Being from Butte, I had a keen interest in this story of the life of Copper King W.A. Clark's youngest daughter Huguette, who died in 2011 at the age of 104. She lived in Butte for a short time when she was young, while her father built a massive mansion on 5th Avenue in New York; the book even has a picture of her sitting with her dolls on the porch of the Copper King Mansion, on Granite Street in Uptown Butte. But most of her life was spent in Manhattan and France. She was a daughter of great privilege and was extremely rich to the end of her days, which allowed for some pretty extreme eccentricities to develop, making her story unusual and interesting.
The first part of the book focuses on W.A. Clark's rise from a prospector in the mines of Virginia City, to a merchant, to a Banker in Deer Lodge, to a mining engineering and owner of the massively profitable Butte copper mines. As with any story of great success, he was in the right place at the right time: the electrification of the U.S. required huge amounts of copper wire. And he didn't stop there, opening another massively profitable copper mine in Arizona, and putting in the first railroad between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, along which he founded Las Vegas as a rail stop. He had two families, the first raised in Butte, and the second (after his first wife died) when he was much older. Huguette was born when he was 67. Both of his wives hailed originally from Butte.
W.A. died when Huguette was in her early 20's. She had a very brief marriage and then spent the rest of her days living on 5th avenue, first next door to her mother Anna, then when Anna died, alone, and finally, for the last 20 years of her life, she lived in a hospital room. This is when the story becomes a bit strange. She gave away huge sums of money to her nurse, totaling around 30 million dollars, and to others who helped her closely: her lawyer, accountant, and personal assistant. She gave lavishly to many others as well.
In the end, her will was contested by her distant Clark relatives, none of whom she knew. In the settlement, these relatives ended up getting about $35 million in total. Her lawyer, accountant, and nurses ended up getting much less than the will originally stipulated. It's a very fascinating story. She was very eccentric and very giving. The reader is left with the notion that she was a good and generous person, and a great lover of art, who didn't do a bit of harm in the world, but whose actions were strange indeed.
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