All this was done by a poor Canadian boy, born in a log-cabin at the edge of the forest in the Province of Ontario, in the year 1837. James Jerome Hill was his name.
Copyright by Pach Brothers
Jas. J. Hill (signature)
On his mother’s side the boy inherited the sturdy characteristics of Scotch ancestry; on his father’s side he found the brilliance and spirit of the Irish race. The soil was the sole source of their livelihood. Born in a wilderness where dark forests still sheltered wolves and deer, and where the Indians still roamed, the boy, from earliest childhood, received impressions that moulded his life’s destiny. He was born to see man subdue the wilderness, to see his struggle with the forces of primitive nature, to see his inevitable victory. As his own father hewed his few acres from the forest, so in the coming years was James J. Hill to redeem vast wilderness territories and give them to the use of man.
Characteristically, the father’s foresight sought more than an ordinary frontier education for his eldest son; and with equal eagerness the boy grasped at the opportunities that were offered him. At eleven he left the little district school where his education had begun, and entered an academy in a nearby village, conducted by an Englishman of college education.
There were no libraries, and in that remote outskirt of civilization newspapers were rarely seen. But a few books in the Hill household gave the growing boy an insight into literature, and the long hours of out-of-door labor which filled that part of the day when he was not at school developed him physically and gave him a foundation of good health which in later years made possible his tireless energy.
When he was fourteen his father died, and realizing the responsibilities which were now resting on his shoulders, the boy gave up his hope of a professional career and for four years supported his mother and her household with such small wages as he earned as clerk in the village store.
For several years, in the imaginative brain of the boy had grown the hope of some day crossing the Western plain and sailing across the Pacific to the Orient. Eagerly he had read all he could find that told him of those far countries. To his imagination they seemed to hold a definite promise of opportunity. He had but little money; but he had faith in himself and in his future. Each year the longing grew until, when he was eighteen, he could stand it no more and his new life began.
Without money, friends, or influence, he crossed the boundary into the United States, and after visiting several of the large Eastern cities, made his way to St. Paul, then a small town situated at the head of navigable water on the Mississippi River. North and west the unbroken prairie and the forests were peopled only by the Indians; buffalo roamed the prairies. Only along the navigable rivers were the cultivated farm-lands of the settlers.