Many are the stories that are told of Mr. Hill in those early days. In the heat of summer and in the blizzards of the northern winters he personally inspected and carried forward the work which he had designed. He endured every kind of hardship. On his steamboats in the open months, and with sled and dog train in winter, he passed back and forth over the route, examining every local condition, studying the soil, the climate, and the mineral deposits along the way.
On one late winter trip, when the bitter winds were sweeping across the snowy prairies, blotting out every landmark and turning the country into a vast white sea, he started north with dogs and sleds, and an Indian guide for a companion. After a few days the nerve of the Indian began to weaken and he urged that they turn back. Realizing that unless decided action was promptly taken the Indian might be dangerous, Hill ordered him to return, and set out again alone, camping by night among the snow-drifts, making tea with melted snow, and sleeping wrapped in his blankets, with his dogs close about him.
The first railroad actually to be constructed into this new territory was the St. Paul and Pacific. It received its charter in 1858, under the name of the Minnesota & Pacific Railroad Company, and was planned to extend from Stillwater, through St. Paul and Minneapolis, west to Breckenridge. Immediately a craze for railroads swept the Northwest, and numbers of companies were formed; but such frenzied speculation could end only in disaster, and one by one the companies fell into bankruptcy.
With anxious eyes Hill watched the rising and waning fortunes of these various railroad enterprises. His investigation led him to believe that the St. Paul & Pacific offered the greatest possibilities. For seventeen long years he worked hard, dreamed his dreams, and added to his capital. Then came the opportunity. The St. Paul & Pacific had become a wrecked property. In it he saw the possibilities for which he had worked and saved. With a clear realization of the tremendous step that he was taking, he cast his entire fortune into the balance, and with the assistance of several associates took over the property, and with it its enormous debt of over $33,000,000. James J. Hill at last held control of a railroad.
He had bought a property that was bankrupt and was described as “two streaks of rust reaching out into the desert”; but in this bold beginning was the germ of the great railroad system which, under the name of the Great Northern, was to bring him fame and fortune in the years to come.
In the six years that followed, Mr. Hill extended his railroad to the Red River and connected with the government line from Winnipeg. By this extension the rich lands of Minnesota were opened to immigrants, and the great wheat-lands of the Northwest were connected with the markets of the United States.
The risk that he had taken was justified; but to his wife and to the friends who knew him it seemed less great, for they knew the character of the man, and to know him was to feel complete confidence in any action which he determined to take. “All his life it was his custom to know all the facts about anything in which he was interested, a good deal earlier and a little better than anybody else. For twenty years he had lived in the country where the situation had been preparing. For four or five years he had been consumed with anxiety to get possession of this property. He alone fully understood its present value; he alone conceived its future with any degree of justness.”
But now his dreams of a greater empire began to be realized. The St. Paul & Pacific, under his able management, was earning money and building up a surplus. In 1883 Mr. Hill extended it to Helena, Montana. And now his belief in the development of the Northwest was more strongly confirmed with each new step. His vision already pictured a railroad stretching across the prairies and over the tremendous barrier of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and the great harbors of Puget Sound. This was no impractical dream, but an idea founded on fact and experience; it was a great constructive enterprise.
Ten years later, in 1893, Mr. Hill began actively to carry out his plan of extending his railroad from Helena to the coast. It is hard to realize the tremendous difficulties which faced him. On the one hand, the Rocky Mountains seemed to block his path; on the other, a financial panic made the obtaining of the money necessary for the project seem almost an impossibility. But he was undismayed; every obstacle was overcome, the road was built, and the empire again extended its boundary, this time to the blue waters of the Pacific.
Following the completion of the Great Northern, as the consolidation of his various railroads was now called, to Puget Sound, Mr. Hill began his struggle to obtain the control of other railroads in order to combine them all into one vast coherent system. The Northern Pacific Railroad was the first to be added, and then the Burlington System was secured and incorporated into the vast development of his plan. Fifty years before, the penniless country boy had left the small village of his birth to seek his fortune; and now, after this life of usefulness, he found himself able to pay in cash over $200,000,000 for the Northern Pacific Railway System.