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 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

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

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

everyone around the Saint Paul levees came to know “Jim” Hill, his name usually rendered as one word, “Jimhill,” a man who always seemed up on anything and everything that went on.

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

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

Jim Hill loved politics, both the bare-knuckled manipulation of favors and patronage and the philosophical discussion of the issues.

Hill especially loved to hold forth on four subjects near and dear to his heart: free trade, resource depletion and conservation, agriculture, and of course, railroading.