Sublime

JAMES J. Hill ranks among the great organizers and managers of the American West. Born in Canada in 1838, Hill moved nearly two decades later to the Twin Cities, where he quickly exhibited the tireless energy and foresight that characterized his entire career. By his early forties he had helped organize major new transportation systems in Canada an

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A year later, in partnership with Wellington and George Blanchard, he proudly formed the firm of James J. Hill Company. He negotiated an exclusive arrangement as forwarding agent for the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad whereby his firm would transfer produce from riverboats to this firm’s rails that pointed westward to Minneapolis and up the Minnes

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Hill even plowed $25,000 into the faltering New York Times. All across the GN empire, Jim Hill’s private car became a landmark, frequently only a mythical landmark, pulled up on sidings from Fargo to Olympia, Washington—there to dictate policy regarding rail regulation and other pressing issues. He was becoming a legend in his own time, an ogre to

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Meanwhile, Jim Hill vastly expanded his fuel business. In 1869 he and partners Chauncey Griggs and John Armstrong created a concern called Hill, Griggs and Company, concentrating at first on the cordwood business that he had been interested in for several years. Logging primarily off forestlands to the north, they sold heavily, once again, to the r

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Jim Hill wasted little time, after gaining full control of the Saint Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba, in sending Farley packing. Hill showed little sensitivity to the old man’s ego, to his greed, or to his clear ability to retaliate. When Farley confronted Hill in the spring of 1879 with the impossible demand that he be made a director of the new c

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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 fo

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And like many of his fellow midwesterners, he railed at the imperialistic financial reign of the Northeast over other regions. In October 1912, Hill purchased two major financial institutions, the First National Bank and the Second National Bank, both of Saint Paul, and in 1913 he merged them under the name of the former. He poured nearly $4 millio

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Stephen and Smith would soon use their newly acquired riches to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Hill would join them for a while, but the Manitoba would always remain the focus of his career and his investments. The associates gloried, of course, in their spectacular success, the product of enormous risks and efforts. But as they looked toward

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Indeed, his knowledge of the railroad, in even the most minute detail, quickly became a matter of legend. For example, while standing on a Dakota rail siding one day, he spotted an engine numbered 94. From that recognition, Hill astounded the engineer by walking up and addressing him by name—Roberts—and noting that the engine had just been in for r

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