Colonel Clough was employed at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars, some years before his real work began. He came from the Northern Pacific. Mr. Hill, when asked by a leading official of that road what he thought of the Colonel, replied, "Huh! he's a good man to file contracts."
Mr. Hill said of Allan Manvel, then General Manager of his road, "He may make a man some day." Mr. Hill grew faster than any man about him. He distanced them all. S. S. Breed was Treasurer of the old Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad. His signature in a bold, fine hand adorned all the bonds of that road, held mostly by the Dutch. He was made auditor when the St. P., M. & M. Ry. was formed.
Breed had reached his point of greatest efficiency, but that did not suffice Mr. Hill, who said to him more than once, for Breed was an old-timer and well liked, "If you can't do the work I'll have to get some one who can." Mr. Hill, however, neither fired the old man, nor reduced his pay. Breed got work up to his death in the Great Northern Railway office, but at the last he served as a guide for strangers.
Breed was supplanted by Bode as Comptroller, followed by C. H. Warren and then by Farrington—all three Big Boys.
About Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, Mr. Hill gave an address at a banquet in the Merchants' Hotel, Saint Paul. With a large map of the United States and Canada on the wall, he took a huge pair of dividers or compasses and putting one leg of the dividers on the map at Saint Paul, he swung the other leg out southeast fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies, into the ocean off the Carolina Coast. Then with Saint Paul still as a center he swung the compasses around to the northwest fifteen hundred miles. "All this country," he said, "is within the wheat-belt." The leg of the compasses went beyond Edmonton in Alberta. Last year this new Canadian country produced more than one hundred million bushels of wheat, and this is only the beginning.
Mr. Hill has always maintained that to call cotton king is a misnomer. Cotton never was king. Wheat is king, for food is more important than raiment.
Wheat is the natural food of man. The civilization of ancient Greece was built upon the Nile Valley wheat. It is the one complete, perfect, vegetable food. It contains all the elements necessary to the making of the human body. The supply of wheat is the arterial blood that makes this world of ours do something. Without wheat we would languish—go quickly to seed, as China has.
Saint Paul and Minneapolis lie at the head of navigation on the Mississippi River—a little less than two thousand miles by water from the Gulf and about the same distance from Puget Sound tidewater by rail.
These cities are in the middle of the wheat-belt. To this point came Mr. Hill, a green country youth.