Eighth General Assembly on the Republican ticket. He took high rank as a legislator, was reëlected in 1861 and chosen Speaker of the House in 1862. In 1875 he was again elected to the House, and in 1876 was elected to Congress. He was reëlected at the expiration of his first term and died during the first session of the next Congress, in 1879.
TALTON E. CLARK was born in Nicholasville, Kentucky, October 18, 1845. He attended the Richmond High School, of which his father was principal, until 1854 when the family removed to Booneville, Missouri, where his education was continued in Shelby College. In 1867 the family came to Iowa, locating at Clarinda, where Mr. Clark studied law for three years with Hon. William P. Hepburn and was admitted to the bar. He became a well-known and successful lawyer in that section of the State and in 1881 was elected to the State Senate on the Republican ticket, serving by reëlection in the Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-first and Twenty-second General Assemblies. He was for six years chairman of the Senate committee for the suppression of intemperance and was the author of important amendments to the prohibitory liquor law rendering its enforcement much more effective. He died at Los Angeles, California, April 20, 1902.
SAMUEL M. CLARK was born in Van Buren County, Iowa, on the 11th of October, 1842. He was educated at the Des Moines Valley College at West Point, in Lee County, and began the study of law when eighteen years of age in the office of Judge George G. Wright and was admitted to the bar at Keokuk in 1864. Immediately thereafter he became associate editor with J. B. Howell of the Gate City, the leading Republican daily of southeastern Iowa. This proved to be his life work for which he rapidly developed remarkable talent and in a few years became one of the ablest and most versatile editorial writers in the State. He was a studious reader of literary and scientific works, an independent and philosophic thinker, his editorials often ranking as finished essays on the subject treated. Few men in Iowa had a wider acquaintance with the notable people of his native State and no one warmer or more abiding friendships. It was one of the greatest pleasures of his busy life to serve his friends. He was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions of 1872, '76 and '80, was seldom absent from the State Conventions of his party and was the author of many of the platforms for a quarter of a century. For a period of fourteen years he was president of the school board of Keokuk and for eight years was postmaster of that city. In 1889 he was appointed by the President Commissioner of the Paris Exposition. In 1894 he was elected to the popular branch of Congress on the Republican ticket and at the close of his first term was reëlected, serving four
