June 15, 2011 • 20 mins
Recently deceased heiress Huguette Clark was reclusive -- she hadn't been photographed since 1930. Her father was the wealthy William Andrews Clark, whose political battles started the War of the Copper Kings. Tune in to learn more about the Clark family.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm de Blane in chuk Reboarding
and recently our co worker Christianna shared a strange story
with us and you might have seen it in the
(00:21):
news that's been in a lot of sites, but most
notably on MSNBC. They originally covered the story. A reclusive
heiress named Huguett Clark died in May under a pseudonym,
in an unmarked room at Beth Israel Medical Center. And
she was a hundred and four years old, so a
near contemporary of Brooke Astor and the owner of the
(00:45):
States in Santa Barbara, California. In Connecticut and the largest
apartment on Fifth Avenue, which this kind of mind blowing here,
forty two rooms worth one hundred million dollars. I looked
it up in Google Map and it's like right across
the street from Central Park. Yeah. But one of the
most remarkable things about the story, in my opinion at least,
(01:07):
is that the last known photo of her was from
nineteen thirty. She hadn't had any photos of herself, and
not many people had seen her around in the past
twenty years or so, right, very few people had seen
her really since the sixties. Yeah, but at one point
she was a great heiress, so would be socialite. At
the age of twenty one, she had inherited one fifth
of her father's estate, the whole worth of which was
(01:30):
three hundred million or about three point six billion in
today's terms. So he gets own story is really fascinating,
and we're going to get into that a little more later.
But her age, her father, and her inheritance connects her
to one of the most interesting stories of the Gilded
Age and the West, the Wars of the Copper Kings. Yeah,
so beaute. Montana is a far cry from a fancy
(01:52):
Fifth Avenue apartment, but that's where this story starts, and
it's where our feud starts as well. So I hope
we've intrigued you proper. Like in the eighteen sixties, miners
from Virginia City discovered gold in what is now Butte Montana.
By the eighteen seventies, the game had shifted to silver mining,
and by eighteen seventy four, a man named Marcus Daily,
(02:14):
who was an Irish immigrant with a quote nose for
or had struck a fifty or one hundred foot wide
vein of copper, depending on which source you're looking at.
And not long after that, the city of Beaute was
formed and was soon connected to the wider world by rail,
and that in turn began the copper boom. Yeah, and
(02:37):
that was fueled by a need for telegraph wires, electric
power lines, and electric motors. And other industries sprung up
to support the mining, like lumber and railroads, and a
handful of companies came to dominate the state's industry. Daily
became one of the first so called copper Kings, along
with his partner George Hurst. William Randolph Hurst father and
(02:58):
Daily's chief rival was you gets father William Andrews Clark,
who had been born in a Pennsylvania log cabin and
who started off panning for gold and selling eggs at
a markup to minors. Yeah. And later we have a
man named Frederick Augustus Hines entering the picture. He's a
German immigrant. He joined the barons, but he only appears
(03:19):
for round two of this war will be discussing. The
first battle was fought between Daily and Clark, who, in
addition to being fabulously wealthy, desperately wanted a political career,
and that's really at the root of these two men's rivalrype.
So we're gonna make it clear round one. The first election. Yeah,
(03:39):
just a little background. Montana at this time was, of course,
not yet a state. It was a territory and there
had to be a non Indian population of sixty thousand
before it could apply for statehood. Though they sort of
jumped the gun on that a little bit, they did.
They tried to get statehood before they really legally could.
It was still allowed though, to have a territorial representative
(04:00):
of to Congress, someone who could lobby in petition real representatives.
In eighteen eighty eight, William Andrews Clark decided he wanted
to run for that position. Yeah, but Daily wasn't about
to let power slip into the hands of his chief
Copper rival, especially because he didn't think that all of
his interests would be successfully represented by Clark to the representatives.
(04:21):
So he worked to elect Clark's Republican opponent, and he
bribed voters with things like cigars and whiskey, or he threatened,
probably more menacingly here, he threatened his own employees with
firing if if they went out and voted for Clark.
So Clark lost and obviously held a pretty big grudge
(04:42):
against Daily for the rest of his life. That wasn't
the end of the story, though, of course. There was
a second election just a year later, and at that
point Montana had become a state. Unsurprisingly, they also soon
adopted a secret ballot after that last elections fiasco, and
Clark he decides to have another or go this time,
and this time he's running for US Senate. At the time,
(05:04):
senators weren't elect elected directly though, they were elected by
the state legislature, and that posed a bit of a
problem for Montana, where each party would only elect its
own representatives, they ended up with this terribly awkward situation.
A brand new state sent four senators to Washington, two Democrats,
one of whom was Clark, and two Republicans, and at
(05:25):
the time, the Republicans controlled the Senate, so the two
Democratic senators were sent home. Sorry, again, Clark lost out.
He doesn't give up, though, This guy just keeps on
trying to get political office. The third election occurs in
eighteen ninety three, and this time he wasn't about to
let party politics get in the way of his ambitions.
He wasn't going to be sent home again, so this
(05:48):
time he bribed the legislators to vote for him regardless
of their political affiliation. That's one way to get around it.
But Daily, not to be outdone, followed right behind him,
counter bribing all the people that he had bribed to
reverse their vote, and Clark lost again, but only by
three votes. Yeah, so the following year there was no
(06:08):
Senate election to squabble over, so the guys had to
do something else with their time. Besides ranking in the
money from all of their business, they fought over the
state capital location, and of course, having the state capital
near your own business is a it's a profitable thing.
You have access to your representatives, you have some sort
(06:29):
of influence and power. And after an initial election where
there were quite a few cities in Montana to choose
from the top choices ended up being Helena and Anaconda,
which was Daily's own mining town, so Daly obviously supported
his own location. He wanted the capital to be right
outside of his mind, but Clark arranged to support Helena
(06:51):
if it's businessmen would help him in turn get elected
to the Senate next chance he had. Yeah, and the
two men put everything they had into this petition. They
stage parades and fireworks displays. They gave out five dollar bills.
Clark even made up a miniature copper collars to show
what a stranglehold anaconda would have on the state if
the capital moved there. He gave him out like party favors. Basically, Yeah,
(07:14):
and the Montana Historical Society estimates that they ended up
each spending about fifty six dollars per head on the election,
which would translate to about one thousand, three d fifty
six dollars today. Clark one. In this instance, the capital
went to Helena. Yeah, so triumphant, Clark again ran for
Senate in but just as the legislature was about to vote,
(07:36):
and he was pretty confident this time and he was
finally going to make it, State Senator Fred Whiteside stormed
into the room waving around four envelopes filled with thirty
thousand dollars, accusing Clark of bribing him and a few
other state senators. Seems like everybody would have known this
by this point, but I guess somebody coming in waving
(07:57):
the cash around really stood for something. So ultimately four
state senators said that Clark tried to bribe them, and
there was testimony in front of a grand jury and
a lot of hullabaloo. Yet Clark still managed to get
elected to the US Senate, and right away opponents filed
a petition which launched a Senate investigation led by the
(08:20):
Committee on Privileges and Elections to see what exactly had
happened during this campaign, and after hearing ninety six witnesses,
the committee decided that he in fact wasn't entitled to
his seat. He had given bribes ranging from two forty
dollars to a hundred thousand dollars. His son had organized
further bribes like paid mortgages, new ranches, new banks, and
(08:42):
clear debts. And it also became clear that his old
rival Daily had spent as much on counter bribes, which
I think some people on the committee sort of tried
to use that as an excuse, like, oh, he had
Daily out there bribing all these people, he had to
do something. But obviously that's two wrongs don't make a
right Clark, as we as we know. Yeah, but Clark
said privately, I never bought a man who wasn't for sale,
(09:04):
but he also resigned before the Senate could act on this.
He was furious, obviously. He finally got to the Senate
and and he's disgraced. So in nineteen o one, though,
he finally got his wish in the fifth election. A
new state legislature, which was mostly elected with his help
so that all the guys are on his side exactly
(09:26):
voted him to the Senate, and Daily had died by
this point in nineteen hundred, and he obviously couldn't put
up a fight, So with his prime opponent gone, Clark
made it to the Senate. He didn't have all fans, though,
Mark Twain for one, said some pretty nasty things about him. Yeah,
he said, Clark is as rotten human being as can
(09:48):
be found anywhere under the flag. He is ashamed of
the American nation, and no one has helped to send
him to the Senate, who did not know that his
proper place was the penitentiary with a chain and ball
on his legs. Yeah, pretty brutal, Mark Twain. Yeah. So
Clark served one term. But by the time Clark finally
got that long awaited Senate seat, a new battle in
(10:10):
the Wars of the Copper Kings had already begun two
years before Daily's death. He had sold part of his
mind to Standard Oil. Of course, probably most of you
have heard of that company, William Rockefeller's company, one of
the greatest or at least largest American companies at the time.
Rockefeller and executive Henry H. Rogers formed a holding company
(10:32):
after that called Amalgamated Copper Company, and they started buying
up other big producers, Clark's included um and there were
a few scandals right from the start. But Daily's nineteen
hundred death really gave Rogers and Rockefeller even more control,
which was not necessarily good news for Montana. Yeah, because
(10:54):
the competition between Daily and Clark had at least left
workers with some options on leverage. But now there was
a monopoly. People called it the company. One guy, however,
was trying to out fox Amalgamated or at least blatantly
steal from them, depending on how you look at it.
And I'm referring to the man that we mentioned earlier
in the podcast New Copper King, Frederick Augustus Hines, and
(11:18):
he had been working in Butte since eighteen eighty nine.
He cashed in by working the apex law, which was
a law that said that the owner of a mining
claim could pursue any vein of ore that rose to
the surface of his claim, even if it went on
to someone else's land. Now, Hines knew that the copper
veins were a complete mess, just super interconnected, so no
one would really be able to tell which were the
(11:39):
veins that apex his claim. So a long story short,
he started mining Amalgamated claims among others, and so when
the company sued him, he basically bought the judges off
and they would throw out the suits, forcing Amalgolmated to
go all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, he
was even cleverer than that. With his first investments. He
had bought the judges no ing that Amalgamated was gonna
(12:01):
come in and contest them, So he knew he was
saved right from the start as long as his judges
stuck with him. Ultimately, there were a hundred lawsuits by
nineteen o two brought against Hines by Amalgamated, But Beaute
and many other people in Montana supported Hines over the
New Yorkers. They thought that he had a better chance
(12:23):
of representing their interests than than Rockfeller and and his company,
And finally, in October nineteen o three, a very frustrated
Amalgamated Copper shut down its operations and protests and fifteen
thousand people were suddenly jobless. So this is shutting down
the mines and all of the associated businesses as well.
(12:44):
Only the newspapers stayed open so that they could keep
on blasting Hines, blaming him for causing all this trouble
in the first place. Interestingly, when Hines finally got a
chance to explain himself, the people of Beaute stuck with him.
They thought, well, okay, his explanation is is better than
that of of the company. But they still wanted to
(13:05):
stop the shutdown. So Montana's governor concedes to Amalgamated's demands.
They decided that the company will be allowed to have
its cases heard outside of Butte, so they'll be able
to get away from Hines has bought judges. Yeah, so
Amalgamated one and Hines eventually sold his shares to them
for twelve million dollars, and soon after that William Clark
(13:26):
sold his two and all the companies became Anaconda Copper
Mining company and just sort of a side note on
that company. It has a strange history. It goes on
till nineteen seventy seven when it was sold, but it
bought the Chile Copper Company and had its minds expropriated
by the Chilean President Salvador A Linde, who was exhoomed recently,
(13:48):
as many of our listeners alerted us UM, and in
March of this year, the old Anaconda Copper Mining Company
was designated a super fund site. So not a very
good history, I guess, right. So that's the history of
the company. But what about Clark's career. Well, while serving
that one senate term that he got to serve, he
announced in nineteen o four that three years earlier he
(14:11):
had been remarried secretly in France. He was sixty five
at the time and his new wife was twenty six
and had been his ward and they already had a
two year old named Andre Hugh Gett was born in
nineteen o six and she was the last of Clark's
six kids. Yeah, and this was you can you can
see tabloid style news papers regarding this story. It's he's
(14:35):
married and has two kids, and it must have all
been quite scandalous, but the family moved into a one
hundred and twenty room house at Fifth Avenue in seventy
seven Street, and you can also see pictures of this.
I put one in our notes so we could admire
it while discussing. But um, you wouldn't admire it too much.
(14:56):
It's really kind of horrifying. It was known as Clark's Folly.
Combines almost every architectural style you can imagine, but it
was elaborate. That's one thing that we can definitely say about.
It had Turkish baths, it had a rotunda, it had
its own railroad line. The oaks feelings were imported from
Sherwood Forest, and it even included four art galleries. Because
(15:19):
Clark was quite an art buff. He collected works from
Degas and run Brand and Titian and Rousseau Um. But
that's where our our young you get grew up. Yeah,
you get actually took the traditional society girl truck for
a time. She attended Spencers School for Girls. She was
married at twenty two, but after a divorce two years later,
(15:41):
she moved in with her mother and started to gradually
withdraw from the public. That last known photo of her
taking a nineteen thirty that we mentioned earlier in the podcast,
that dates from the day of her divorce. After her
mother's nineteen sixty three death, she was rarely seen. Yeah,
But the the unusual thing, I think, the thing that
might so capture people's imagination to about this story is
(16:03):
that she didn't let all those properties just decay. They
were all kept up two remarkable standards. Really. The Santa
Barbara estate contained pictures of Andre growing up, even though
she had died at sixteen. That's you gets older, sister,
to remind everyone, Um, two fifteen acres were given to
the Boy Scouts, and and the house in Connecticut was
(16:26):
the same, kept up immaculately, even though you get never
even spent to night there. Um. The building staff at
the fifth Avenue apartment, even though that is where you
get lived for for a lot of her life, rarely
saw her. Yeah. They would just catch an occasional glimpse.
And it's a belief that she checked herself into the
hospital about twenty two years ago. It's still unclear how
(16:49):
the estate will be divvied up. I think there again,
to make a Brooke Aster comparison, there have been some
fears that maybe there was some sort of elder abuse
from manipulation with her estate, but that's not definite yet.
It is still pretty pretty new story. Yeah, I think
there's still a lot that we have to learn about
(17:10):
her personal story and just about this new story unfolding
with her estate. So yeah, I just I think it's interesting.
Maybe because she so removed herself from modern life, she
is sort of a stronger connection to the era of
her father almost we we don't have other associations too
to make for her. Yeah, she's a connection I think
(17:31):
to a time that people are still really a time
of in American history that people are still really very
interested in UM. And I think that's a good transition
into our listener mail segment. We have a postcard from
Stephanie in Australia, and she's an American living in Australia.
She says, Dear Sarah Dablina, thank you for putting out
(17:54):
a consistently interesting, informative and educational podcast. I can't choose
a favorite, but would love more on a mary Or
and Royalty, for example, the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts, or
facts behind the Myths. Thanks again for helping my walks
to work go buy more quickly, so already the Rockefellers
mentioned in this podcast. Hopefully you'll like this one, Stephanie,
(18:15):
we can. We can check it off the last. It
also has a kili on the front, which, as you
all now know from from Facebook. I have a stuffed
animal kiwi that I got from a New Zealand Listener's
pretty awesome. We also have a cool postcard from John
and it is a postcard from Havana, and I don't
think we've ever gotten a postcard from Cuba before he
(18:37):
was he was betting on that. I think he had
contacted us on Twitter already too to say promised a
postcard from somewhere where we had never gotten one from before.
And I hazarded to guess Atlantis because I know we've
definitely never gotten in Atlantis postcard. But he was pretty close,
so he wrote in to say I spent the last
ten weeks traveling solo through Central America doing photography work
(19:00):
with two great n g o s. And he also
suggested that we cover some Cuban history at some point.
So thank you John for the postcard. It's a it's
a lovely picture of a sunset and fishing, so too fun,
postcards for the Day, Yeah, and some possible suggestions for
future episodes. If you have any suggestions for a future episode,
(19:22):
please write us Where History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com or you can look us up on Facebook
or on Twitter at Miston History. Yeah. And if you
want to learn a little bit more about the clean
up kind of stuff that's probably going to be going
down at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, we have an
article called what is Super Fun Redevelopment written by our
own Jane McGrath, so you can check it out by
(19:44):
searching for what is Super Fun Redevelopment on the home
page at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House
(20:05):
Efforts iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes,
m
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm de Blane in chuk Reboarding
and recently our co worker Christianna shared a strange story
with us and you might have seen it in the
(00:21):
news that's been in a lot of sites, but most
notably on MSNBC. They originally covered the story. A reclusive
heiress named Huguett Clark died in May under a pseudonym,
in an unmarked room at Beth Israel Medical Center. And
she was a hundred and four years old, so a
near contemporary of Brooke Astor and the owner of the
(00:45):
States in Santa Barbara, California. In Connecticut and the largest
apartment on Fifth Avenue, which this kind of mind blowing here,
forty two rooms worth one hundred million dollars. I looked
it up in Google Map and it's like right across
the street from Central Park. Yeah. But one of the
most remarkable things about the story, in my opinion at least,
(01:07):
is that the last known photo of her was from
nineteen thirty. She hadn't had any photos of herself, and
not many people had seen her around in the past
twenty years or so, right, very few people had seen
her really since the sixties. Yeah, but at one point
she was a great heiress, so would be socialite. At
the age of twenty one, she had inherited one fifth
of her father's estate, the whole worth of which was
(01:30):
three hundred million or about three point six billion in
today's terms. So he gets own story is really fascinating,
and we're going to get into that a little more later.
But her age, her father, and her inheritance connects her
to one of the most interesting stories of the Gilded
Age and the West, the Wars of the Copper Kings. Yeah,
so beaute. Montana is a far cry from a fancy
(01:52):
Fifth Avenue apartment, but that's where this story starts, and
it's where our feud starts as well. So I hope
we've intrigued you proper. Like in the eighteen sixties, miners
from Virginia City discovered gold in what is now Butte Montana.
By the eighteen seventies, the game had shifted to silver mining,
and by eighteen seventy four, a man named Marcus Daily,
(02:14):
who was an Irish immigrant with a quote nose for
or had struck a fifty or one hundred foot wide
vein of copper, depending on which source you're looking at.
And not long after that, the city of Beaute was
formed and was soon connected to the wider world by rail,
and that in turn began the copper boom. Yeah, and
(02:37):
that was fueled by a need for telegraph wires, electric
power lines, and electric motors. And other industries sprung up
to support the mining, like lumber and railroads, and a
handful of companies came to dominate the state's industry. Daily
became one of the first so called copper Kings, along
with his partner George Hurst. William Randolph Hurst father and
(02:58):
Daily's chief rival was you gets father William Andrews Clark,
who had been born in a Pennsylvania log cabin and
who started off panning for gold and selling eggs at
a markup to minors. Yeah. And later we have a
man named Frederick Augustus Hines entering the picture. He's a
German immigrant. He joined the barons, but he only appears
(03:19):
for round two of this war will be discussing. The
first battle was fought between Daily and Clark, who, in
addition to being fabulously wealthy, desperately wanted a political career,
and that's really at the root of these two men's rivalrype.
So we're gonna make it clear round one. The first election. Yeah,
(03:39):
just a little background. Montana at this time was, of course,
not yet a state. It was a territory and there
had to be a non Indian population of sixty thousand
before it could apply for statehood. Though they sort of
jumped the gun on that a little bit, they did.
They tried to get statehood before they really legally could.
It was still allowed though, to have a territorial representative
(04:00):
of to Congress, someone who could lobby in petition real representatives.
In eighteen eighty eight, William Andrews Clark decided he wanted
to run for that position. Yeah, but Daily wasn't about
to let power slip into the hands of his chief
Copper rival, especially because he didn't think that all of
his interests would be successfully represented by Clark to the representatives.
(04:21):
So he worked to elect Clark's Republican opponent, and he
bribed voters with things like cigars and whiskey, or he threatened,
probably more menacingly here, he threatened his own employees with
firing if if they went out and voted for Clark.
So Clark lost and obviously held a pretty big grudge
(04:42):
against Daily for the rest of his life. That wasn't
the end of the story, though, of course. There was
a second election just a year later, and at that
point Montana had become a state. Unsurprisingly, they also soon
adopted a secret ballot after that last elections fiasco, and
Clark he decides to have another or go this time,
and this time he's running for US Senate. At the time,
(05:04):
senators weren't elect elected directly though, they were elected by
the state legislature, and that posed a bit of a
problem for Montana, where each party would only elect its
own representatives, they ended up with this terribly awkward situation.
A brand new state sent four senators to Washington, two Democrats,
one of whom was Clark, and two Republicans, and at
(05:25):
the time, the Republicans controlled the Senate, so the two
Democratic senators were sent home. Sorry, again, Clark lost out.
He doesn't give up, though, This guy just keeps on
trying to get political office. The third election occurs in
eighteen ninety three, and this time he wasn't about to
let party politics get in the way of his ambitions.
He wasn't going to be sent home again, so this
(05:48):
time he bribed the legislators to vote for him regardless
of their political affiliation. That's one way to get around it.
But Daily, not to be outdone, followed right behind him,
counter bribing all the people that he had bribed to
reverse their vote, and Clark lost again, but only by
three votes. Yeah, so the following year there was no
(06:08):
Senate election to squabble over, so the guys had to
do something else with their time. Besides ranking in the
money from all of their business, they fought over the
state capital location, and of course, having the state capital
near your own business is a it's a profitable thing.
You have access to your representatives, you have some sort
(06:29):
of influence and power. And after an initial election where
there were quite a few cities in Montana to choose
from the top choices ended up being Helena and Anaconda,
which was Daily's own mining town, so Daly obviously supported
his own location. He wanted the capital to be right
outside of his mind, but Clark arranged to support Helena
(06:51):
if it's businessmen would help him in turn get elected
to the Senate next chance he had. Yeah, and the
two men put everything they had into this petition. They
stage parades and fireworks displays. They gave out five dollar bills.
Clark even made up a miniature copper collars to show
what a stranglehold anaconda would have on the state if
the capital moved there. He gave him out like party favors. Basically, Yeah,
(07:14):
and the Montana Historical Society estimates that they ended up
each spending about fifty six dollars per head on the election,
which would translate to about one thousand, three d fifty
six dollars today. Clark one. In this instance, the capital
went to Helena. Yeah, so triumphant, Clark again ran for
Senate in but just as the legislature was about to vote,
(07:36):
and he was pretty confident this time and he was
finally going to make it, State Senator Fred Whiteside stormed
into the room waving around four envelopes filled with thirty
thousand dollars, accusing Clark of bribing him and a few
other state senators. Seems like everybody would have known this
by this point, but I guess somebody coming in waving
(07:57):
the cash around really stood for something. So ultimately four
state senators said that Clark tried to bribe them, and
there was testimony in front of a grand jury and
a lot of hullabaloo. Yet Clark still managed to get
elected to the US Senate, and right away opponents filed
a petition which launched a Senate investigation led by the
(08:20):
Committee on Privileges and Elections to see what exactly had
happened during this campaign, and after hearing ninety six witnesses,
the committee decided that he in fact wasn't entitled to
his seat. He had given bribes ranging from two forty
dollars to a hundred thousand dollars. His son had organized
further bribes like paid mortgages, new ranches, new banks, and
(08:42):
clear debts. And it also became clear that his old
rival Daily had spent as much on counter bribes, which
I think some people on the committee sort of tried
to use that as an excuse, like, oh, he had
Daily out there bribing all these people, he had to
do something. But obviously that's two wrongs don't make a
right Clark, as we as we know. Yeah, but Clark
said privately, I never bought a man who wasn't for sale,
(09:04):
but he also resigned before the Senate could act on this.
He was furious, obviously. He finally got to the Senate
and and he's disgraced. So in nineteen o one, though,
he finally got his wish in the fifth election. A
new state legislature, which was mostly elected with his help
so that all the guys are on his side exactly
(09:26):
voted him to the Senate, and Daily had died by
this point in nineteen hundred, and he obviously couldn't put
up a fight, So with his prime opponent gone, Clark
made it to the Senate. He didn't have all fans, though,
Mark Twain for one, said some pretty nasty things about him. Yeah,
he said, Clark is as rotten human being as can
(09:48):
be found anywhere under the flag. He is ashamed of
the American nation, and no one has helped to send
him to the Senate, who did not know that his
proper place was the penitentiary with a chain and ball
on his legs. Yeah, pretty brutal, Mark Twain. Yeah. So
Clark served one term. But by the time Clark finally
got that long awaited Senate seat, a new battle in
(10:10):
the Wars of the Copper Kings had already begun two
years before Daily's death. He had sold part of his
mind to Standard Oil. Of course, probably most of you
have heard of that company, William Rockefeller's company, one of
the greatest or at least largest American companies at the time.
Rockefeller and executive Henry H. Rogers formed a holding company
(10:32):
after that called Amalgamated Copper Company, and they started buying
up other big producers, Clark's included um and there were
a few scandals right from the start. But Daily's nineteen
hundred death really gave Rogers and Rockefeller even more control,
which was not necessarily good news for Montana. Yeah, because
(10:54):
the competition between Daily and Clark had at least left
workers with some options on leverage. But now there was
a monopoly. People called it the company. One guy, however,
was trying to out fox Amalgamated or at least blatantly
steal from them, depending on how you look at it.
And I'm referring to the man that we mentioned earlier
in the podcast New Copper King, Frederick Augustus Hines, and
(11:18):
he had been working in Butte since eighteen eighty nine.
He cashed in by working the apex law, which was
a law that said that the owner of a mining
claim could pursue any vein of ore that rose to
the surface of his claim, even if it went on
to someone else's land. Now, Hines knew that the copper
veins were a complete mess, just super interconnected, so no
one would really be able to tell which were the
(11:39):
veins that apex his claim. So a long story short,
he started mining Amalgamated claims among others, and so when
the company sued him, he basically bought the judges off
and they would throw out the suits, forcing Amalgolmated to
go all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, he
was even cleverer than that. With his first investments. He
had bought the judges no ing that Amalgamated was gonna
(12:01):
come in and contest them, So he knew he was
saved right from the start as long as his judges
stuck with him. Ultimately, there were a hundred lawsuits by
nineteen o two brought against Hines by Amalgamated, But Beaute
and many other people in Montana supported Hines over the
New Yorkers. They thought that he had a better chance
(12:23):
of representing their interests than than Rockfeller and and his company,
And finally, in October nineteen o three, a very frustrated
Amalgamated Copper shut down its operations and protests and fifteen
thousand people were suddenly jobless. So this is shutting down
the mines and all of the associated businesses as well.
(12:44):
Only the newspapers stayed open so that they could keep
on blasting Hines, blaming him for causing all this trouble
in the first place. Interestingly, when Hines finally got a
chance to explain himself, the people of Beaute stuck with him.
They thought, well, okay, his explanation is is better than
that of of the company. But they still wanted to
(13:05):
stop the shutdown. So Montana's governor concedes to Amalgamated's demands.
They decided that the company will be allowed to have
its cases heard outside of Butte, so they'll be able
to get away from Hines has bought judges. Yeah, so
Amalgamated one and Hines eventually sold his shares to them
for twelve million dollars, and soon after that William Clark
(13:26):
sold his two and all the companies became Anaconda Copper
Mining company and just sort of a side note on
that company. It has a strange history. It goes on
till nineteen seventy seven when it was sold, but it
bought the Chile Copper Company and had its minds expropriated
by the Chilean President Salvador A Linde, who was exhoomed recently,
(13:48):
as many of our listeners alerted us UM, and in
March of this year, the old Anaconda Copper Mining Company
was designated a super fund site. So not a very
good history, I guess, right. So that's the history of
the company. But what about Clark's career. Well, while serving
that one senate term that he got to serve, he
announced in nineteen o four that three years earlier he
(14:11):
had been remarried secretly in France. He was sixty five
at the time and his new wife was twenty six
and had been his ward and they already had a
two year old named Andre Hugh Gett was born in
nineteen o six and she was the last of Clark's
six kids. Yeah, and this was you can you can
see tabloid style news papers regarding this story. It's he's
(14:35):
married and has two kids, and it must have all
been quite scandalous, but the family moved into a one
hundred and twenty room house at Fifth Avenue in seventy
seven Street, and you can also see pictures of this.
I put one in our notes so we could admire
it while discussing. But um, you wouldn't admire it too much.
(14:56):
It's really kind of horrifying. It was known as Clark's Folly.
Combines almost every architectural style you can imagine, but it
was elaborate. That's one thing that we can definitely say about.
It had Turkish baths, it had a rotunda, it had
its own railroad line. The oaks feelings were imported from
Sherwood Forest, and it even included four art galleries. Because
(15:19):
Clark was quite an art buff. He collected works from
Degas and run Brand and Titian and Rousseau Um. But
that's where our our young you get grew up. Yeah,
you get actually took the traditional society girl truck for
a time. She attended Spencers School for Girls. She was
married at twenty two, but after a divorce two years later,
(15:41):
she moved in with her mother and started to gradually
withdraw from the public. That last known photo of her
taking a nineteen thirty that we mentioned earlier in the podcast,
that dates from the day of her divorce. After her
mother's nineteen sixty three death, she was rarely seen. Yeah,
But the the unusual thing, I think, the thing that
might so capture people's imagination to about this story is
(16:03):
that she didn't let all those properties just decay. They
were all kept up two remarkable standards. Really. The Santa
Barbara estate contained pictures of Andre growing up, even though
she had died at sixteen. That's you gets older, sister,
to remind everyone, Um, two fifteen acres were given to
the Boy Scouts, and and the house in Connecticut was
(16:26):
the same, kept up immaculately, even though you get never
even spent to night there. Um. The building staff at
the fifth Avenue apartment, even though that is where you
get lived for for a lot of her life, rarely
saw her. Yeah. They would just catch an occasional glimpse.
And it's a belief that she checked herself into the
hospital about twenty two years ago. It's still unclear how
(16:49):
the estate will be divvied up. I think there again,
to make a Brooke Aster comparison, there have been some
fears that maybe there was some sort of elder abuse
from manipulation with her estate, but that's not definite yet.
It is still pretty pretty new story. Yeah, I think
there's still a lot that we have to learn about
(17:10):
her personal story and just about this new story unfolding
with her estate. So yeah, I just I think it's interesting.
Maybe because she so removed herself from modern life, she
is sort of a stronger connection to the era of
her father almost we we don't have other associations too
to make for her. Yeah, she's a connection I think
(17:31):
to a time that people are still really a time
of in American history that people are still really very
interested in UM. And I think that's a good transition
into our listener mail segment. We have a postcard from
Stephanie in Australia, and she's an American living in Australia.
She says, Dear Sarah Dablina, thank you for putting out
(17:54):
a consistently interesting, informative and educational podcast. I can't choose
a favorite, but would love more on a mary Or
and Royalty, for example, the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts, or
facts behind the Myths. Thanks again for helping my walks
to work go buy more quickly, so already the Rockefellers
mentioned in this podcast. Hopefully you'll like this one, Stephanie,
(18:15):
we can. We can check it off the last. It
also has a kili on the front, which, as you
all now know from from Facebook. I have a stuffed
animal kiwi that I got from a New Zealand Listener's
pretty awesome. We also have a cool postcard from John
and it is a postcard from Havana, and I don't
think we've ever gotten a postcard from Cuba before he
(18:37):
was he was betting on that. I think he had
contacted us on Twitter already too to say promised a
postcard from somewhere where we had never gotten one from before.
And I hazarded to guess Atlantis because I know we've
definitely never gotten in Atlantis postcard. But he was pretty close,
so he wrote in to say I spent the last
ten weeks traveling solo through Central America doing photography work
(19:00):
with two great n g o s. And he also
suggested that we cover some Cuban history at some point.
So thank you John for the postcard. It's a it's
a lovely picture of a sunset and fishing, so too fun,
postcards for the Day, Yeah, and some possible suggestions for
future episodes. If you have any suggestions for a future episode,
(19:22):
please write us Where History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com or you can look us up on Facebook
or on Twitter at Miston History. Yeah. And if you
want to learn a little bit more about the clean
up kind of stuff that's probably going to be going
down at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, we have an
article called what is Super Fun Redevelopment written by our
own Jane McGrath, so you can check it out by
(19:44):
searching for what is Super Fun Redevelopment on the home
page at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House
(20:05):
Efforts iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes,
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