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By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.

—MARK TWAIN ON WILLIAM A. CLARK

By the mid-1890s, Butte, Montana, had become the undisputed copper capital of the world, and copper had turned Butte’s two ruling “kings”—Marcus Daly and William Clark—into fabulously wealthy men.

For his part, Marcus Daly resided in his own town, christened with the same name—“Anaconda”—as his company. The town of Anaconda stood twenty-six miles from Butte and was built around a gigantic smelting operation constructed by Daly and his partners to process the raw riches ripped from their mines. Daly built and lived in the sumptuous Hotel Montana, which he kept fully staffed, though he and his family were often the only guests. Each morning, he ate a breakfast of beefsteak in a dining hall designed to accommodate 500, though he usually dined alone.¹

The floor of Daly’s hotel bar featured a wooden inlay of Tammany, his favorite racehorse, constructed by an imported New York artist from over a thousand pieces of hardwood. Anyone stepping on Tammany’s regal head was required to buy drinks for the house. As for Tammany himself, Daly kept him and the rest of his horses on a 22,000-acre horse farm in the lush Bitterroot Valley. (When Daly died, his horses sold at auction for more than $2 million.) For his commute between Anaconda and Butte, Daly rode a private rail car named Hattie, said to be the most luxurious in the country. Daly also owned the rails along which Hattie rolled, having built his own railroad after a dispute with Montana Union over rates.

William Clark was even richer—and more extravagant—than Marcus Daly. Clark’s tastes, reflecting one sharp contrast with Daly, ran to the pretentious. He built, for example, a garish Fifth Avenue mansion in New York at a cost of $7 million, reportedly the most expensive private residence of its day. The mansion included 121 rooms, 31 baths, and 4 galleries for the display of Clark’s beloved art collection, gathered during numerous trips to fin de siècle Europe. To ensure consistency of building materials throughout the house, Clark purchased entire stone quarries and his own bronze foundry. In addition to his Fifth Avenue residence, Clark maintained mansions in Butte and Los Angeles, with an oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara thrown in for good measure. Nor did Clark neglect his family’s housing needs. Son William Junior’s Butte home featured a $65,000 garage (with heated floors) for the protection and care of horses, carriages, and an extensive automobile collection.²

Daly’s and Clark’s financial power converted easily into political power, and it was the realm of politics that provided the central battleground for the two men’s titanic clash. Speculation about the origin of the Clark-Daly feud has inspired a rash of theories ranging from personal slight to clashing business plans. Whatever the genesis of the enmity, the political ambition of William Clark and the election of 1888 provided the backdrop for the feud’s first dramatic, public eruption.

In 1888, Montana was still a territory, and an election was held to select its nonvoting delegate to the United States Congress. Clark ran as a Democrat on a platform calling for lower trade tariffs (the Republicans of the day called for higher ones) and “keep[ing] the Mongolian race from our shores.”³

Daly, in addition to his personal disdain for Clark, had a pointed parochial interest at stake. His copper industry required gargantuan amounts of timber—both to buttress his mine shafts and to fuel his smelters. Part of Daly’s western empire included extensive timber holdings, but Anaconda also took logs another way—by poaching off federal lands. For years this practice had been overlooked, in part because of vague property lines, but the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland brought several enforcement suits—still pending in 1888. Daly hoped that Republican Benjamin Harrison would win the presidential election (which he did), and that a Republican delegate from Montana would have more sway than a Democrat (i.e., Clark) in getting the Department of Interior to quash the suits.⁴

Daly quietly set about to engineer a Clark defeat, beginning by ensuring that his own miners and sawyers (whose shift bosses inspected the ballots before submission) voted against Clark. It worked. Clark lost fourteen of sixteen Montana counties, and the infamous “War of the Copper Kings” had begun.⁵

For a dozen years, the Clark-Daly feud would foul the waters of Montana politics—culminating with perhaps the most corrupt election in American history and spilling dramatically onto the floor of the United States Senate.

By 1899, Montana had become a state—entitled to representation by two senators in Washington. Until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came into force, senators were not elected directly by popular vote, but rather indirectly by state legislatures. This concentration of electors greatly facilitated corruption, conveniently congregating the handful of men who cast the deciding ballots.

The stage was set for copper king William A. Clark, who having conquered the world of business now ached for the title of senator. He made no bones about the means he would deploy to win. His son Charlie said, infamously, “We will send the old man to the Senate or the poorhouse.”⁶

An investigation by the United States Senate would later reveal the depth and breadth of Clark’s bribery. For many legislators, the bribe was no more complicated than an envelope stuffed with cash. For others, bogus business deals were concocted to cover the tracks, including a number of land transactions in which Clark paid ridiculously inflated prices. One legislator struggled to explain how he had arrived at the legislative session penniless (indeed, borrowing $25 to make the trip) but returned home to pay $3,500 cash for a new ranch. Another claimed part of his $3,600 windfall as the profits of gambling; the rest, he said, he had “found in his hotel room.”⁷ By one credible estimate, Clark paid around $431,000 for the purchase of forty-seven votes, a tidy sum in the currency of the day.⁸

This scale of bribery, to the credit of a few solid Montanans, did not go unnoticed. Indeed, a remarkable drama played out over a month-long period in Helena, the state capital. Rumors of Clark’s bribery began even before the opening of the legislative session, and during the session, “the purchase of votes was talked about almost as freely as the weather.”⁹ Mark Twain, who knew William Clark personally, said that “by his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.”¹⁰

The smell, though, was offensive to some—or at least to a few. Rumors became so persistent that the Montana legislature formed a committee to investigate the corruption before the voting took place. The most dramatic testimony came from a former buffalo hunter, Senator Fred Whiteside. Whiteside reported that he had been offered a bribe by Clark agents, which he accepted in order to provide evidence. Dramatically, Whiteside presented $30,000 in cash to the investigating committee. “I know that the course I have pursued will not be popular, but so long as I live, I propose to fight the men who have placed the withering curse of bribery upon this state.” A grand jury was now convened to consider the findings.¹¹

William Clark, though, was far from finished. As balloting began for the Senate election and as the grand jury convened, Clark’s men flooded still more money into the streets—now including the grand jurors on their lists of targets. Clark’s network of Montana newspapers, meanwhile, blasted the Whiteside allegations as part of a vast conspiracy.

At the same time, Senator Whiteside himself became the target of a vicious counterassault. Whiteside’s recent election to the state senate had been challenged by his local opponent, and Clark’s forces seized upon the opening. A recount was demanded, and Clark’s forces succeeded in disqualifying ballots in which Whiteside voters had marked an “X” after his name—rather than before.¹²

Clark’s audacious, shameless counterassault worked. The grand jury declined to find evidence of bribery. Senator Whiteside, meanwhile, was disqualified from the state congress. The old buffalo hunter, at least, did not go down quietly. On the day of his disqualification, Whiteside rose on the floor of the state senate and gave his former colleagues full bore. “If I failed to express myself at this time,” he said, “I feel that I would be false to myself, false to my home, and false to the friends that have stood so manfully by me.

“Let us clink glasses and drink to crime,” chided Whiteside. The Senate election, he said, “has reminded me of a horde of hungry, skinny, long-tailed rats around a big cheese.” Dozens of men would turn away their eyes and squirm uncomfortably in their seats as Whiteside delivered his final broadside. “I am not surprised that the gentlemen who have changed their votes to Clark recently should make speeches of explanation, but I would suggest that their explanations would be much more clear and to the point if they would just get up and tell us the price and sit down.”¹³

Money, indeed, had trumped. The Montana legislature sent William A. Clark to the United States Senate, but the election saga was far from over.

Marcus Daly’s newspapers had made sure that the bribery scandal received wide play. Organized in part by Daly, anti-Clark forces took their fight to Washington. The U.S. Senate, under its own rules, can reject members for cause. On the day that William Clark took his seat in the Senate, two petitions were laid before the national body—one from Clark opponents in the Montana legislature and one from the governor of Montana. The petitions outlined the charges against Clark, and in a process familiar to modern political observers, the Senate launched an ethics investigation through the Committee on Privileges and Elections.

Clark watched as a parade of Montana state legislators gave sheepish explanations of the sudden turns in their economic fortunes. Senator Whiteside too told his story, and both Clark and Daly were called before the committee. (Daly, of course, was no angel. The committee, for the record, found ample wrongdoing on both sides.)¹⁴

In the end, Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously “that the election to the Senate of William A. Clark, of Montana, is null and void on account of briberies, attempted briberies, and corrupt practices.” Faced with adoption of the committee recommendation by the full United States Senate, William Clark resigned on May 15, 1900.¹⁵

Resignation, though, was not the same as quitting. Remarkably, Clark’s most outrageous maneuvers were still to come. His resignation created a vacancy that the governor of Montana would now be entitled to fill. The governor, Robert B. Smith, was a Daly ally and had aided the effort to overturn Clark’s election. Smith’s lieutenant governor, however, a man named A. E. Spriggs, was a close ally of Clark’s.

Clark allies arranged an elaborate scheme to lure Governor Smith out of the state. In his absence, Lieutenant Governor Spriggs—now Acting Governor Spriggs—appointed William Clark to the vacant Senate seat! Learning of this outrage, Governor Smith rushed back to Montana, declared Spriggs’s action invalid, and appointed his own man to the Senate. Each side protested the action of the other, and both candidates were tossed to Washington for the United States Senate to sort out.

Perhaps fatigued with the shenanigans, the Senate never resolved the matter of Montana’s rightful representation. The issue would die without any man taking the office. Montana citizens, having labored to earn the cherished right of statehood only a decade earlier, would have only one senator in Washington for the balance of the term.¹⁶

The election scandal of 1899, viewed from the distance of a full century, might be amusing if not for the legacy it spawned. Through a decade-long struggle founded on ego and personal aggrandizement, the Copper Kings had done much to “define deviancy down.”¹⁷ In the process, Montana picked up habits that would stick with the state for decades, including crude manipulation of the press, naked political corruption, and domination of state government by the copper industry.

In a few years, powerful interests from outside the state would use these same tools in ways as yet unimagined. Indeed, in one sense, the War of the Copper Kings can be viewed as a “noisy diversion.”¹⁸ For while Clark and Daly roiled the waters on the surface, a great shark circled below.