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1861, when W.A. was twenty-two years old, launched the Civil War.The Confederacy began drafting soldiers in April 1862, about the time W.A. headed west, and the Union followed suit in March 1863.After W.A. died, a biography written by a bitter former employee claimed that W.A. had fought with the Confederates before deserting, but this idea is contradicted by the available evidence. His home states of Pennsylvania and Iowa both stayed in the Union, andno W. A. Clark of his age and county appears in any service roster, muster roll, or other record for either the Union or Confederate army. If W.A. had any Confederate sympathies, he kept them to himself. Years later,he recalled hearing, near the end of the war, what he referred to as the sad news of President Lincoln’s assassination.
    W.A. chose three books for his journey west:
Parsons on Contracts
, Hitchcock’s
Elements of Geology
, and
Poems of Robert Burns
, “the Ploughman Poet” and favorite son of Scotland. He went on to use all three, becoming in the West a sharp negotiator, a prescient judge of the mineral wealth underground, and a lover of the romantic arts.
BANNACK OR BUST

 
    I N THE SOUVENIR PHOTOS of tenderfoot gold miners from Colorado in the 1860s, with six-shooters on their hips, there is no reason to think that twenty-four-year-old W. A. Clark stands out from the pack. Though he later listed his height at five feet eight inches to five feet ten onhis passport applications, his family and friends described him asfive feet five, maybe five feet six in his boots. He weighed 120 to 125 pounds, never as much as 130, with a pipe-cleaner physique, giving the impression of endurance rather than strength.
    He also had a lot of nervous energy. He spoke confidently, pointing his long, thin fingers for emphasis. His gait was more a run than a walk.His hands were constantly in motion. W.A. was a dynamo of alert intelligence.
    In Colorado in the winter of 1862–63, he started at the first rung of the mining industry, as a hired hand on a small claim at Bobtail Hill, near Central City. “With three others I helped sink a shaft with a windlass, to a depth of 300 feet,” he recalled. At most, he made three dollars a day.
    News of another gold strike to the northwest spread through the mining camps of Colorado that winter. Gold had been found in what isnow Montana, on the banks of a mountain stream called Grasshopper Creek. “The report got into the papers and caused a great deal of excitement,” W.A. recalled.
    He and two prospector friends left Colorado with two yokes of cattle, a light Schuttler wagon, picks, shovels, gold pans, fresh vegetables, and the certainty that they’d get rich if anyone would. They were headed for a corner of Idaho Territory, for the high, desolate land that would become southwestern Montana. “Our motto then,” W.A. recalled, “was Bannack or Bust.”
    Starting out on May 4, 1863, while the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville was being fought in Virginia, W.A. and his friends traveled into the Wyoming Territory, following the Overland Trail to Fort Bridger, where theywere stopped by word of trouble with Shoshone Indians ahead on the Oregon Trail. For safety, they waited to join a long train of twenty-five covered wagons pulled by ox teams. The wagon train consisted of about one hundred people, including a few families with women and children.

    One of these three gold miners in Central City, Colorado, in 1863, would, by the end of the century, own banks, railroads, timber, newspapers, sugar, coffee, oil, gold, silver, and the most profitable copper mines in the world. William Andrews Clark, at right, was about twenty-four here.“There was no lack of opportunities,” he said, “for those who were on alert for making money.”
( illustration credit2.2 )
    The trip from Denver to Bannack, through more than seven hundred miles of wilderness, took sixty-five days. From Fort Bridger they traveled over the Teton Range, up the Snake River,