Sublime

For sheer grit and audacity, Harriman had few rivals, and he now proceeded on a daring, even reckless corporate raid that would shake Wall Street to its very foundations. Since Morgan and Hill had stonewalled his request for a one-third holding in the Burlington, he would proceed to attack them from the rear. He would, instead, stealthily buy contr

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

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

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

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

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.