Clark established a 160-acre farm along the South Platte River, acquiring a fortune and substantial landholdings from selling potatoes to miners and Denverites.

[5] After experiencing a conversion following a Denver tent revival by the United Brethren, Clark quit drinking, having struggled with alcoholism prior.

In 1839, he joined a whaling voyage aboard the ship Delphos that spent 17 months at sea, primarily in the South Atlantic with a stop in Australia.

That year, the penniless Clark moved to Taylor County, Iowa, where he built a sawmill and married Lucinda Watts.

[11] Rufus and Lucinda Clark, with their daughter Mary, travelled by ox train to Denver in April 1859 during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, arriving July 11.

Clark homesteaded 160 acres in Overland Park along the South Platte River,[12] near the site where Montana City had stood the year before.

[20] Clark conditioned this donation on the premises that the community would be laid out in a tree-lined grid and that the sale and production of alcohol would be prohibited, thereby avoiding replicating Denver's "moral and environmental pollution".

[22] A municipal incorporation effort was organized by Clark, James Fleming, and Avery Gallup in early 1886 at the new university site of South Denver in response to the saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments near a racetrack in Denver's Overland Park, to allow the area to legally enforce anti-vice laws.

With help from others, the group created a petition and approached the 150 residents of the area in search of the 30 votes needed to establish the community.

Despite Johnston's efforts to revive the area as an "elite, cultured university town", the concept of Evanston becoming a "Methodist colony" soon died.