper prices were depressed, falling to nine cents a pound, and the mine lay idle.
    When W.A. visited the mine in 1888, the copper market was ripe, with prices having been driven up to fifteen cents a pound by a French syndicate that was limiting production. He and his mine superintendent went crawling around the mine to take ore samples every twelve inches. Satisfied with what he found, he took an option on the mine and started buying up all the stock, which was scattered across the globe. Eventually, out of 300,000 shares, the Clarks would own 299,000.
    Under his ownership, the United Verde would become the richest copper mine in the world. It again showed W. A. Clark’s ability to grasp an opportunity. He installed a massive industrial complex for extracting, crushing, and roasting the ore to bring out the vital copper. The mining shafts, lined with concrete, reached two-thirds of a mile deep. W.A. alsoconnected Jerome to the Santa Fe railroad by a narrow-gauge line, cutting his transportation costs dramatically.
    For his workers, W.A. built a model town, complete with a library and schools. This planned community, called Clarkdale, was founded in 1912 a mile from the mine. Under the rigid segregation of the day, miners and their families lived in company cottages, with Upper Clarkdale for engineers and bosses. Lower Clarkdale was for working class whites. Mexican immigrants lived in crude buildings in Patio Town closer to the smelter. And out in the desert Native American workers lived in domed huts they built themselves. The company provided a baseball park and four swimming pools, disability insurance, and wages paid on a bonus system, with extra pay given for loading more ore or blacksmithing more pickaxes. Unlike its competitors, the United Verde enjoyed mostly harmonious relations with its unions.
    W.A. operated all his businesses under strict secrecy, but he did let out that the United Verde was capable of producingeight million pounds of fine copper per month. Newspapers speculated that its annual profits were $5 million to $10 million, or in today’s dollars roughly $140 million to $280 million. With great understatement, W.A. recalled in a speech some years later his impression of the ore samples from United Verde that he had seen in New Orleans: “This was one of the most attractive collections of mineral to be found at the exhibition.”
TWO TABLESPOONS OF WHISKEY

 
    T HE 1880 S BROUGHT a flood of pioneers into Southern California. Some came to escape harsh winters elsewhere. Some sought the restoration of their health. And some were prescient entrepreneurs and land speculators. The Clark family contributed immigrants in all three categories, and through W.A.’s enterprise, they built a railroad to open up Los Angeles as the center of business on the Pacific coast, America’s gateway for trade with the Orient.
    In 1880, Los Angeles was an unimpressive town of 11,000 on the Los Angeles River. In some years, the river flooded in the winter and ran