In the third season of the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood, one of the most villainous characters in a show full of villains was introduced. Ruthless mining magnate George Hearst arrived, eager to seize control of the richest mine in town – no matter what the cost. But was he really as rotten as the show suggested he was?
My guest is Matthew Bernstein, author of “George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age”. He talks about the rise and fall and rise again of a man who made millions sniffing out gold, silver and copper mines across the country, and who fathered one of the most controversial characters of his era, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.
More about the author and his book here: https://www.oupress.com/author/matthew-bernstein/
Here is the transcript from our interview together:
Erik: Welcome, all to the Most Notorious Podcast. I’m Eric Rivenes. No small talk, chit-chat on this show. Let’s get straight to the interview as always. I’m very pleased to introduce my guest today, Matthew Bernstein. He is an adjunct professor of English at Los Angeles City College. He also teaches at Matrix for Success Academy and is a frequent magazine contributor. And the book which he is here to talk about today is called George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age. Thank you so much for coming on. Welcome.
Matthew: Great to be here, Erik.
Erik: So George Hearst, I know him and a lot of other people listening, might have been introduced to him through the television show Deadwood. He was played by Gerald McRaney, and he was one of the primary villains in the show. How did you first learn about George Hearst?
Matthew: Well, the first time I came across George was actually through Deadwood, but I wasn’t immediately intrigued in his life story until I started researching it. But I got to tell you, I loved Deadwood. At that time, that was my very favorite show and I still consider it my favorite Western TV show. Now, happily, a friend of mine actually works on NCIS LA where Gerald McRaney I got I gave him a signed copy and she would report to me that McRaney would be – he was very enthusiastic And she would see him reading it on set. So I was pleased by that
Erik: Wow, great story. Glad he liked it. What motivated you to write a book about him?
Matthew: Well, I was between classes at Victor Valley College where I was teaching at the time. And I was in their library and I happened across a book called Citizen Hearst. And it was about William Randolph Hearst, George Hearst’s son, and I started flipping through it. And I was very engaged by the story. I’d never read a non-fiction biography that felt so much like fiction because William Randolph Hearst’s life was just so wild. But what struck me was that there was only like 40 or 50 pages where George Hearst played a part. And I was like, well, this is the guy that made all the money. You know, this is the guy I really want to read about. But you couldn’t find a biography on George. I eventually found one written in the 1930s by friends of the Hearst family. And it made George Hearst seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread. You know, so it really wasn’t being very factual. And I read some other William Randolph Hearst biographies and they were kind of the same thing, just a little bit on George. So I finally realized that either I was going to wait around for a historian to write the book I wanted to read, or I would have to do the massive amount of research and write the book myself. So that’s how it happened.
Erik: Makes sense, yeah. So George Hearst was not set up for success at an early age. He had to do it basically all by himself.
Matthew: Yeah, when he went to the Gold Rush in 1850. By the time he got there, all he had was like a bag of flour and no money. It was basically a rags to riches story. And he went around California for 10 years during the height of the Gold Rush, sometimes making a little money and sometimes losing money – as he would tell you – and not doing terrifically well. So, yeah, he didn’t have a whole lot of familial help. In fact, his mother and his father-in-law at that point, back on the farm in Missouri, they were actually asking him during this time if he could pitch in, which he very much tried to do.
Erik: He was incredibly smart and had a real intuition for the business of sniffing out
minds but he had no real formal education, right?
Matthew: Yeah, he had a very patchy education. He grew up in Franklin County in Sullivan and Missouri, not terribly far from St. Louis, maybe 60 miles from St. Louis. But at that point in time, you were being educated in log cabins. There was nothing formal. He would say, I did a few months of schooling here and a few months of schooling there. At one point in time, as a child, they packed him away and sent him to an aunt in St. Louis so he could get a little bit more reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what really struck him was mining. And Missouri was known as the lead belt. And he went to a mining school when he got very interested in it. And it really sparked a passion with him. But yeah, as far as intelligence goes, as an educator I can tell you now, there’s a concept of multiple intelligences where some people are gifted in art and some people in music. He had what we would call a natural intelligence or a naturalist intelligence. He was one of those guys who could look at a mountain and had a very good instinct of what minerals were in it. Now, his son would have the linguistic genius. But both of them had an iron will and a vaulting ambition.
Erik: So what was his personality like? What did he look like? How did he present himself to people?
Matthew: Well, he was a little over six feet tall. He was blonde, genial smile. People said he could tell a good anecdote. And later in life in Virginia City in the 1860s and then in the 1880s and 90s, he was friends with Mark Twain, first in Virginia City. And George was one of those few people who could actually riff with Mark Twain. They would crack each other up and their tall tales would get taller and taller to the amusement of others. George was a natural leader. Whenever he’d be part of a mining outfit even before he made a ton of money people would tend to defer to George Hearst. He had a he had an instinct for that and as for a personality – well -he liked to drink. He liked to smoke cigars. He liked to race horses. He liked to gamble He liked to have a bunch of cronies around him and have a good time. And people would say that, yeah, George was, he was not lazy but he was prone to having a good time until someone said that there was gold or silver or copper in them thar hills. Whenever he heard about a strike, he was instantly for it and at that point in time he would be all action.
Erik: Except for one, correct? The California Gold Rush.
Matthew: Yeah.
Erik: He didn’t act as quickly as he later thought he should have.
Matthew: Yeah, you’re right about that. You know, when the Gold Rush happened, people in Missouri would read newspaper reports and they were hearing stories, and George initially kind of wanted to go, but then he went to the father of a gal he was sweet on. And he said, you know, like, this is going to blow out, there’s not much gold there, the Jesuits got it all beforehand. So George was like, okay, and he sat on his hands. And at that point in time, he was helping to run a store, kind of like a grocery store on the outskirts of town. And he waited, he felt he waited too long. He eventually sets out with a couple of cousins in 1850. They take the Oregon Trail and cut off to the California Trail. And when he gets to California, he’s kind of horrified that it’s too crowded. It appears to him that all the easy pickings have already been plucked up. And yeah, that’s one of the things where he kicks himself for about 10 years that he went too late.
Erik: So what does he do when he gets there? Where does he start his work and what is the gold mining process like in 1850?
Matthew: Okay, well, by 1850, a lot of the river gold had already been plucked up. People were taking like frying pans, any pan they could get and getting it out of the waters. Now, once they had kind of gotten all the gold there, people started realizing – and thousands of people came into California. San Francisco blooms, you know, from something like 50 people to thousands, virtually overnight. Ships were left in the port as like the sailors came in, you know, they would leave, they would abandon their boats and you would see these like rotting carcasses of their ships from the hills of San Francisco. And he realizes, as a lot of people do, that what needs to happen is you actually need to find the source of the gold. And the source of the gold is actually in the mountains and washed down in the rivers. And George initially started doing what was called placer mining not far from Sutter’s Mill, the heart of the gold rush, where the gold was first discovered. And he roams around. He eventually gets to Nevada City, which was then called Nevada. It would become City, so that people wouldn’t confuse the state of Nevada when that became a state. He’s near Nevada City, not terribly far from Tahoe, and Grass Valley and they’re both booming gold rush towns. And George is able to establish his first gold mine there. And he’s got some cousins and some friends. And at one point he’s down in a windlass and someone comes up and finds him, because Hearst has got the mill and the other guys, including Almarin B. Paul have got the mine and they make a deal, half the mill for half the mine and everyone’s deferring to George and George is able to make a good fortune out of that. But, and this is the problem with gold mining, even once you’ve got a gold mine, ultimately, unless you’re really lucky, like here in the Dakotas in Deadwood, ultimately the gold is going to run out. And it did around 1851, 1852. And George had to leave the area. He went to Sacramento and tried for a while to succeed in merchandising. Down the street was Leland Stanford, who had become a governor and then part of the big four, you know, the railroad barons. But George didn’t do very good in merchandising and ultimately gave it up.
Erik: So what prompts his move to Virginia City and what does he find there?
Matthew: Well, it’s about 1859 and he’s back in Nevada City at this point. He’s got another gold mine. And a lot of people start coming in from the east, from Nevada territory. It was really the Humboldt Desert at that point. And they tried to be sneaky about it, but they had these bags of ore, and they were looking for an assayer. People would look at the ore, and they would say, yeah, there’s gold in there. There’s mostly silver. And then the question is, where did you find it? And they tried to be cagey. George Hearst sniffed it out pretty quickly that there was a fortune to be made in the Humboldt desert, in what is now Virginia City, not terribly far from Reno. And Nevada City wasn’t terribly far away. I don’t have the numbers quite on me, but it wouldn’t shock me if it was something like 60 miles. So he gets a party together, and they start out over the mountains. And right in the middle of it, George gets cold feet. He’s thinking to himself, you know, I’ve got safety back in California. I’ve got a gold mine. This seems like a wild goose chase among the Indians, as he describes it in his memoirs. But he decides ultimately, you know, I can’t go back with my tail between my legs I’m gonna push on and he gets to this mining camp that will ultimately be called, Virginia City and there’s a there’s a bunch of prospectors. They’re living in shanty tents and it’s a it’s dirty. There’s nothing like civilization and he eventually starts talking with someone who kind of intimates like yeah, the ore they’re pulling out over there, you know, looks like blue stuff, maybe lead, like, we’re thinking that’s silver. And George goes all in. He sends word back to his friend, Almarin B. Paul, in Nevada City to sell the gold mine, to get me my share, and then he’s able to purchase one-sixth of the Ophir Mine. And the Ophir Mine turns out to be brimming with silver. And within six months of Hearst being in Virginia City, he is a millionaire. And now he’s living large. He buys a nice house, two-story, because now civilization comes in. He’s smoking cigars. He’s drinking on the deck. He’s got his cronies around. He meets Mark Twain and he’s living large.
Erik: So how old is he at this point in his life?
Matthew: At this point in time, it’s 1860. He’s 40 years old. He was born in 1820. So he’s a little long in the tooth because he’s thinking about marriage. For the first time, he’s spectacularly wealthy. So he goes around Virginia City and he’s kind of trying to find a gal. And he finds one gal. And they’re kind of hitting it off. He’s thinking of marriage and people throwing rice at him as he walks down the aisle. But the sister of the gal he’s sweet on spoils the play and says, you can’t marry that worthless Hearst. Now, yes, he had a lot of money but he was also, again, he was a guy who liked to drink and gamble and smoke cigars. He had his pronounced Missouri accent. Some people didn’t think he was quite a catch. Some people thought he was a dirty old Hearst. Anyways, yeah, he struck out with the ladies in Virginia City.
Erik: Yeah, the ratio of men to women that was not helpful at all for men looking to find a wife.
Matthew: Oh, yeah,
Erik: So he goes back to Missouri and this is during the Civil War and Missouri of course is a very volatile border state…
Matthew: It’s very much a microcosm for the Civil War. Yeah, so he gets a letter from his stepfather, because George’s dad died when he was, I think, a teenager. Anyways, he gets the letter, and the letter says, mom, your mom is sick. You need to come home. And it’s been 10 years. So he does the right thing. He comes home. And his mom’s dying of tuberculosis and now it’s 1860. Then he spends some time splashing around his money and he’s actually trying to look for a local girl at this point. The Civil War begins and they’re close to St. Louis. They’re close to the center of the storm here because both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis know that the largest cache of munitions in a slave state, which Missouri was, is in the St. Louis Arsenal. So there’s a whole Game of Thrones thing about who can control it. There’s Confederates pretending to be Unionists. People see through that. and ultimately the Union gets control of the arsenal. There’s battles raging all around and George is not going to join the war. His family when he was born had owned slaves on the farm. When he goes back to Missouri, he wants none of that. He has seen how the world operates in a big city like San Francisco, and that’s the kind of thing he wants to be in. He wants to be in a cosmopolitan city with a cosmopolitan lady. And as a newly made millionaire who doesn’t exactly believe in the southern cause, considers himself a westerner, he doesn’t want to fight for either side. So he portrays himself as neutral. A little bit, he does help out some of his southern cousins. One of them gets arrested and begs his cousin George to do anything he can in St. Louis and try to get him off. And George ultimately gets arrested for basically speaking his mind and being a bit of a blowhard, supporting the Confederacy verbally at least. Now there’s not much written about it, but he was arrested and his friends in Virginia City were very concerned that this whole empire he was forming through Virginia City silver was going to dissolve and their livelihoods could be impacted as well.
Erik: So he finds and marries a woman named Phoebe Apperson and they moved to San Francisco where he’s not exactly thrifty (chuckle). He’s well known for making a lot of money and spending a lot of money.
Matthew: Oh, none of the Hearst family is known for being thrifty. Yeah, he eventually attracts a cousin’s cousin, Phoebe Apperson, and they get married and she wears a dress that she herself had stitched. It’s a small wedding because her parents don’t really think that he’s a great match because he’s so much older. It’s something like she’s 19 and he’s 41, you know, like it’s a large difference. Anyways, they do get married. He gets a pass to go through Union lines. They take a trip around or into the Isthmus of Panama. And by the time they’re on the other side, Phoebe is showing. She is pregnant with the boy who is going to become William Randolph Hearst. They get to San Francisco and George wants to show off for his new wife. He buys a nice house. They have a horse and wagon. You know, they’ve got a billiards table. He buys a racetrack, you know, right there in the middle of San Francisco. It ultimately burns down. He gets some money back through insurance, but it’s pretty wild. He is spending money like a millionaire and as rich as he is, he’s actually spending more than he can afford.
Erik: So Phoebe, who is a long ways from home, is joined by her mother, right? She comes out to the West Coast.
Matthew: Yeah, her family joins them a couple years later. Now they’ve got a grandkid. And they move out to San Jose and kind of like start a farm. And they’re very religious people. So they’re big members of the church out there.
Erik: But she believes she’s married into financial security and not long after their marriage, they suffer a tremendous financial catastrophe. He loses all of the money and he ends up going into debt.
Matthew: Yeah, he gets himself underwater. You know, in the 1860s, there was all sorts of silver mostly being discovered in the West. Idaho, further on in Nevada and George, because the Opher Mine, his other mines in Virginia City are looking to be played out, he starts going with his buddies and mining excursions and nothing’s really panning out. He’s making a little bit of money here, a little bit there, mostly losing money. And ultimately he thinks like, okay, I’m going to recoup my losses. And a lot of his friends who are wealthier than he is, and he’s smoking cigars with and he’s drinking with, they’re making fortunes at the stock market. And George thinks, well, I can do that, you know, like one turn of the cart. So he starts spending more in time at the San Francisco Stock Board, and like the ignorant of stocks guy he is, he loses his wad, as he calls it, and suddenly he’s $100,000 in debt. So this is outrageous. He’s able to make some of it back on a big gold mine in California. And around that time, he meets Lloyd Tevis and James B. Haggin. And these are two of the biggest robber barons in the West. You know, like Tevis at one point was the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Wells Fargo was something he had invested in. Haggin made a fortune by buying a lot of worthless swamp land as people thought it around Sacramento, irrigating it and then selling it for a fortune. Anyways, they meet George Hearst and even though George Hearst isn’t doing very well financially, they figure like we can stake this guy and they do and George ultimately ends up not doing terribly well for them.
So they figure like, okay, we’re going to give you one last throw of the dice. And this is about 1872. So George goes out and he’s like, okay, I’m either going to find a fortune or my whole family is, you know, we’re going to be paupers. At this point in time, he’s had to first rent out and then sell their home in San Francisco. And it appears he’s keeping Phoebe in the dark. She’s having this European vacation with little William Randolph Hearst at the time and is fairly ignorant to their financial distress. and he was convinced that there might be a great diamond mine somewhere in the West. And he knows this because a couple of Southerners named Slack and Arnold have shown up in San Francisco to the Bank of America with a big sack of diamonds and rubies and they can take them there. And George wants in, but they’re going with a different mine appraiser. So George starts getting maps and hiring people to track Slack and Arnold and his party as they go further into the West trying to figure out where this fabled diamond mind is. Erik, have you heard this story about the great diamond hoax of 1872?
Erik: In your book. (Both laugh) No, I have read about it in passing before in preparations for interviews for this show, but never actually talked about it in an interview, if memory serves. Charles Tiffany is involved in this.
Matthew: Yeah, yeah. So they create, you know, what they’ve got to do is they’ve got to get these diamonds appraised. So who better to go to the greatest diamond expert in the country, Charles Tiffany in New York City. So they all go to New York City and they spread out these diamonds on a billiards table. And Tiffany says like, OK, you know, this is going to take some time. And he gets back to him a day or two later. And by this time, generals, like old Civil War generals are involved. General Dodge is one of them. And Tiffany says like, this is worth a fortune. And everybody is unbelievably happy. At this point in time, they’ve created a mining outfit. You know, there’s other stocks being talked of. And now it’s time to lead the party where it is. And it turns out that it’s in present day Colorado, near Bridger, if I’m pronouncing the word correctly. And George Hearst is able to, he sends a party. At this point, Hearst has based himself out of Salt Lake City because he figures Salt Lake City is kind of like a good middle spot in the entire West. So wherever it turns out the mine is, he can jump to it. And he’s got a party that have secretly tracked Slack and Arnold and the others leave and they all leave happy you know because they find more diamonds and more rubies, Hearst guys show up and they determine that these diamonds, there’s something wrong with them. Clarence King also gets in on the action. He’s another great mine appraiser and someone tells King, this is the bulliest mine you’ve ever seen. Like, not only does it produce diamonds, it produces cut diamonds. And then, it quickly comes out that like, these look like South African diamonds. And the whole thing appears to be a hoax. It appears that Arnold and Slack have played the San Francisco and New York experts in their field for fools and have gotten a fortune. But George has got the inside track. He wasn’t able to get any diamonds worthwhile, but what he’s got, and this is what his buddies Haggin and Tevis are after, is he’s got the information that this is worthless. So Haggin and Tevis, who are great speculators themselves and robber barons are able to short the market and make a fortune and now George Hearst is back in their good graces.
Erik: So he’s he’s a partner with them, right but not on equal footing, exactly.
Matthew: Yeah. Some people call it a triumvirate. But it’s really Tevis on top then Haggin and then George Hearst. And he’s their mining stocking horse. And it now pays off for them more than just the diamond information. At the same time as the great hoax was playing out, George Hearst, because he’s based in Salt Lake City, decides he’s going to do some prospecting around Salt Lake City. And not terribly far away, he finds some guys have sunk a shaft in a canyon, and they’ve called it the Ontario Mine. And George has got his buddies around with him, and they say, like, no, this is no good. But George has got a feeling, and he oftentimes does. And he sticks around, and the owner of the mine says, look, I don’t really think there’s much here. I’m kind of looking to sell. I want to get out. But there’s going to be a big price. So the price they agree on, historians differ, either $25,000 or $30,000 incidentally. George is able to scrounge that up, and he gets a hold of the Ontario mine, and he starts developing it. And as it turns out, it will become the greatest silver mine of that time and Hearst has got it. Nobody had any idea of it and its owned by Hearst, Haggin and Tevis and it will take a couple of years to build it up so that it can make a lot of money. And during this time, because we’re now in 1873, the whole country is dealing with a severe depression. And Phoebe and William Randolph Hearst come back and they have to live in a boarding house for a while. Phoebe will have to live with her parents for a while. So things are not great. But ultimately, when it starts paying off, it starts paying off in the millions. And at that point in time, George Hearst is never going to go broke, despite how much ungodly money he will spend.
Erik: It’s a pretty incredible story. I mean the average salary in this period is like $300 to $400 a year and the idea that someone with little education can make millions, lose millions and then make millions again, it’s pretty extraordinary.
Matthew: Absolutely. It’s almost like Mark Twain’s book, The Gilded Age, you know, where like you can make a fortune overnight, lose it the next week, rebuild your fortune the next month. George Hearst lived that life. And it was also the age for it. Selling shorts was only made legal in the United States in the 1850s. You know, like this was the time when you would have Rockefellers and Haggins and Tevises and the big four in California were able to make huge amounts of money. The country was also sort of like primed for it. Getting over the Civil War, suddenly the minds and capitalists had something else to look at. But yeah, it was an outrageous amount of money that George Hearst made, and he knew what he wanted to do with it. He wanted to live large. He wanted to allow Phoebe to do whatever she wanted, whether that meant like a great mansion here or there, an art collection here, only the best tutors for little William Randolph Hearst. Even as a child, he learned to fence and ride. A Harvard education was in the offing. And George at any point could buy a cattle ranch, a political career. You know, like he, there was nothing he could dream of spending that he couldn’t afford when he was at his height.
Erik: So he’s got this incredible ability, as you’ve already said, to just look at a mountain and gauge its value. And now he just sort of starts darting around the country, chasing down leads, following up on rumors of riches, and always wanting to get in at the beginning.
Matthew: Yeah, he does love to travel. I’m not sure in that age there was a millionaire who spent so much time on the road. Part of it I think is he wasn’t so happy being in a domestic environment. If he spent so much time with the kid and his wife, it would probably drive him crazy. But yeah, he goes around the country and he’s had his eye on Deadwood for a while, or the Black Hills before Deadwood gets its name. It gets its name for Deadwood Gulch, which was named for the dead trees in there. You know, like Custer and his guys had come in in 1874 and determined, yes, the rumors of gold is true, the gold is there. And George really can’t get in there. Troubles obviously hit their peak in 1876 with the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But by 1878, the area that will become known as Deadwood and Lead are overrun with prospectors, illegally. But the country is trying to get out of a depression anyway. So, the thought that there’s all this gold there is something that the government and the military is kind of winking at and they’re not really telling these invading prospectors to get out. So anyways, 1878 – George finally is able to pull the trigger and get out there himself. And now he’s got the capital coming from the Ontario mind and the backing of Haggin and Tevis. So, kind of like the show Deadwood, even though he’s not as violent, but he is as rapacious. He does want to control the entire area. So he ends up buying up all the minds that he can. He’s initially seen as an invader. Very soon there’s something like 40 civil lawsuits against him. You know, they don’t think he can get a water right here and use such water there. They think he’s gotten a hold of this percentage of this mine through illicit means. Everybody seems to be against him because, you know, they were there first. George is coming in as this great power. But when George Hearst does go into a mining camp, there are some significant improvements. He brings with him the advent of civilization. When George comes in, he’s going to bring his people. So you’re going to need grocery stores and stables. You’re going to need schools to raise the children. Trains are going to be built. So George Hearst in some degree does help stitch together the country. He is able to connect things. And that’s one of his great legacies.
Erik: So you loved Deadwood, the HBO series. I loved Deadwood. I’m sure many listeners love the show too. Hearst gets there at a really interesting moment in Western history. All of these iconic Western figures are there at about the same time. Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, the Earp brothers.
Matthew: Seth Bullock.
Erik: Yep, Seth Bullock is there too. And David Milch, the creator, writer of the show, he of course embellishes, exaggerates, takes creative license with the history to heighten the drama on the show, but how do you think McRaney did in playing Hearst? Was he really that ruthless?
Matthew: Well I would say that George Hearst in the TV show Deadwood is one of the great TV villains of all time. He’s almost like like you can’t beat him. Everybody knows you can’t defeat Hearst and in the show, you know, Swearengen, being the smarter of the two, constantly has to pull Bullock back from doing something that will upset Hearst to the point that Hearst will burn the entire town down. You know, it’s great drama because at this point in the show, Swearengen was the bad guy. But in season three when, you know, Hearst takes center stage, Swearengen is actually now the necessary evil. You know, he is the one who’s smart enough to recognize that you have to appease Hearst and somehow figure out a way of getting him out of town. So McRaney’s portrayal is just terrific. And David Milch did an amazing job coming up with the concept of let’s not use this idea, because this was the idea, that George Hearst was this just wonderful, fun-loving guy. When George Hearst dies, he dies as a US senator in Washington. And right after that, senators make these great eulogies of what a wonderful human being he was. George Hearst wasn’t a bad man. George Hearst wasn’t an evil man. He was a fun-loving man and he had rough edges. One thing that did happen, and this is where history and TV overlaps somewhat, at least in the spirit, is there was a murder trial. George was trying to get a hold of a certain mine shaft. The problem was the Pride of the West mine was very near his Homestake mine and there was a shaft that both mining outfits claimed. And there was a bit of a tussle. So George had left when he went back to San Francisco, Sam McMaster, a transplanted Irishman, to head up his mining outfit. And the Homestake Mine was the biggest mine in the hills. If we’re going to go back to the TV show Deadwood, this would be the hill that Alma and Ellsworth, or this would be the mine that they had that Hearst wanted. And the mine produces millions and millions and millions of gold and was later turned into a place where they do experiments with neutrinos that’s still active. Whatever the case, there’s a tussle and Sam McMaster sees some police officers and Pride of the West owners come into his office and they serve him with a cease and desist letter. And he’s like, all right, I’m not going to take this lying down. So he gets some of his guys and they go down to the contentious mineshaft and there’s a bit of a tussle now that he’s able to get some of the Pride of the West guys arrested and while they’re in jail his guys are at the mine but there’s more Pride of the West. There’s only like Sam McMaster and like five guys, Hearst men, and there’s way more Pride of the West men. You know, they’ve got guns, they’ve got shovels and the Hearst men decide that they will take the high ground. There’s a little cabin there and three of them get inside this cabin. They’ve got their guns pointed out the window and there’s a lot of jawing back and forth. But then one of the Hearst guys fires and Alex Frankenberg, who’s a Pride of the West man, is shot in the neck. And he’s alive. But the Hearst men are all quickly arrested. The Pride of the West men storm the cabin. Some of the Hearst men escape, but they’ll later surrender. And the next day or the day after Frankenberg’s neck, hemorrhages, and he’s dead. The Hearst men have killed a Pride of the West man. So McMaster and his pal Angus McMasters, no relation, they are proven that they couldn’t fire the shot. But the three other Hearst boys, they’re put in jail and the trial is going to commence. and Hurst does what you should do at that point if you’re the CEO. He goes down to Deadwood himself, takes a train from San Francisco, and he’s got experience overseeing trials because he’s had a lot of lawsuits in his mining days in Nevada, and Hurst knows how you do these things. With the money you have, bribing jurors is not impossible. And he’s been accused of this before and it appears, at least the newspapers believe so, and a lot of people in Deadwood including the judge, who was Judge Gideon Moody who fought in the Bloody 9th infantry in the Civil War along with Ambrose Spears. Moody, when when Hearst men are found innocent, despite all the evidence against them, he takes the jurors to task. And he says something that, something of the matter that if a Deadwood jury is going to behave like a lot of cavemen, essentially, then what good are you? And he has their names stricken from the official records. The three Hearst men are allowed to get out scot-free. The last anyone sees of them in Deadwood, they’re taking the old Custer Road. They’re riding their horses, and they’ve got their guns. And that’s going to build up a lot of resentment with George Hearst. But he’s used to having a lot of resentment thrown at him, not to the point of the Deadwood in the TV show, Gerald McRaney’s portrayal, but nothing like the wonderful guy that the U.S. Senate would have you believe right after George Hearst died in 1891 in Washington and they read their eulogies.
Erik: That Homestake Mine, it continued to produce right well into the 20th century.
Matthew: Yeah, yeah. At this point in time, George now has the greatest silver mine with the Ontario and the greatest gold mine with the Homestake. He had about a dozen other lesser mines and they were all making money as well. Ultimately, he was making just millions off of this with his partners as well. But George Hearst would have the biggest slice of these mines. Now, in the TV show Deadwood, what finally gets George to move away is he hears about a copper strike in Montana. And that’s more or less true to life as well. It’ll be the Anaconda Mine. And he’ll gain control of that in the early 1880s. He goes there himself. He had a stocking horse, which he sent to try to get a hold of it, and couldn’t really get a hold of it. There was one stubborn person that wanted like a percentage. So George has to do it himself. And once he does, and once it is proven miraculously to be the greatest copper strike on the planet, you see a pattern with George Hearst, he now owns the greatest silver mine, gold mine, and copper mine that anyone’s ever heard of. And they’re bringing up pure copper, which is almost unheard of. So at this point in time, everything he’s doing seems to be turning to gold, or silver or copper. So he starts looking at like, well, what other empire can I conquer? So he starts thinking of politics.
Erik: And another thing that he is very well aware of, is the debate going on at the time about about whether gold should be the standard or silver, and he’s got a stake in both.
Matthew: Yes, and that’s interesting to determine which side he’ll pick, because George Hearst and William Randolph Hearst ultimately won’t see eye to eye. What happens is George, because he likes his friends, he likes his cronies, and they’re western silver guys, George is ultimately going to decide that bimetallism is how the country should act because he’s going along with his pals. You know he’s got gold coming out of one pocket and silver coming out of the other. So it really is not going to make a financial impact for him personally, but he wants his friends to be happy. So he is backing – once he gets his hands in politics politics, silver with everything he has. At one point in time he’s even called the Silver Senator in the newspapers.
Erik: Would you mind explaining why that was important that the government chose gold or silver?
Matthew: Well, yeah, I mean it really became the focus point of the election of 1896 more dramatically between William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley, but it had started decades before. The idea was that a lot of Westerners wanted silver and they had silver dollars, but the gold standard was what American money was backed by. You know, gold itself, like it’s not like it is today where our money is actually backed simply by the full faith of the American government. At the time, it was gold and a lot of people thought that if silver could join gold, there would be an alleviation of pressure. There would be more money in the market altogether and some people thought that if you elevate silver, it would lead to a deflation of gold. And if that were the case, people who were in debt, like say farmers to eastern bankers, would have an easier time in repaying their debt because essentially their debt would be worth less. So what you ended up having was you had a lot of rural farmers teamed with Western silver mining operators that really were key on bimetallism. And then on the other side, the proponents of the gold – a lot of Easterners who thought if you elevated silver, it will shake up the market and no one is exactly sure what is going to happen but it might not be good for us if you are a banker or if you are a politician with ties to the Eastern banks. So post Civil War, it became one of the most electrifying and divisive issues in the country. Were you a gold man or were you a silver man? William Randolph Hearst, after his father passes in 1891, and now William Randolph Hearst is the Hearst, and he’s a powerful newspaper mogul with the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal. William Randolph Hearst is actually going to be for gold. But, because he’s a Democrat he’s going to back William Jennings Bryan. But initially he doesn’t want his newspapers to mention that Bryan is for silver. Some people said that was like – Hearst wants to jump in the water without getting wet. But whatever the case, it was a divisive issue, and it was even divisive within Hearst’s own family.
Erik: Yeah. Hearst was so cunning. He had such a mind for making money that he even took advantage of the capture of Geronimo, right?
Matthew: (chuckle) He certainly did, and he did in a number of ways. So when Geronimo was captured in 1886, there was a lot of land between Sonora, Mexico, and New Mexico, and Arizona, that people didn’t find valuable because this was sort of Geronimo territory. And as soon as Geronimo was captured, Hearst was Johnny-on-the-Spot. He was like, let’s buy up this land. And very quickly, he buys up a million acres in Sonora, Mexico, near Chihuahua, the city of Chihuahua. And he starts the Babicora Ranch. And ultimately, he’s going to have a cattle ranch that, or rather, the cattle drive will go from Chihuahua, from the Babicora Ranch, all the way to Santa Fe, passing through areas like Tombstone. Fortunately for him, this was after the Gunfight at the OK Corral and what historians call the Vendetta Ride. So the cowboys weren’t rustling many cattle at this point. The other way George Hearst took advantage of the capture of Geronimo was in 1886, Hearst had been appointed US Senator when his Democratic colleague Miller had died of an asthma attack. And California Democratic Governor George Stoneman decided that George Hearst was the guy because other than Stoneman, Hearst at this point was seen as sort of like the leader of the California Democrats. So this is getting back to Geronimo incidentally. So Hearst will be kind of kicked out of office essentially. The Republicans in California figure out a way to say that Stoneman appointing him was unconstitutional. George comes back to California and rather than crawling into a bottle, he decides to marshal his resources. And Phoebe says, okay, what you should do is you should invest in a charity, and as it happened, there was a giant earthquake in South Carolina and that’s where a lot of the Hearst people were from. So Hearst decides, like, OK, what we should do is we should put on a performance at a theater in San Francisco. And they get one of William Randolph Hearst’s pals from Harvard, Ernest Thayer, who will go on to write Casey at the Bat, a great American classic. And Thayer decides he will, almost like an SNL skit, he will, or more like maybe Mel Brooks, he will create a play based on the most exciting story of the time, and that’s the capture of Geronimo. So they put on the capture of Geronimo, and George and Phoebe have box seats, and even the Republican papers are laughing and find the whole thing a hit, and decide, you know, George Hearst is a pretty good guy after all. So he’s able to use Geronimo’s capture in a variety of reasons.
Erik: So what do you think his legacy is? How is he perceived by people today and is that perception accurate?
Matthew: Well, Hearst’s legacy is twofold. There’s some good, there’s some bad. You know, in one way, he helped stitch the country together, you know, through all of the industry he created and being the industrial capitalist miner, you know, when he went into a mining town, he brought trains and schools and business with him. On the other hand, if you look at it from the perspective of the American Indians. Sure, George Hearst was stitching a country together, but it wasn’t their country. Their country had also had already been destroyed, such as the Lakota Sioux in the Black Hills, and the Apache in Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora, Mexico. So they weren’t too thrilled. But again, George exactly wasn’t the one who did that. He was just the biggest vulture. Now, in UC Berkeley, they do have a bust of him because the Hearst family threw a lot of money into UC Berkeley and they kind of repaid that by putting up the Hearst Mining and Memorial Building. And as part of that bust they have of there, they have some words, “he filched from no man’s store”. There’s a lot else, but “he filched from no man’s store”. And that’s true, you know, he wasn’t a robber in that manner, but he didn’t seem to have any problem on building his store on the ashes of other people. Now, as I was reading this book, chapter by chapter, as I do to my hiking partner as we drive to various spots on the Pacific Crest Trail. What really got her was when I got into fall of 1888 and George Hearst votes for an amendment to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. And what this amendment did was it stranded – exiled – thousands of Chinese-Americans who were overseas, and could no longer legally return, and that’s where she began rolling her eyes. Because, you know, she’s half Italian, half Japanese, and a good person besides. And that’s the part that I feel is the most egregious in the Hearst story. That, yeah, he was probably just going along with his Democratic colleagues, but a man of a little more substance, a man of a little more substance than the rest of the people in the country. Yeah, he was probably just going along with his Democratic colleagues, but a man of a little more substance might have done the right thing. Now, another way he has a tremendous legacy is leaving his money to his wife, Phoebe, and his son, William Randolph Hearst. And they’re both going to do extraordinary things. Now, Phoebe is going to give a lot of money to education, to the kindergarten foundations, which she helped champion and pioneer. She also has a library built in Lead, South Dakota, where Hearst had his Homestake Mine. The Homestake Foundation is going to build the deck where you view Mount Rushmore incidentally. There’s a plaque of them there. She’s going to give lots of money to education, Berkeley in particular. William Randolph Hearst, of course, and this is part of his legacy, he’s looking at the old man and he’s saying, how can I possibly compete with this historic figure, this United States Senator. And like his dad, he wants to be the “best in the west”. And he does this instead of through mining, through newspapers. And also like his dad, who had no compunction about bribing jurors, when George Hearst felt , when he felt that truth was secondary to his ambitions, he would toss his money towards that. And William Randolph Hearst in his newspapers saw what his father was up to in that nature and realized that honesty is not always the best policy, at least, you know, in the Hearst philosophy. So you will get Yellow Journalism, which Hearst, William Randolph Hearst here. kind of industrialized. It came about in 1896. Of course, people had been writing scandalous and not always true newspaper articles for millennia. You know, even Julius Caesar, you know, was writing in his commentaries about how wonderful he was doing conquering Gaul, you know, in order to drum up public opinion. But William Randolph Hearst was going to industrialize it. And as he looked at his father as the model, that’s the way he went about it. Now, at the same time, one should take a look that he was a bit of a naturalist. In the Senate, they did put him in charge of California’s forestry and he took it seriously. When the big push to form Yosemite National Park was going on, spearheaded by John Muir, they asked George Hearst, is there any good mining to be done in this proposed national park? And he said, well, if you’re talking about preserving the Tuolumne, I would preserve all of it. You know, all the mining really has been done, and this will be beneficial for the country. And a lot of people at that time would say that John Muir was the number one guy behind Yosemite National Park and George Hearst came in second. And I think he actually really enjoyed that.
Erik: Was Hearst aware of the environmental impact of his mining?
Matthew: Well, they could see the impact of hydraulic mining. And initially, Hearst would use hydraulic mining, you know, like the water would essentially like destroy a mountainside. But later on, when people became more cognizant of it, he changed his tune and he determined that hydraulic mining wasn’t something that miners should be able to do. So for his time, he had a good sense of things. But at the same time, he made his money through that sort of stuff first. And then like Carnegie and lots of fellows, later on after they became rich, then they started doing more charitable acts.
Erik: Thank you for sharing some of Hearst’s story with us. And your book came out last year, right?
Matthew: Yeah, 2021, fall of 2021.
Erik: And is there somewhere people can go to connect with you?
Matthew: Oh, I’ve got a Facebook page. The book’s out in Amazon. This fall, my new book, Hanging Charlie Flynn, about a highwayman in Frontier, California, And I’m hoping that Team of Giants will kind of pick up where, that’s the one I’m just finishing up now, will pick up where the George Hearst story left off because this one is how William Randolph Hearst, Teddy Roosevelt, and a number of other people furnished and then fought in the Spanish-American War.
Erik: Fascinating. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Matthew: Thank you, Erik, it’s been a delight talking to you.
Erik: Again I have been speaking to Matthew Bernstein. He is the author of George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age. This has been another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I’m Erik Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.
