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

probably cleaner air, Clark embarked on a European sojourn in 1878 and moved his wife and children to Paris. The City of Lights, a fashionable destination for the American upper class, had an expatriate community that included the Boston Brahmin Henry James and painters John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt. Kate and the children, who became fluent in French and German, spent three years in Paris (another son, Paul, was born in 1880), followed by two years in Dresden. Clark learned French and a smattering of other languages and began avidly collecting art. An absentee but indulgent father, Clark spent winters in Europe and the rest of his time in Montana or visiting his increasingly far-flung enterprises.
    His parents never had the wherewithal to give him the Grand Tour of Europe, that British tradition embraced by wealthy Americans who sent their aristocratic young heirs on cultural tours to Roman ruins. So he belatedly gave it to himself. Clark took his family to Italy (Pompeii), Greece (Athens), and Turkey (Ephesis), and even took a steamer to Algeria. When the Clarks returned to America, Kate and the children settled on Long Island, while her husband went back to Butte to supervise construction of their mansion on Granite Street.
    A trip to the 1884 New Orleans World Exposition led Clark to his next bonanza. Intrigued by a display of ore by Arizona’s mineral department, he asked where the rocks were from. The source was the United Verde Copper Mine in Jerome, which the owners had been unable to make profitable after digging down one hundred feet. Clark purchased the mine for a pittance. Under his auspices, United Verde produced eight million pounds of high-quality copper per month at a time when demand for the metal was surging due to the newly invented telephone.

    Clark was set on a collision course with another Montana mining titan: Marcus Daly, an upstart Irish immigrant with an even better eye for undervalued assets. Daly scored with a silver mine in Butte and then purchased an even richer copper mine, the Anaconda. He was backed by a syndicate that included George Hearst, the California mining magnate who was elected to the U.S. Senate and bankrolled the newspaper aspirations of his son William Randolph Hearst. Just as Clark put his money into developing Butte, Daly turned the tiny town of Anaconda, twenty-four miles from Butte, into his company town, building a courthouse and library and starting his own newspaper, the
Anaconda Standard
.
    The two Montana moguls were opposites in appearance and personality. “William Andrews Clark is a little man with a big head,” wrote the
San Francisco Call
. “He is as dapper as a fashion plate from his feet to his glossy hat. His tailor works wonders with his frock coats. Clark’s fingers are manicured and not a hair lies awry on the bushy red thatch which covers his head.” The newspaper wrote of his opponent: “Marcus Daly is big, broad-shouldered, deep chested andpowerful. He is of mercurial and choleric Irish temperament, genial to friends, vindictive to an enemy, quick of speech and given to a lusty swear word on occasions.”
    William Andrews Clark and Marcus Daly hated each other so much that they were willing to spend millions of dollars to blacken each other’s names and corrupt their fellow citizens. The origin of this feud has mystified historians, who cite possible causes ranging from insulting remarks the men made about each other to business deals gone awry. The feud went viciously public when William Andrews Clark was unanimously nominated in 1888 by Montana’s Democrats as the territory’s delegate to Congress. Daly was a Democrat but bolted his party to block Clark from winning. In this era before the secret ballot, Daly arranged for his Anaconda shift bosses to view and change miners’ ballots in favor of Clark’s Republican opponent.
    Clark lost but he was undeterred in his effort to seek national office. In 1889, when Montana became a state,