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with butter and homemade maple syrup or homemade apple butter!… We lived the outdoor life both winter and summer.… We had sleighing and coasting. We were often taken to school in a big sled with all the neighbors’ children.
    Will’s schooling was limited to three months in the winter, because farmwork came first. The Clark children attended the public school, Cross Keys, in Dunbar. As the two oldest, Sarah and W.A. had an advantage over the younger children, going on at age fourteen to Laurel Hill Academy, a selective private school at the Presbyterian church in town. Such academies offered a meager college preparation course: a little algebra, basic Latin, a taste of history and literature, and public speaking.
    The Clarks were not in that log cabin for long. With money Will’s father made mostly from harvesting trees, they moved into a larger wood-frame farmhouse on the property. When Will was about eleven,he helped his father build a handsome, two-story Federal-style brick residence, which stands today aftermore than 160 years.
    John Clark passed on to his children great energy. He was proud of his fruit trees, prouder still of being a Presbyterian elder for forty years, and he was an advocate of hard work and fair dealing. Mary Andrews Clark gave her children boldness, ambition, and kindness. “Such good common sense,” sister Elizabeth said of their mother, “such beauty of body and soul, such refinement, very religious in a tolerant way, progressive with a good sense of fun.”
    In 1856, at age sixty-two, perhaps a dubious age to start a new venture, John sold the Pennsylvania farm and moved his family west, traveling more than seven hundred miles by rail, steamboat, and stagecoach to the deep, loamy soil of Iowa. Seventeen-year-old Will drove a team of horses by himself the full distance ahead of the family. ‡
    Will was “about grown up,” Elizabeth recalled, “or at least thought he was.” His great shock of wavy hair was dark auburn, matching his florid complexion. He was growing a mustache, which was also red. His eyes were a bluish steel gray, with a piercing stare.
    Choosing brains over brawn, Will taught winter school in Iowa in 1857, then enrolled in an academy in Birmingham, Iowa, the following year. In 1859–60, he taught in aone-room school in Missouri. His sister Anna recalled W.A. telling of a man who took one look at the small, twenty-year-old schoolteacher and said, “Young man, you are a failure.”
    But W.A., as he preferred now to be called, was imbued with his parents’ ambition, striving “to better my condition.”In 1860, he enrolled in the study of classics and law atIowa Wesleyan University, a Methodist Episcopal institution in Mount Pleasant. The tuition was twenty-five dollars a year. W.A. was taking classes both as a college freshman and a first-year law student, studying Latin, Greek, and geometry along with his legal contracts. He began a second year of the two-year course. In the spring of 1862, however,he dropped out of school, abandoning any hope of practicing law. Suffering from gold fever, an affliction sweeping the nation, he decided he was not cut out to “sit around in offices and wait for clients.”
    W.A. was by no means the first of the tens of thousands of men who traveled west in search of El Dorado. Gold had been found in 1848 in California, sparking the 1849 gold rush. The latest strike was in Colorado’s Front Range, first at Pikes Peak in 1858 and then more substantially the next year near Central City and Black Hawk, about forty miles west of Denver. Moved, he said, by “a spirit of adventure,” W.A. went west to Atchison, Kansas. From there he drove a six-yoke bull team of oxen across the Great Plains to Manitou Springs, near present-day Colorado Springs, a journey of more than eight hundred miles over five months.
    Something besides gold may have spurred W.A. and others westward. The first mortars fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April