Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first U.S. president, was born in West Branch, Iowa, to a family of modest means and believed in the unbounded opportunity of American life. He said that his country gave him, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance, and that in no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope. Family, faith, education, and hard work opened a world of opportunity to a man of simple beginnings, even to the presidency. Hoover was born in a small two-room cottage on August 10, 1874, and he was the first president born west of the Mississippi River.