Sublime

With a huge war chest and no public security holders, Rockefeller could fight a no-quarter war for as long as Scott and Potts chose to bleed. Characteristically, he kept the war very focused. As A. J. Cassatt, a later Pennsylvania president, told a House committee, “They simply insisted that they could not make any arrangement with us for the

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

The company’s competitive advantage, it appears, was mostly Carnegie—his relentless pressure, his hounding to reduce costs, his instinct to steal any deal to keep his plants full, his insistence on always plowing back earnings into ever-bigger plants, the latest equipment, the best technologies.

Having retired as CEO of the Great Northern in 1907 and assumed the title of chairman of the board of directors, Jim Hill forfeited the latter title as well in 1912 and formally retired.

Roosevelt showed little patience for the “statesmen of the Atlantic seaboard” who were congenitally “unable to fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.” In his telling, not George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett—fighting Indians, hacking their way through the woods—were the true

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

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.