Free The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon

joined with partners to establish a bank that bought up gold dust and shipped it to an assay office in New York at a sizable profit. Clark later spun that off into yet another banking venture,W. A. Clark and Bro., bringing in his brother, James Ross Clark. Eleven years younger, Ross proved to be a valuable partner, willing to run the operations that his sibling amassed. William Andrews Clark realized that loan terms could be structured in ways that made it virtually impossible for a miner to repay on time. A default allowed his bank to snap up valuable property for pennies on the dollar.
    In 1872, Clark ventured from Deer Lodge to Butte to examine shallow quartz mines reputed to be worthless. Taking an astute gamble, he bought the claims to four Butte mines. But before investing in expensive equipment, he decided that he needed to learn more about geology and the science of mining.
    Taking a leave of absence from his bank, Clark moved to Manhattan to attend Columbia College’s mining school, founded in 1864. Clark was so eager for knowledge that he was willing to take classes with undergraduates nearly half his age. The couple left their young children with family members in Pennsylvania so they could experience New York unencumbered.
    The Clarks arrived in Manhattan, then a metropolis with nearly a million residents, during the post–Civil War boom when the city was rife with newly minted millionaires and served as a destination for those who had made their fortunes elsewhere. The 1872 guidebook
Lights and Shadows of New York Life
, by James McCabe, depicts the social-climbing follies of the nouveau riche, terming them the “Shoddyites.” “They are ridiculed by every satirist, yet they increase,” McCabe wrote. “They occupy the majority of the mansions in the fashionable streets, crowd the public thoroughfares and the Park with their costly and showy equipages, and flaunt their wealth so coarsely and offensively in the faces of their neighbors, that many good people have come to believe that riches and vulgarity are inseparable.”
    The Clarks, with their shiny new Montana fortune, fit right in with the Shoddyites. The couple had a hunger for culture, satisfied by the proximity of the newly opened Metropolitan Museum at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. The new Grand Opera House featured the top talents of Europe, and the Knoedler Gallery’s art exhibitions drew the monied social set. Clark would purchase many works at theKnoedler in the years to come. During his studies at Columbia, he and his professors examined mineral samples from his newly purchased Butte mines, and the results confirmed his instincts: he had tapped into major copper veins.
    Once back in Montana, Clark developed those mines, relying on modern technology to maximize their potential. He built a mill in Butte that used machinery to break down raw ore into metal residue, a process previously done by hand with a hammer. The environmental desecration accelerated when Clark built the first smelter in Butte to process raw ore. The smelter sent plumes of chemicals into the skies. The process of roasting ore in open pits made things worse. The miners, with their lungs damaged from their time underground, were especially vulnerable to deadly pneumonia. Vegetation dwindled down to only four trees in the entire city.
    William Andrews Clark would later sing the praises of the pollution that his mining operations created. “I must say that the ladies are fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called,” Clark told the Montana Constitutional Convention in a speech in the late 1890s, “because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a good complexion, and that is the reason that the ladies of Butte are renowned wherever they go for their good complexions.” He added that Butte’s physicians perceived the smoke as a “disinfectant” that destroys “the germs of disease.”
    Eager to provide his family with a sophisticated social milieu and