George Hearst was born in 1820 in Sullivan, Missouri, where his father William ran a store and three heavily mortgaged farms. With little schooling, George learned geology from books lent by the family doctor, Silas Reed, and by watching local lead mines. His father died in 1846, leaving him the family debts. In 1850 he left for California with a group of 16, failed at placer mining near Sutter’s Mill on the American River, and in 1851 moved to Grass Valley to prospect and deal in quartz mines, spending a decade in Nevada County before his break.

In 1859 he recognized that the blue mud other miners discarded in the Washoe district was silver ore and bought a one sixth interest in the Ophir mine on the Comstock Lode. He and his partners hauled 38 tons of ore by mule over the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco for a $91,000 profit. His firm, Hearst, Haggin, Tevis and Company, became the largest private mining firm in the country, with the Ontario silver mine in Utah, Marcus Daly’s Anaconda copper mine in Montana, and the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota, which ran until 2001. He lost the 1882 governor’s race, entered the U.S. Senate by appointment in 1886 and election in 1887, and died in office in 1891.

• The Ontario mine yielded $17 million over a decade and carried him through the Panic of 1873.
• In 1862, at 42, he married Phoebe Apperson, and their only child was William Randolph Hearst.
• He acquired the San Francisco Examiner to settle a gambling debt, using it as a Democratic Party tool before his son took it over.
• His Senate career centered on fighting the Central Pacific Railroad, which controlled freight rates on his ore.
• Phoebe funded libraries in Lead, South Dakota, and Anaconda, Montana, and the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley.