U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [544]
Slope. Cholera fol owed in the ruts of the oxcarts, they died of cholera round the campfires, in hastilybuilt chinchinfested cabins, they were picked off by hostile Indians, they blew each other's heads off in brawls.) George Hearst was one of the few that made it;
he developed a knack for placermining;
-466-as a prospector he had an accurate eye for picking a goldbearing vein of quartz; after seven years in El Dorado County he was a
mil ionaire, Anaconda was beginning, he owned one-sixth of the Ophir Mine, he was in on Comstock Lode.
In sixtyone he went back home to Missouri with
his pockets ful of nuggets and married Phebe Apper-son and took her back by boat and across Panama to San Francisco the new hil y capital of the mil ionaire miners and bought a mansion for her beside the Golden Gate on the huge fogbound coast of the Pacific.
He owned vast ranges and ranches, raised cattle,
ran racehorses, prospected in Mexico, employed five thousand men in his mines, on his estates, lost and won fortunes in mining deals, played poker at a century a chip, never went out without a bag of clinkers to hand out to old friends down on their uppers, and died in Washington
a senator,
a rough diamond, a lusty beloved whitebearded
old man with the big beak and sparrowhawk eyes of a breaker of trails, the beetling brows under the black slouch hat
of an oldtimer.
Mrs. Hearst's boy was born in sixtythree.
Nothing too good for the only son.
The Hearsts doted on their boy;
the big lanky youngster grew up solemneyed and
selfwil ed among servants and hired men, factotums, overseers, hangerson, old pensioners; his grandparents spoiled him; he always did everything he wanted. Mrs. Hearst's boy must have everything of the best.
-467-No lack of gold auggets, twentydol ar goldpieces, big silver cartwheels. The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to
get along with the others in the roughandtumble de-mocracy of the boys growing up in San Francisco in those days. He was too timid and too arrogant; he
wasn't liked.
His mother could always rent playmates with ice-cream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fire-works always ready to set off. The ones he could buy he despised, he hankered always after the others.
He was great on practical jokes and pul ing the
leg of the grownups; when the new Palace Hotel was
opened with a reception for General Grant he and a
friend had themselves a time throwing down handfuls of birdshot on the glass roof of the court to the con-sternation of the bigwigs and stuffedshirts below. Wherever they went royal y the Hearsts could
buy their way,
up and down the California coast, through ranches
and miningtowns
in Nevada and in Mexico,
in the palace of Porfirio Diaz;
the old man had lived in the world, had rubbed
shoulders with rich and poor, had knocked around in miners' hel s, pushed his way through unblazed trails with a packmule. Al his life Mrs. Hearst's boy was to hanker after that world
hidden from him by a mist of mil ions;
the boy had a brain, appetites, an imperious wil ,
but he could never break away from the gilded
apronstrings;
adventure became slumming.
-468-He was sent to boardingschool at St. Paul's, in Concord, New Hampshire. His pranks kept the school
in an uproar. He was fired.
He tutored and went to Harvard
where he cut quite a swath as businessmanager of
the Lampoon, a bril iant entertainer; he didn't drink much himself, he was softspoken and silent; he got the other boys drunk and paid the bil s, bought the fire-works to celebrate Cleveland's election, hired the brass-bands, bought the creampies to throw at the actors from
the box at the Old Howard,
the cannon crackers to blow out the lamps of
herdic cabs with,
the champagne for the chorines.
He was rusticated and final y fired from Harvard,
so the story goes, for sending to each of a number of professors a chamberpot with the professor's portrait tasteful y engraved on it.
He went to New York. He was crazy about
newspapers. Already he'd been hanging around the
Boston newspaperoffices. In New York he