strayed down into England as far as Salisbury. During the
Reformation they became Presbyterians, and -- according to the
authorized biography, The Life of George Hearst, privately
printed by his son -- they were all "sternly moral." In the course
of time, the spelling of the name was changed to Hurst.

John Hurst founded the American branch of the family. He
was firmly planted on the soil of the New World before the
Pilgrim Fathers had landed on Plymouth Rock, for he arrived
in the colonies in 1608 and settled in what was to become Isle
of Wight County in Virginia, where he is said to have acquired
ten acres of land and nine Negro slaves. He begot a numerous
progeny of sons and daughters; and the sons moved on into
North Carolina. It was there, in the early eighteenth century,
that the name was changed to Hearst.

Admiringly, the official biographer assures us that "the
Hearsts were a clannish family." In one instance, three Hearst
daughters married three brothers, all of them Presbyterian
clergymen. Kirk and Covenant long remained the chief objects
of the family's devotion. In line with this, the Hearsts appar-
ently took no part in the American Revolution.

Early in the nineteenth century, the vast tract of land which
Jefferson purchased from Napoleon in 1803 offered new oppor-
tunities to restless and ambitious souls. Such a one was William
Hearst of Abbeville County, South Carolina. In 1808 he made
the long trek out to Missouri and settled on a high ridge in
Franklin County, where he raised wheat and corn, bred horses
and cattle, and carried on a precarious trade with the pioneer
city of St. Louis. In 1817 he married Elizabeth Collins, daugh-
ter of a neighboring southerner, and in 1820 was born their son
George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst.

George Hearst was brought up on his father's small planta-
tion in the midst of a sparsely settled territory. The total formal
schooling which he obtained was limited, according to his own
testimony, to two years. His interests were from the first diU+OOAD

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