Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/134

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

CHAMP CLARK 115 to the second office in the greatest government in the world, he is still as frank as a schoolboy. Clark spent one year at Marshall College, a year of profit to him, for it gave him the money for a course in the Cincin- nati Law School; it was also a year of great benefit to the college, for Clark possessed unusual talent for instruction, was full of human sympathy and labored day and night with the students, many of whom were older than he. From this work he proceeded to Cincinnati where he finished the law course and went thence to Wichita, Kansas, hung out his sign and awaited the first client — a vain wait of eleven weeks. The grasshoppers had invaded the State the previous year, eaten up all the crops, and left a great depression in their wake : times were bitterly hard. To get enough money to get out of the State, Clark went out in the fields and worked as a hired hand cutting com. From Kansas he went to Missouri, stopped at Louisiana, an old and historic town on the Missis- sippi, and formed a law partnership with David A. Ball. He was still a youth when he landed in the town of Louis- iana, past which, up and down the long river, Mark Twain had but recently been casting the lead on the big side-wheel floating palaces that bore the commerce of the Great Valley. William Merritt Chase was going to school in the next county, dreaming even then of artistic conquests to come. John B. Henderson, who lived in the town of Louisiana, had just been driven from his place in the United States Senate because he had voted with Lyman Trumbull and Edmund G. Ross to save Andrew Johnson from conviction at the bar of the Senate. James 0. Broadhead and Col. D. Pat Dyer, since world-fa- mous, were members of the Pike County bar, and the song of

    • Joe Bowers, who had a brother Ike,** was a popular ballad.

Clark's first Sunday saw him at the little church where worshiped the followers of the great Alexander Campbell. There he put in his letter from the Christian Church at Cincin- nati and was received into full fellowship. Within a few days a steamboat trip was arranged by the young men of the town ; the old steamer War Eagle, towing the barge Mamie, brass