which contained seven or eight hundred dollars.
Knowing of no means by which I could rescue my horse I began to realize my situation and danger of freezing, being thoroughly drenched in a temperature of 10 degrees below zero. I started to run back one-quarter mile to a house and met two men who had heard my cries and were coming to my relief. They were in time to save my horse, … drawing him on the ice with a rope.
I reached the fire just in time as my legs began to get benumbed and my feet were frozen tight in my shoes. Here I remained until evening drying myself and clothes and had a log fire built near which I stood my horse to get warm and dry.
Meticulous as ever, W.A. recorded in his ledger book the cost of his near-death experience:
Paid for getting horse out, $4.00.
• • •
After his narrow—and rather expensive—escape, W.A. was ready for a vacation. His journal reveals his growing interest in the arts, as well as his talent for spotting new sources of revenue.
“Arrived in Helena,” he wrote, “when I met numerous friends and acquaintances. Took board at the International Hotel. I was engaged reading among others ‘Pickwick Papers’ by Dickens.” He spent the next few weeks “at Helena amusing myself sleigh riding, attending theaters, reading, writing and billiards.”
But Dickens and billiards were not the primary objects of W.A.’s vision. His diary entry for March 6, 1868, reads: “Sent a proposal to convey U.S. Mail from Helena to Missoula for two more years commencing July 1st, ’68, for the sum of $22,400 per annum.” That’s about $400,000 in today’s dollars.
W.A. had no intention of hauling the mail through Indian country for the rest of his life, however. In the fall of 1868, he subcontracted out the mail delivery business and took a trip east. He boarded a mackinaw flat-bottomed boat at Fort Benton on the Missouri River. He told friends he was going to bring back a wife.
----
* Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish, has long been the standard name in America for this immigrant group, who were the product not of Scottish and Irish parents, but of Protestant families from Scotland and England who settled in the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century and then moved on to the United States.
† Eight more Clarks were born in Pennsylvania: John Reed, who died in infancy; Joseph Kithcart; Elizabeth; Margaret Johnson, who died in infancy; Mary Margaret; James Ross; George; and Anna Belle.
‡ They settled in Van Buren County, near the Missouri border and the Des Moines River village of Bentonsport. The youngest child, Anna Belle, was only six months old. In Iowa, three-year-old George died of whooping cough, and the last child, Effie Ellen, was born. Known as Ella, she was the grandmother of co-author Paul Newell.
§ Named for William Clark (no relation), one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806.
KATE
W.A . HAD SET OFF down the Missouri, intent on seeing a childhood friend back in Pennsylvania. He recalled a girl with dark brown eyes and curly brown hair “who was dear to me when we were children together.” In the fall of 1868, the flat-bottom boat W.A. had boarded at Fort Benton docked in Sioux City, Iowa. There W.A. visited with his parents. He then rode by rail back to Pennsylvania to see this childhood friend. At age twenty-nine, he took his mother along for the courting.
The courting began in an Odd Fellows Hall in Connellsville, where W.A. asked Katherine Louise Stauffer to a dance. Brown-eyed “Kate” was no longer a girl, but a beautiful, bright young woman of twenty-four. W.A., a worldly veteran of the western mines, Indian territory, and freewheeling commerce, “wooed and won” her. On the morning of March 17, 1869, they were wed at her parents’ large brick house in Connellsville, where her father was a prosperous businessman. A minister of the Church of Christ performed the ceremony. After a morning breakfast reception,
Knowing of no means by which I could rescue my horse I began to realize my situation and danger of freezing, being thoroughly drenched in a temperature of 10 degrees below zero. I started to run back one-quarter mile to a house and met two men who had heard my cries and were coming to my relief. They were in time to save my horse, … drawing him on the ice with a rope.
I reached the fire just in time as my legs began to get benumbed and my feet were frozen tight in my shoes. Here I remained until evening drying myself and clothes and had a log fire built near which I stood my horse to get warm and dry.
Meticulous as ever, W.A. recorded in his ledger book the cost of his near-death experience:
Paid for getting horse out, $4.00.
• • •
After his narrow—and rather expensive—escape, W.A. was ready for a vacation. His journal reveals his growing interest in the arts, as well as his talent for spotting new sources of revenue.
“Arrived in Helena,” he wrote, “when I met numerous friends and acquaintances. Took board at the International Hotel. I was engaged reading among others ‘Pickwick Papers’ by Dickens.” He spent the next few weeks “at Helena amusing myself sleigh riding, attending theaters, reading, writing and billiards.”
But Dickens and billiards were not the primary objects of W.A.’s vision. His diary entry for March 6, 1868, reads: “Sent a proposal to convey U.S. Mail from Helena to Missoula for two more years commencing July 1st, ’68, for the sum of $22,400 per annum.” That’s about $400,000 in today’s dollars.
W.A. had no intention of hauling the mail through Indian country for the rest of his life, however. In the fall of 1868, he subcontracted out the mail delivery business and took a trip east. He boarded a mackinaw flat-bottomed boat at Fort Benton on the Missouri River. He told friends he was going to bring back a wife.
----
* Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish, has long been the standard name in America for this immigrant group, who were the product not of Scottish and Irish parents, but of Protestant families from Scotland and England who settled in the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century and then moved on to the United States.
† Eight more Clarks were born in Pennsylvania: John Reed, who died in infancy; Joseph Kithcart; Elizabeth; Margaret Johnson, who died in infancy; Mary Margaret; James Ross; George; and Anna Belle.
‡ They settled in Van Buren County, near the Missouri border and the Des Moines River village of Bentonsport. The youngest child, Anna Belle, was only six months old. In Iowa, three-year-old George died of whooping cough, and the last child, Effie Ellen, was born. Known as Ella, she was the grandmother of co-author Paul Newell.
§ Named for William Clark (no relation), one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806.
KATE
W.A . HAD SET OFF down the Missouri, intent on seeing a childhood friend back in Pennsylvania. He recalled a girl with dark brown eyes and curly brown hair “who was dear to me when we were children together.” In the fall of 1868, the flat-bottom boat W.A. had boarded at Fort Benton docked in Sioux City, Iowa. There W.A. visited with his parents. He then rode by rail back to Pennsylvania to see this childhood friend. At age twenty-nine, he took his mother along for the courting.
The courting began in an Odd Fellows Hall in Connellsville, where W.A. asked Katherine Louise Stauffer to a dance. Brown-eyed “Kate” was no longer a girl, but a beautiful, bright young woman of twenty-four. W.A., a worldly veteran of the western mines, Indian territory, and freewheeling commerce, “wooed and won” her. On the morning of March 17, 1869, they were wed at her parents’ large brick house in Connellsville, where her father was a prosperous businessman. A minister of the Church of Christ performed the ceremony. After a morning breakfast reception,
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