VIIJAMES J. HILL

Born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1837Died in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1916

A hundred years ago Napoleon, with the sword, carved out of Europe an empire. To accomplish this, the lives of men by the thousands were sacrificed. With misery and bloodshed its boundaries were extended, and in a few years it had vanished into the history of the past. In like manner, for centuries have men of dominance changed the maps of the world, with armies and the sword.

But within the memory of men who live to-day another kind of empire-builder gave to the new world an empire of another kind. With peace and prosperity, year by year, he developed its vast square miles of territory. With rails of steel he pushed its boundaries each year still further into the wilderness. Each year he opened up to the world new acres of fertile fields, rich mines, and the tremendous natural resources of a virgin country. It is an empire that time can never destroy. It is an empire that has brought prosperity to the world.

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.

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 hisshoulders, 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.

The young man had no money; it was necessary for him to devote himself for a time to some profitable occupation. He was eighteen years old, but he was willing to turn his hand to any honest work, and his vivid imagination inspired him to work hard so that his future hopes might be realized. All of the business activity of St. Paul centred on the levees along the river, where merchandise brought up the Mississippiby boat was unloaded for shipment by ox-teams to the outlying settlements.

Hill was attracted by this kind of business. The position of shipping clerk in the office of the agents of a steamboat company was open, and he grasped it. The work was varied: he received incoming and outgoing freight, ran the warehouse, inspected its contents, kept an open eye for new business, and when labor was scarce, helped the men load and unload the steamboats. On this early experience was to be built the great triumph of coming years.

Not content with performing well his daily work, young Hill spent his evenings largely in studying the more technical and theoretical aspects of the transportation business and the possibilities, dependent upon adequate transportation, of the development of the great unexplored Northwest. Moreover, he saved his money, realizing that a time would come when his savings, however small, might prove vital to the grasping of an opportunity.

The year 1864 marks the close of the second period of his education. The great Civil War had torn the country. Hill, eager to serve his adopted land, had tried to enlist; but an accident in childhood which had resulted in the loss of an eye made it impossible to pass the physical examination. Although just beyond his majority, the boy had become a man in more than years. His steady attention to his work and the long hours of study had put him into a position from which he could now step fearlessly forward. He was a man of affairs.

The practical business knowledge and the business relationships which he had formed made him desire to be more completely his own master. It was not that he was tired of clerking; it was rather that he realized that the time had come to strike out for himself. To this resolve his young wife, Mary Theresa Mehegan, whom he had married in 1864, lent all her power of love and encouragement. A true partner in all her husband’s plans, Mrs. Hill shared every struggle along the path of success.

The young business man became interested in many things. Far to the north was the great Red River country, and he began to identify himself with the traffic which was carried on between this territory and St. Paul. He developed his warehouse business; he became a dealer in salt, coal, cement, and lime; he transferred freight, and, above all, he studied the developments of railroading, with a realization that in the freight-car and the locomotive was the secret of the transportation of the future. Fuel particularly interested him, for he believed that, as the railroad train would supersede the steamboat, so would coal supplant wood as a motive power.

A year after resigning his clerkship, he entered into the first of the many partnerships which he formed during his life. His savings were now an asset of real value, and the $2500 which he had put by made the partnership possible. The partners planned to do a general transportation, commission, and storage business, and in 1866 he began his enlarged activities.

The following year Hill secured a contract with theSt. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company to supply it with fuel. It was his first real introduction to the railroad business, and on it were based the labors and successes of the coming years. The railroad in the Northwest was still in its infancy; transportation depended largely on the rivers and lakes.

During the next few years, Hill studied the transportation problems of the Northwest with constantly increasing faith in his belief that, by means of adequate transportation, it was possible speedily to develop this vast region for the use of man. More and more the idea appealed to him. His romantic vision led him on in his thoughts far beyond the boundaries which surrounded the mental vision of his fellow citizens, and his years of study and varied business experience enabled him, step by step, to turn his dreams into realities.

Steadily the railroads had extended westward from the Great Lakes. The end of the Mississippi River transportation was within sight. But from St. Paul to the rich lands of the Red River only the clumsy carts and the lake flatboats carried the merchandise which the settlers required. Present needs of adequate transportation were great; future requirements were enormous beyond comprehension. Hill went into the problem, and soon had a regular line of boats, carts, and steamers operating between St. Paul and Winnipeg. The empire-maker had begun to build.

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 personallyinspected 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 littlebetter 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 nowcalled, 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.

Mr. Hill believed that the tilling of the soil was the true basis of success; that on the soil rested the stability of government, and that from it came the wealth of the world. To him, his vast systems of railroads were the means of opening to settlement regions of arable land, and later, when these lands had been cultivated, of connecting them with the rest of the world and affording markets for their produce. To increase population and industry along a railroad was the surest way of making the railroad profitable. He believed that a railroad would be rich or poor along with the farmers who cultivated the fields beside its tracks.

In order to help the thousands of farmers along the lines of his railroads to make their farms more profitable, Mr. Hill bought, wherever in the world they could be best obtained, herds of the finest cattle. These he bred on his own farms, and many he gave away to the farmers for their own breeding. In all, he gave away more than eight thousand head of cattle and hogs, and for many years offered prizes for thebest cattle raised by the farmers. “We must have better farming,” he said. “We must have more intelligent methods. Experience has shown that there is no way in which they can do this so well as by raising cattle, pigs, and horses, and by dairying.”

As a boy he had dreamed of the Orient. Now his dreams were to be realized. From the Western states his trains came eastward heavily loaded with lumber from the great forests of Oregon and Washington. To operate most profitably, it was apparent that these trains should not go west empty, but filled with merchandise. But there were not enough people in these Western states to consume the merchandise the trains could carry. Beyond the Pacific, however, were millions of people. China and Japan needed many things. Why should not his railroads carry westward merchandise for these great markets of the Orient?

With characteristic thoroughness, Mr. Hill sent agents to China to study the food-problem, and the best way to make a market there for American flour. They reported the existence of a great market for flour, cotton, and steel. To gain this business was to wage industrial warfare with Belgium and Great Britain, who had a cheap all-water route to the Orient by way of the Suez Canal.

But as his railroads extended only to the Pacific shore, a great ocean still lay between him and these alluring markets. To solve this problem, Mr. Hill formed, in 1900, the Great Northern Steamship Company, and built the Minnesota and the Dakota, the greatest vessels ever built flying the American flag, torun between Seattle and Yokohama and Hong Kong. But in this great venture, with its promise of success, Mr. Hill encountered disappointment, for the policy of the United States was unfavorable, rates and regulations made the cost of the operation of the ships excessive, and he was at last forced by circumstances to withdraw from the Oriental field.

Meanwhile, the vast empire of the Northwest was rapidly filling up with settlers. In a single year eighteen thousand farmers located along the Great Northern, and each year, farther and farther back from the tracks, new lands were developed and new homes were located where only a few years before the buffalo and the Indians had wandered. Next after the railroad, it was the farm which held the closest interest of the empire-builder.

Second only to Mr. Hill’s belief in the farm as the foundation of national prosperity was his interest in the discovery and development of new sources of mineral wealth. As a young man he had recognized the tremendous part which coal was to play in the history of transportation and the consequent development of the country. For years he had studied the coal deposits of the Northwest, and there was probably no one better informed than he regarding their quality, extent, and location.

In like manner he had investigated the general facts regarding the world’s supply of iron ore. At this time, however, there were no known deposits of iron ore in the Northwest. Then came rumors of the discovery of iron deposits in northern Minnesota. But now Mr.Hill’s two oldest sons were taking an active interest in the vast operations of their father. Like him, they had traveled extensively, not only over the territory reached by his railroads, but also over the still undeveloped lands, particularly in northern Minnesota.

In this way the two younger men became convinced of the wealth of iron ore which awaited only proper development and railroad connections to yield an enormous profit. Mr. Hill saw also the great opportunity that presented itself, and in 1899 personally purchased, for $4,050,000, a great tract of land on the now famous Mesabi Range. Immediately, railroad connections with the iron country were constructed, and arrangements for the shipment of the ore over the Great Northern were made. But although this was in every respect a private venture, practically discovered and entirely paid for by Mr. Hill out of his own pocket, his high sense of honor and responsibility refused to accept the enormous profits which were soon to be realized. Believing that the stockholders of the Great Northern, who with their money had stood behind him and had in a measure made this new development possible, were entitled to a share in the profits, he organized this new mining project, and distributed its stock, share for share, among them in proportion to their investment in the railroad. His refusal to take the entire profit is a fine example of the high principles which guided his every act and were in large measure responsible for his success.

Throughout his life, Mr. Hill believed that the success of men and nations rests entirely on the truestpersonal liberty. To him the man was always bigger than the state. Personal initiative and effort came first; what man individually could not accomplish, that the state must do; but never should the state assume the development or operation of a project until it was recognized that an individual or a group of individuals could not better accomplish the desired result.

The forest, the farm, and the mines, were in his belief the three sources of wealth. But wealth could come only from universal industry, honesty, thrift, and fair dealing among men. In his own dealings with his fellow men, he required those qualities; and, although his keen sympathies invariably responded to true distress, he had scant patience with those whose false vision saw in wealth honestly acquired a fund to be drawn upon for the support of the lazy and shiftless.

He once said: “There are four great words that should be written upon the four corner-stones of every public building in the country, with the sacredness of a religious rite. These watchwords of the Republic are Equality, Simplicity, Economy, and Justice.” And another time he said, when speaking of a profit-sharing arrangement he had made with his employees: “I am as well satisfied with that institution as with anything I have ever had to do with. I think that its greatest value is teaching the men to save. The first two or three hundred dollars is the hardest to save, but when once you have started, you all know it comes easy.”

Long before his death Mr. Hill’s name had become known throughout the civilized world. “His fame was international. His services were cosmopolitan.” Among the many honors which were heaped upon him in recognition of his services to mankind was the degree of Doctor of Laws by Yale University. In conferring this degree, Professor Perrin, of Yale, said:—

“Mr. Hill is the last of the generations of wilderness conquerors, the men who interpreted the Constitution, fixed our foreign relations, framed the Monroe Doctrine, and blazed all the great trails which determined the nation’s future. He has always been an original investigator, and we know him now as a man of infinite information. Every item of his colossal success rests upon a series of facts ascertained by him before they had been noted by others, and upon the future relations which he saw in those facts to human need and national growth. He believes that no society can prosper in which intellectual training is not based upon moral and religious culture. He is a national economist on broad ethical and religious lines; but the greatest things in all his greatness are his belief in the spiritual significance of man and his longing for the perpetuation of American institutions at their highest and best.”

His interest in books as a source of education found expression in the great public library which he presented to the city of St. Paul. To him, the trained mind was a necessity for success. Whether trained in the university or in the active life of the world did not matter, so long as it was trained; that was all that concerned him.

Mr. Hill’s reputation in years to come will rest chiefly on his career as an “Empire-Builder.” But he was primarily a railroad manager and a railroad engineer. His knowledge of the great business of transportation made it possible for him to extend his interests far and wide; no opportunity came near him that he did not investigate, and no opportunity which he accepted was ever put aside until he had developed it to its most perfect completion.

Physically, he was a man who seemed to express in his appearance the force and character which distinguished him mentally among men. Slightly under average height, with a great head firmly set on square, powerful shoulders, he commanded attention. He was physically strong, and his powers of endurance, which served him so well in the long hard days of his early life, remained unimpaired almost to his death. His firm mouth was half hidden by a beard, whitened in his latter years. His brow was high. His eyes were alert and looked out from beneath shaggy eyebrows. He was a man of a notable appearance which demanded respect and inspired confidence.

“Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then some more work,” was one of his frequent explanations of his success, and his advice to others. To young men he said: “The best advice to a young man, as it appears to me, is old and simple. Get knowledge and understanding. Determine to make the most possible of yourself by doing to the best of your power useful work as it comes your way. There are no receipts for success in life. A good aim, diligence in learningevery detail of your business, honest hard work, and a determination to succeed, win out every time, unless crossed by some exceptional accident or misfortune. Many opportunities come to every man. It depends upon himself, and upon what he shall make of himself, what he makes of opportunities and what they will make of him.”

From a poor farmer boy, in fifty years, James J. Hill, by the force of his own determination, and the opportunities common to all men in the great Republic of which he became a citizen, achieved a position among the world-leaders of his day. Wealth in millions came to him, not by inheritance or a stroke of speculative chance, but from the works which he himself had conceived and created. The achievements of his life will long be remembered, not only because of their public service, but because of their inspiration to other men by affording an example of the heights which may be reached by hard work, imagination, and determination to succeed.

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