The financial blizzard of the year Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three was, without doubt, an important factor in letting down the bars, so that James J. Hill could come to the front. The River Valley at that time was not shipping a bushel of wheat. The settlers were just taking care of their own wants, and were feeding the Lady of the Snows up North around Winnipeg. We now know that the snows of the Lady of the Snows are mostly mythical. She is supplying her own food, and we are looking toward her with envious eyes.
In the year Nineteen Hundred Nine, the two Dakotas and Minnesota produced more than two hundred million bushels of wheat—worth, say, a dollar a bushel. And when wheat is a dollar a bushel the farmers are buying pianolas.
The "Jim Hill Country" east of the Rockies is producing, easily, more than five hundred million dollars a year in food-products that are sent to the East for market.
The first time I saw Mr. Hill was in Eighteen Hundred Eighty. He was surely a dynamo of nervous energy. His full beard was tinged with gray, his hair was worn long, and he looked like a successful ranchman, with an Omar Khayyam bias. That he hasn't painted pictures, like Sir William Van Horne, and thus put that worthy to shame, is to me a marvel.
Hill has been an educator of men. He even supplied Donald A. Smith a few business thrills. "Tomorrow night I intend to entertain the Governor," once said Smith to Hill. "Tomorrow night you will be on the way to Europe to borrow money for me," said Hill. And it was so.
First and foremost, James J. Hill is a farmer. He thinks of himself as following a plow, milking cows, salting steers, shoveling out ear-corn for the pigs. He can lift his voice and call the cattle from a mile away—and does at times. He bought a section of Red River railroad land from himself and put it in his wife's name. The land was swampy, covered with swale, and the settlers had all passed it up as worthless. Mr. Hill cut the swale, tiled the land, and grew a crop that put the farmers to shame. He then started a tile-factory in the vicinity, and sold it to the managers—two young fellows from the East—as soon as they proved that they had the mental phosphorus and the commercial jamake.
The agricultural schools have always interested Mr. Hill. That which brings a practical return and makes men self-supporting and self-reliant is his eternal hobby. Four years in college is to him too much. "You can get what you want in a year, or not at all," he says. He has sent hundreds of farmers' boys to the agricultural colleges for short terms. Imagine what this means to boys who have been born on a farm and have never been off it—to get the stimulus of travel, lectures, books, and new sights and scenes! In this work, often the boys did not know who their benefactor was. The money was supplied by some man in the near-by town—that was all. These boys, inoculated at Mr. Hill's expense with the education microbe, have often been a civilizing leaven in new communities in the Dakotas, Montana and Washington. In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba became a part of the Great Northern.
Hill had reached out beyond the wheat country into the arid zone, which was found to be not nearly so arid as we thought. The Black Angus and the White-Faced Herefords followed, and where once were only scattering droves of skinny pintos, now were to be seen shaggy-legged Shire horses, and dappled Percherons.
The bicycle had come and also the trolley-car, and Calamity Jake prophesied that horses would soon be valuable only for feeding Frenchmen. But Jacob was wrong. Good horses steadily increased in value. And today, in spite of automobiles and aeroplanes, the prices of horses have aviated. Jim Hill's railroads last year hauled over three hundred thousand horses out of Montana to the Eastern States.