Thus the NP developers, motivated by a federal land-grant policy that encouraged reckless building, isolated the Twin Cities.

So in August 1885, Kennedy arranged the sale of twenty thousand shares of Manitoba stock to the firm of Lee, Higginson, and Company, as agents for the Bostonians. The four associates—Hill, Kennedy, Smith, and Stephen—put up the stock for sale; soon after, Hill and Kennedy made similar purchases of Burlington stock. Marshall Field, who had never

By the time of the completion of his railroad, he would have, indeed, become the single most powerful individual in the northwestern United States.

Hill’s rise to the top of a burgeoning local coal business is interesting not only because it formed a cornerstone of his career and generated venture capital for later investments but also because it revealed for the first time his instincts toward what friends would call vertical and rational integration of an industry and what foes would call

Ever the pragmatist as well as the tough competitor, Hill also eventually presaged another future characteristic when he abruptly changed course and parleyed with his chief competitors to bring peace to the area coal industry by joining together in a market-sharing consortium.

Harriman was a truly remarkable man, one of the most brilliant railroaders and formidable capitalists in American history, whose genius has been somewhat masked behind a partially deserved reputation for shady dealing.

The epic battle of American railroad history began in 1901 and centered on control of the strategic Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad (the “Q”). Once Hill and Morgan had consolidated the NP with the GN under Hill’s effective tutelage, it made more sense than ever to forge a connecting link between the Twin Cities–Duluth termini of the two

Jim Hill worked incessantly at improving every aspect of the railroad’s structure and operation. He traveled back and forth along the line in his business car, looking for dips and bumps and spying out curves that could be straightened and grades that could be lessened. More than any other railroad leader of the day, he had an engineer’s passion

To many, Hill always seemed the embodiment of cold and analytical practicality; but even as a boy, he revealed how realism and romanticism can coexist in the same mind, how in fact the interaction between the two can form the personality.