Latest / Pionerd / James J. Hill: The Empire Builder Who Shaped the Upper Midwest
Transcript
- The Empire Builder on the Levee On a hot summer afternoon in 1856, a seventeen-year-old Canadian teenager stepped off a riverboat at the St. Paul levee. He had one working eye, nine years of school, and empty pockets. His plan to join a fur-trapping team up north had just collapsed. Yet, within four decades, this missing boat connection transformed a young clerk into the single most powerful rail baron in the American Northwest. James Jerome Hill did not just build tracks across the plains. He altered how an entire region moved, farmed, and built its towns. His private rail network grew so massive that it eventually sparked the first major presidential antitrust battle in United States history. The Levee Clerk and the Winter Freight July 21, 1856, marked James J. Hill’s arrival at the St. Paul mud banks. A bow-and-arrow accident at age nine had permanently blinded his right eye. After his father died in 1852, Quaker headmaster William Wetherald gave young Hill free tuition at Rockwood Academy to master algebra, geometry, land surveying, and English. The steamboat agency Brunson, Lewis, and White hired the seventeen-year-old as a levee clerk. By 1860, Hill moved to wholesale grocers Borup and Champlin, managing complex freight transfers between riverboats, farm wagons, and early rail lines. Single-eye blindness kept Hill out of Union Army infantry service in 1861. Instead, he joined the local Pioneer Guard militia unit and pressed hay for military horses. He soon spotted a major flaw in northern trade. Every winter, thick ice locked up the Mississippi River and brought riverboat shipping to a complete halt. Hill stepped directly into the gap. During frozen months, he won private bids to supply wood, hay, and grain to local army posts like Fort Snelling. In March 1865, Hill built the first all-weather transfer warehouse on the St. Paul waterfront. He ran rail tracks directly through the building so workers could load flour barrels from Saint Anthony mills out of the rain. During quiet winter months, he baled hay inside the empty space to keep the facility profitable. In 1867, seeing wood fuel grow scarce on the treeless plains, Hill partnered with Chauncey W. Griggs to trade anthracite coal. By 1875, Hill, Griggs and Company dominated the Twin Cities fuel trade, generating the capital Hill needed to enter steamboat shipping and target the broken rail lines of the Red River Valley. The Red River Valley and the Manitoba Line The Winter of 1870 pushed Hill deep into the northern wilderness. Traveling by dogsled, he waded icy rivers and set a guide’s dislocated shoulder with a stick and a rope. That rough trek convinced him of the Red River Valley’s massive farming future. Hill teamed with former fur trader Norman Kittson to monopolize steamboat freight to Winnipeg. Yet winter ice still halted river traffic for months. Hill knew a railroad through the valley would save homesteaders an entire year of crop growth. The Panic of 1873 crushed the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, driving it into receiver court. Dutch investors had poured millions into the line's bonds, but the stock crash left them holding defaulted debt on an unfinished track. Hill spent three years analyzing their tangled mortgages. In 1878, Hill, Norman Kittson, Donald Smith, and George Stephen formed a group called "The Associates." Working with mortgage trustee John Stewart Kennedy, they bought out the panicked Dutch bondholders for five million dollars, securing control of physical tracks and state land grants worth over nineteen million. Reorganized as the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway, Hill rushed track construction north to St. Vincent before the December deadline, unlocking two million acres of Minnesota land. Hill flooded the region with settlers, offering ten-dollar immigrant train tickets and cheap homestead land. To build lasting freight volume, he distributed Russian hybrid seed wheat and loaned hardy Scottish cattle and sheep to farmers for breeding. He built the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River and established the joint Minnesota Transfer freight yard to link regional rail lines. Not every community welcomed his terms. When Wayzata sued over main-street track noise, Hill retaliated by moving their depot a mile east to Holdridge, declaring residents could walk a mile for twenty years. In 1882, he opened the three-hundred-room Hotel Lafayette at Minnetonka Beach to draw wealthy summer tourists. Building the Great Northern to Puget Sound In 1883, Hill pushed his railway toward the Pacific Ocean. Rivals mocked the project as "Hill’s Folly" because he refused federal land grants and taxpayer subsidies. Hill famously declared he cared nothing for mountain scenery if it meant steep grades and wasted coal. During the summer of 1887, his crews set a staggering pace. Eight thousand workers and thirty-three hundred horse teams laid steel track from North Dakota across Montana, averaging over a mile a day and bridging Cut Bank gorge. To cross the Rockies on a low grade, Hill needed an unmapped mountain pass. While select popular accounts credit a scout named Santiago Jameson, official Great Northern records establish that principal engineer John F. Stevens surveyed and mapped Marias Pass in the bitter cold of December 1889. Sitting at five thousand two hundred sixteen feet, this pass gave Hill the lowest rail crossing in the northern Rockies. He renamed the network the Great Northern Railway in 1890, pushing through Cascade switchbacks until workers drove the final spike near Puget Sound on January 6, 1893. When the Panic of 1893 drove rival transcontinentals into bankruptcy, Hill survived by cutting freight costs to a quarter cent per ton-mile and shipping Southern cotton to Japan. In 1898, he purchased vast iron ore deposits across the Mesabi Range, hauling raw ore to Lake Superior docks. He built high-capacity steel steamers to carry grain and ore from West Superior to Buffalo, New York, bypassing rival trunk lines. When wage cuts triggered a nationwide strike by Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union in 1894, Hill accepted arbitration and restored worker pay scales. Conflict and the Fall of the Trust By 1896, Hill partnered with New York financier J.P. Morgan to control the bankrupt Northern Pacific. Five years later, they bought the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line to secure Midwestern grain routes into Chicago. This move sparked a covert stock raid by Union Pacific chief Edward H. Harriman. In May 1901, Harriman attempted to buy control of Northern Pacific stock. A buying delay while broker Jacob Schiff attended synagogue allowed Morgan and Hill to counter-buy remaining shares. Northern Pacific stock spiked from one hundred ten dollars to one thousand dollars a share, setting off the nation’s first major Wall Street panic. To prevent future raids, Hill, Morgan, and Harriman formed the four-hundred-million-dollar Northern Securities Company in late 1901, establishing a complete rail monopoly across the northern states. Governor Samuel Van Sant of Minnesota and President Theodore Roosevelt swiftly launched a federal prosecution under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The landmark case was tried at the Federal Courts Building in St. Paul. In March 1904, the United States Supreme Court ruled five to four against Hill, ordering the Northern Securities trust dissolved. Despite this antitrust defeat, Hill maintained separate operational control over his railroads through majority stock holdings, expanding lines into Oregon and Texas. To protect his corporate headquarters from fire, Hill constructed the 1887 St. Paul office building with barrel-vaulted brick ceilings supported by steel rails and filled with sand designed to drop and smother flames. Legacy of the Empire Builder Hill spent his final years endowing the St. Paul Public Library, funding regional colleges, and guiding his North Oaks experimental farm. He hosted figures like Grover Cleveland on annual salmon fishing trips aboard his yacht Wacouta and lived in a thirty-six thousand square foot Summit Avenue mansion. Yet Hill worked daily until his death on May 29, 1916. At two o'clock during his funeral, every Great Northern train and steamship stood silent for five minutes. From a single-eyed levee clerk to a titan of industry, Hill’s private network laid the arterial foundation for modern transit across the Upper Midwest.