Who killed Hearst in Deadwood? His fate in the series and the movie, explained
George Hearst spends all of Deadwood's third season strangling the camp — buying claims, buying lawmen, and having people killed when buying doesn't work. Viewers have been searching for his death scene ever since. There isn't one.
Nobody kills Hearst. He survives the entire series and the 2019 movie. Trixie shoots him in the shoulder in season three and he recovers. In Deadwood: The Movie, set in 1889, Seth Bullock arrests him for ordering Charlie Utter's murder and puts him in a cell, badly beaten but alive. The real George Hearst died of natural causes in 1891.
The season 3 shooting
After Hearst orders the murder of Ellsworth, Trixie (Paula Malcomson) pulls the derringer from her boot, distracts him at his door, and shoots. She hits his shoulder and runs. He never gets a clear look at her face.
Hearst demands the shooter's body. Al Swearengen kills Jen, another woman working at the Gem, and passes her off as the assassin. Hearst accepts it and rides out of camp, having lost nothing. That was the end of the series when HBO canceled it in 2006 — the standoff everyone expected simply never happened.
What the movie does instead
Thirteen years later, the film brings Hearst back as a sitting U.S. senator from California, still buying land and still ordering killings. The last act runs like this:
- The auction — Hearst tries to buy the land his telephone lines need. Alma Ellsworth outbids him with her own money.
- The witness — his attempt to have Samuel killed fails after E.B. Farnum warns Bullock.
- The wedding — Hearst crashes Trixie and Sol Star's reception with two out-of-town lawmen, demanding her arrest for the shooting a decade earlier.
- The arrest — Bullock, now a U.S. Marshal, tells them they have no jurisdiction and arrests Hearst for Utter's murder instead.
- The thoroughfare — the town swarms him on the walk to jail and beats him nearly to death before Bullock stops it.
His deputy Harry Manning, secretly on Hearst's payroll, tries to shoot Bullock in the back and is killed by Calamity Jane first. Hearst stays in the cell.
Gerald McRaney, who played him in both, summed the character up to Gold Derby in 2017:
"He regarded human beings as just other pieces of mining equipment."
What happened to the real Hearst
History gave him even less of a comeuppance. George Hearst was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1886, elected in his own right, and died in office in Washington, D.C. on February 28, 1891, at 70. His estate was worth an estimated $19 million. His son, William Randolph Hearst, went on to build a newspaper empire on it.