Question of the Day - 07 May 2025

Ah, misinformation. Where some people get it from is an enduring mystery to us. 

Your Uber driver might as well have told you that Clark County was named after Wilbur Clark (of Desert Inn fame), Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Dick Clark (of "American Bandstand"), or Dwight Clark (of the San Francisco 49ers).

And yes, the namesake of Clark County is quite an interesting story. 

Ironically, Clark County was, in fact, named after William Clark, but a decidedly different William from the one who co-led the Lewis and Clark Expedition. That William Henry Clark died in 1838, 70-odd years before Clark County was named for William Andrews Clark (1839-1925).

Our very own William Clark was elected to the U.S. Senate from Montana in 1901 on the second of two tries. He'd come to Montana by way of Pennsylvania (where he was born), Missouri (where he taught school), Colorado (where he went into the mining business), and a stint in the Confederate army, which he fortuitously left after realizing that his prospects were better in copper mining and then transportation, specifically railroads. 

The future senator’s fortune was further augmented by money lending and profiteering. It's said that he sold eggs to miners for $3 a dozen, or roughly three weeks’ salary. His fortune grew to at least $50 million (roughly $2.4 billion today). With money coming in quickly, he financed the Southern Pacific Railroad straight out of his personal cash flow.

Clark also had fingers in many an industrial pie. His empire eventually grew to encompass a foundry in New York, a wire-manufacturing plant in New Jersey, mines in Arizona, oil wells in Long Beach, even a sugar plantation near Los Angeles. His business acumen inspired the saying, "Never a dollar got away from him that didn’t come back stuck to another."

W. A. Clark’s political career was not one of distinction. He served only a single term as a senator. In The First 100: Portraits of Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas, A.D. Hopkins encapsulates his reputation thusly, "Driven apparently by plain greed ... he's remembered most for buying a seat in the U.S. Senate than for all his business successes."

The year after Clark gained his Senate seat (that august body had refused to seat him in 1899, due to a bribery scandal), he formed an uneasy partnership with E.H. Harriman in the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. Its Salt Lake City-to-L.A. route traversed the site of what would become Las Vegas.

The idea for the southern Nevada route wasn’t even Sen. Clark’s own, but that of his younger brother, J. Ross Clark. The two formed the Las Vegas Land & Water Co., which sold the 2,000 acres from which Las Vegas erupted in 1905. The senator, in a gesture of beneficence, had originally purchased the site as a ranch where his railroad laborers could recuperate from illness near Las Vegas Springs.

Though a true robber baron, W. A. Clark was not without his philanthropic side. As one biography notes, "Charitable efforts of Clark include a camp for girls in upstate New York still named for one of his daughters, the Paul Clark Home; an orphanage in Butte that provided sanctuary for the sick and the indigent; and the YMCA home in Los Angeles for homeless girls and their mothers."

Nor did he believe himself above improvement. When he entered the smelting business, he prepared for it by taking classes at New York’s Columbia School of Mines. In later years, he learned French and German, so he could personally conduct negotiations in the European art world.

However, when he and his brother sold the ranch that became Las Vegas, Sen. Clark reverted to form, doling out acreage at a 500% markup. Not surprisingly, chicanery also marked this deal.

The elder Clark had his hand in the forming of more than one major city. Back when he was publisher of the Butte Miner (one of three Clark-owed newspapers), he successfully pushed Helena as the winning candidate to be Montana’s state capital, prevailing over the competing claims of Anaconda. He also financed much of the infrastructure around which Butte, Montana, grew, including an amusement park, electric railway, and power company.

As for his Las Vegas involvement, it ended soon after the crucial land auction, when Sen. Clark retired to the East Coast in 1907. (J. Ross stayed on in Vegas far longer, dying here in 1927.) After leaving the Senate, W. A. occupied his later years with amassing a considerable art collection and maintaining various homes, including a Parisian pied-a-terre.

William Andrews Clark spent the last two decades of his life primarily in a 100-room mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He also bankrolled the Clark Wing of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. However, the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA is named after another son, a book collector and arts patron who outlived Sen. Clark by only nine years. The family dynasty is chronicled in W. D. Mangam’s 1941 book, Clarks: An American Phenomenon.