The copper magnate who became rich thanks to the gold seekers

In the spring of 2011, the painter Huguette Clark died in New York City, just a couple of weeks shy of turning 105. Her death and her life had been full of mystery. Upon dying, she left a legacy of 500 million euros, but no descendants. The reason for the fortune she possessed is found in the figure of her father, a great copper magnate who conceived his daughter at an age when most mortals retire.

The future millionaire was born in Pennsylvania and later lived in Iowa, where he completed his studies. Despite his geographically Northern origins, when the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Confederate army, in an experience that would be brief because he quit after a year. Greatly influenced by the Montana gold rush, at twenty-three years old he thought the future was in the mining of this yellow metal, but as such hard work did not give him enough returns he became disillusioned. He repeated a pattern that had been observed in the California gold rush – fifteen years earlier – consisting of stopping digging stone and dedicating himself to offering services to miners. He did all kinds of transport and trade, from food to mail, passing through mining tools, having as clients miners from remote territories who had no alternative to his high prices. This activity allowed him to save enough resources to open a small bank in the town of Butte, a place that would become the epicenter of mining in Montana. The bank served him above all to take ownership of small mining operations that defaulted on the loan payments he had previously made to them, so that in a few years he had already built a good fortune. When the mountains of Montana began to show symptoms of gold vein exhaustion, the business shifted towards copper and silver, and Clark did not miss the appointment.The investments he made in copper mines increased in value exponentially when, in the final decades of the 19th century, the electricity boom occurred, an innovation that immediately required large quantities of this metal to wire the country's geography. At that time, Clark was already the copper king of Montana, along with his rivals Marcus Daly and Frederick Heinze, but he did not limit himself to that territory, but rather expanded his businesses to the south, to the state of Arizona, where he bought the United Verde metal foundry. With the fortune he built, he did not seclude himself in copper either, but rather invested in the press (the Butte Miner masthead was his), railroads, livestock, and timber, among others.In 1884 he entered politics, participating as president of the convention organized so that the territory could attain statehood and join the Union. In that first attempt there was no agreement, but there was in the second, in 1889, also presided over by Clark. His move into national politics was much more controversial because nine years after failing in a first attempt to enter the Senate (1890), he tried to secure the senator's seat thanks to a massive campaign of bribery of deputies and senators of the state of Montana (they were the electors because there was no direct suffrage). The panoply of favors was truly broad: loans, cancellation of debts, gifting of estates, and, of course, the classic envelopes stuffed with cash. Our protagonist managed to take possession of the seat, but it lasted him very little, because only a few months later he was evicted in the face of the overwhelming evidence. In fact, his case triggered the appearance of the Seventeenth Amendment to the American Constitution to try to prevent the case from repeating itself. According to some sources, when questioned about the case, Clark replied that he “had never bought anyone who was not for sale”. In 1901 he finally managed to become a senator, this time apparently in a clean way.His entry into the senate coincided with his wedding, the second one, this time to the young Anna Eugenia LaChapelle, who was thirty-nine years his junior. Despite the physical limitations of age, he would still manage to have two daughters, Louise (born in Madrid, by the way) and Huguette, with whom we opened this piece. Counting the previous marriage, the tally stopped at nine offspring. The copper magnate died in March 1925 at his 121-room mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York.