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

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

On the Red, his steamboating-forwarding business served as the advance staging arm of a railroad temporarily too weak to move forward to its natural termini. Unlike most Minnesotans, who viewed the Saint Paul and Pacific as a near-worthless derelict, Hill viewed it as a miracle waiting to happen, a potentially wondrous enterprise simply lacking com

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 ru

But he realized better than others that the SP&P had great potential—if, that is, its lines could somehow be completed before the deadlines expired for completing the trackage and securing the land grants. As a steamboater on the Red, he knew the potential value of the farmlands lying along the Saint Vincent Extension, many of these lands the p

The Hills, and the other GN investors, were about to reap a dual harvest: from the rich mines themselves, and from freight rates levied on the massive tonnages of ore hauled from the Mesabi to Lake Superior.

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

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

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