The Red River Valley is a wonderfully rich district. Louis Agassiz first mapped it and wrote a most interesting essay on it. Here was a wonderful prehistoric lake, draining to the south through the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. By a volcanic rise of the land on the southern end, centuries ago, the current was turned and ran north, making what we call the Red River, emptying into Lake Winnipeg, which in turn has an outlet into Hudson Bay.
Agassiz came up the Mississippi River on a trip in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five. The boat he traveled on was one for which James J. Hill was agent. Naturally, it devolved on Hill to show the visitors the sights thereabouts. And among these sights happened to be our friend Kittson, who, full of enthusiasm, offered to pilot the party across to the Red River. They accepted and ascended to Fort Garry. Agassiz, full of scientific enthusiasm, wrote out his theory about the prehistoric lake. And science, now, the world over, calls the Red River Valley, "Lake Agassiz." With Louis Agassiz was his son Alexander, a fine young man with pedagogic bent, headed for his father's place as Curator of the Museum at Harvard.
From Winnipeg the party was supplied an Indian guide, who took them across to Lake Superior. Then it was that Alexander Agassiz saw the wonders of Lake Superior copper and Lake Superior iron. And Harvard lost a professor, but the world gained a multimillionaire. Louis Agassiz had no time to make money, but his son Alexander was not thus handicapped.
The report of Agassiz on the mineral wealth of Lake Superior corroborated Mr. Hill's own opinions of this country, which he had traversed with dog-sleds. Money was scarce, but he, even then, made a small investment in Lake Superior mineral lands, and has been increasing it practically ever since. A recent present to the stockholders of the Great Northern of an iron tract worth many millions of dollars had its germ in that memorable day when James J. Hill met the Agassiz party on the levee in Saint Paul and unconsciously changed their route as planned.
Mr. Hill's experience would seem to prove that life after all is a sequence, and the man who does great work has long been in training for it.
There are two ways for a traveling-man to make money: one is to sell the goods, and the other is to work the expense-account.
There are two ways to make money by managing a railroad: one is through service to the people along the line of the road; the other is through working the bondholders.
It was the eventful year of Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, before James J. Hill really got up steam. He was then thirty-eight years old. He was agent for the Saint Paul and Pacific, and in this capacity he had seen that the road was being run with the idea of making money by milking the bondholders.
The line had been pushed just as long as the bondholders of Holland would put up the money. To keep things going, interest had been paid to the worthy Dutch out of the money they had supplied. Gradually, the phlegmatic ones grew wise, and the purse-strings of the Netherlanders were drawn tight. For hundreds of years Holland had sought a quick Northwest passage to India. Little did she know she was now warm on the trail. Little, also, did Jim Hill know.