NEW BOOK: GEORGE HEARST

Hearst was born in 1820 into modest yet comfortable circumstances in Missouri, where his father owned three small farms. Farming interested young George not at all, but when he was 15, lead was discovered near his home. The subsequent diggings fascinated him. I think I was naturally a mineralogist, he would write years later. The knowledge seems to me instinctive.

When gold was discovered in California, Hearst headed west with plenty of competition: There were perhaps 800 San Franciscans before the metal revealed itself at Sutter's Mill. By the time Hearst arrived, in the fall of 1850, the city's population had swelled to 25,000, with more than 100,000 hopefuls scouring the riverbeds.

Hearst joined them, and after some discouraging months seeking gold along the rivers—which were overcrowded and quickly exhausted—he turned to the mountains. By then he was looking for quartz, not because it was valuable, but because he had learned that during the volcanic birth of California's coastal mountains, streams of molten quartz carried gold along with them and imprisoned it as they cooled.The knowledgeable prospector could crack open a stone and see within its snowy depths a gleaming yellow filling. Hearst's friends gave him the name Quartz George.

Then came Washoe, part of Utah Territory at the time. Hearst had heard about silver deposits there, and bought a share of a mine. At first nobody believed that the ore he brought back to San Francisco was valuable, but finally the head of the San Francisco Mint agreed to give it a look—he offered Hearst and his associates $91,000 after costs, or about $3 million today, for what turned out to be one of the earliest extractions from the Comstock Lode. After that, the money never stopped.

Nor did Hearst. In the following decades he traveled throughout the West, sometimes coming up dry, more often not. Some 65 miles outside of Butte, Mont., in 1883, Hearst began digging at the Anaconda Mine, where they struck a bed of pure copper. Continuing to delve, they found that the bed was thirty to forty feet wide and descended more than a thousand feet. In other words, Mr. Bernstein writes, it was the greatest copper strike on the planet.

He had a rival in Clarence King, a fellow appraiser of mines. Both the Southerner and the Westerner in Hearst disliked what Mr. Bernstein describes as King's high-minded northern sensibilities. King, for his part, remarked that Hearst was bitten on the privates by a scorpion; the latter fell dead.

Perhaps inevitably for a man of his wealth, Hearst went into politics, ending his days as a Democratic senator from California. This is surely the least appealing part of his career. Still, there is a warmth to the man that makes him good company throughout the book, and charm in his downright language, as when he said, When I was young I had very strong religious views, and was brought up to a thoroughly orthodox way; but after leaving home my ideas got broader, and on studying these things for myself, without any influence from parents, or ministers, I came to the conclusion that I knew just about as much about it as anybody, and I knew nothing.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
'George Hearst' Review: A Head for Metals (https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-hearst-review-a-head-for-metals-11639345597)

 

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