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Before Hearst— In none of the third generation is there visible anything—ex-cept the geniality—of the extraordinary character of whom William Randolph Hearst was the only son. Across the plains and mountains from a farm in fat Missouri went hawk-nosed George Hearst among 250,000 other young men drawn by the California gold strike. He was one of the handful who struck it, and kept it, and multiplied it richly. With mule and pack horse he roamed hardily from Alaska to Mexico. He went back to Missouri for his bride, patrician Phoebe Apperson, descended from Carolina-Virginia stock. His mines, ranches, banks, race horses and friends were one of the greatest collection ever made even in old California. He also owned $7,500,000 worth of the Anaconda; his million acres in Mexico pastured 48,000 cattle; and he would have bet any amount of it all on the landing of a fly on a lump of sugar. He went to the Senate on the appointment of a man he had fought for the Governorship. President Cleveland preferred him to Senator Leland Stanford. (After his death Phoebe Apperson Hearst did almost as much for the University of California as the Stanfords did for their private university.)
Senator Hearst's gangling son Willie got on neither at St. Paul's School (Concord) nor at Harvard. He was shy. and had too much money to work out of it the natural way. His early habit of entertaining the boys to win them stuck to him. The striking things about Hearst's prankish, college days, which were twice interrupted by "rustications," were his comparative sobriety and calmness at the centre of the whirlwinds he created, and his real interest even then in publishing. He haunted Boston newspaper plants. He made the Lampoon not only funny but profitable. And he decided Joseph Pulitzer's sensational new World was the ablest newspaper in the country.