James J. Hill: A Great Life in Brief

James J. Hill

A Great Life in Brief

Stewart Holbrook

Epicenter Press is a regional press publishing nonfiction books about the arts, history, environment, and diverse cultures and lifestyles of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

For more information, visit www.EpicenterPress.com

Text © 1955, 2017 by Stewart Holbrook

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Permission is given for brief excerpts to be published with book reviews in newspaper, magazines, newsletters, catalogs, and online publications.

Cover and interior design: Aubrey Anderson

Cover Photos:

Front: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,

Harris & Ewing Collection, LC-H261- 665 [P&P]

Back: (top) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain News Service, LC-B2- 2527-14 [P&P]; (bottom) Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Harris & Ewing Collection, LC-H261- 667 [P&P]; (engine icon) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-19403 (b&w film copy neg.)

Originally published by Alred A. Knopf, 1955.

Reprinted with permission.

eBook ISBN:978-1-935347-96-5

Print ISBN: 978-1-935347-82-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941689

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Produced in the United States

I

It is significant of James J. Hill’s complex character that of two of the best remembered stories about him, one paints him as hero, the other as villain. Once, in a Dakota blizzard, when a section crew was trying to clear track for a stalled Great Northern passenger train, President Hill of the railroad came out to snatch the shovel from one man and send that bemused working stiff into the president’s private car for hot coffee, while he himself shoveled snow as though driven by steam. One after the other, the gandy-dancers were spelled off and drank fine java in unaccustomed elegance while the Great Northern’s creator and boss wielded a shovel. That was Jim Hill for you. Again, because the mayor of a small Minnesota town objected mildly to all-night switching in his village, Hill swore by God that its people should walk, then had the depot torn down and set up two miles away. That, too, was Jim Hill.

Hill may well have induced more European peasants to settle in the American West than any other man, and most of their daughters praised him for it, even while some of their sons cursed his memory by calling a particularly stubborn and harassing weed by the name of Jim Hill mustard.

That was the way it went with Jim Hill.

He has been termed the Commodore Vanderbilt of the West. It is not a sound analogy. Hill was an original. In his lifetime men called him the Little Giant and the Red River Pirate, and said that he desolated Minnesota, populated the Dakotas, made Montana a state, and stole Puget Sound. Others hailed him as the true prophet of Northern wheat, the friend of the farmer, the curse of homesteaders, the Oregon Bandit, the Empire Builder. He was each and all of those things, a legend while he lived, a legend still in death—and death came during the First World War. The measured critical writing on the man is yet so meager that it seems improbable that a fair estimate of his character will be made.

What he accomplished, however, is not vague. It can be measured in part by the thousands of miles of railroad that he built or acquired, the millions of acres homesteaded at his call, and by the fifty-three million dollars he bequeathed to his heirs or to good works. When Hill died, his empire ranged unbroken from the Canadian border to Missouri and Colorado, from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound and Oregon.

One of his appealing qualities, which many think were somewhat limited, was that he was not an emperor whose knowledge of his realm came solely from his agents and captains. When the Great Northern’s number-one train whistles for Sauk Center or Fargo or Wolf Point or Whitefish or Bonners Ferry or Wenatchee, on its way two thousand miles across the top of the United States, the echoes scarcely find a stark butte or a mountain valley that Jim Hill himself did not know at first hand.

One who has been riding the Hill Lines for many years is likely to fancy that in them one finds certain qualities of Jim Hill the man. By this is meant the land and the climate and the very towns and stations of this now spectacular, now monotonous, but usually handsome, harsh, desolate, wild, and bitter region. There is forlorn little Malta, an angry sun beating down, baking the false-fronts, roasting the soil, while dust clouds roll up from behind the Western Star or the Empire Builder... Or Havre at night, snapping from cold, coyotes howling within sound of the roundhouse. Or the glittering hill that is Butte at evening, seen from the Northern Pacific’s Limited as she comes out of the high pass of the Rockies—Butte twinkling with astonishing brilliance in this high, thin air, while away to the south rises the gigantic stack that is Anaconda, spewing yellow fumes and death to vegetation… The tumultuous Kootenai, boiling white over rocks, sea green in the deeper pools… Then the immense lushness of the Wenatchee orchards… Finally, the long thundering bore straight through the Cascade Range and emergence into the dripping, fog-ridden silence of the towering firs, the most somber and melancholy forest on earth; and soon the lights of Puget Sound and the hoarse voices of ships leaving for the Orient.

Sixty years ago, Hill hitched all these things together, then went on to tie them to Denver, to Omaha, to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. They comprised the Hill Lines, Jim Hill’s System, and they crossed and threaded and hounded a genuine empire. Offhand it is difficult to think of another American who had quite so much direct influence on quite so large a region.

Most of Hill’s country is decidedly northern in climate and character. They have winter there, a season that brought out the best in Jim Hill, a winter sort of man whose forebears originated in the Scottish Highlands. Before ever he owned a locomotive. Hill walked across Minnesota on snowshoes; he had driven dog teams to Fort Garry and slept in the open of subarctic Manitoba when it was Prince Rupert’s Land. Winter marked him, too. By the time he was forty, his massive shaggy head, his leathery face, his graying beard, and his immense shoulders reminded his friends of a rather grim old lion. What struck you, too, was the man’s one good eye. It was as black as night, save that it often seemed to glow from deep in his dark, weathered countenance like a live coal at the bottom of a cinder pit.

Some men come to look the way they do because conditions and their own bent have forged their personality. Hill was one of these. At fifty, as at seventy, he made men think of some crag like piece of geology, decorated with frosty tamarack, standing above a canyon in the mountains. That was Jim Hill, old Rock of Ages himself, a neolithic legend with a volcanic base.

***

He was born September 16, 1838, in the hamlet of Rockwood, County of Wellington, in what is now Ontario and was then Upper Canada, the third of four children of James and Anne (Dunbar) Hill. The Hills were stanch Protestants from Armagh, Ireland, whose antecedents were probably among Cromwell’s men; the Dunbars originated in Scotland.

It was a custom in the Hill family, as with many another at the time, to name the eldest son for the father; when an earlier son James died, the Hills named their second son James Jerome. Like the others, he was born in the log house his parents had built on their fifty-acre place in the Ontario bush, as the Canadian backwoods was known. In later years Anne Hill often remarked that the happiest day of her life was when the last tree in the clearing which could possibly fall on her house was cut down.

If there was anything that distinguished the Hill-Dunbar home from those of other bush pioneers in the neighborhood, it was the books on a shelf in their log house: The Works of Shakespeare, the Poems of Robert Burns, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a dictionary, and the Bible. Whether or not these volumes were the source of it, the one remarkable thing that the community seemed to recall, in later years, of Hill’s youth was that the boy read everything he could lay hands on.

The Rockwood settlement would appear to have been particularly fortunate in that it harbored a number of Quakers, including an old man, John Harris, late of Cork, Ireland, who taught the district school where Hill learned to read; and William Wetherald, an English Quaker with a college education.

In 1848 Wetherald, encouraged by the Hills and a few other families, opened Rockwood Academy, a private school in which young James Jerome was enrolled. Wetherald was apparently a really fine teacher who chose deliberately what seemed to him the best things a child should know. He held that mental discipline, and not mental craftsmanship, was the ideal. He taught the usual courses of reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, and also gave his pupils an excellent grounding in English and Latin, with a little Greek and the beginnings of geometry. This educational fare was extraordinary for the time and place, but more so was the manner in which it was set before the youngsters. Wetherald was probably one of those rarities called a natural teacher. Thirty years after his schooldays, James J. Hill, by then one of the giants of the Northwest, begged his old teacher to pay him a visit. The aged Wetherald did so, to Hill’s great delight, and the two men continued to correspond until the former’s death, the Quaker always signing himself Thy old friend and teacher.

During the youth’s fourth year at Rockwood Academy, James Hill Senior died, and shortly thereafter the widow and children moved to nearby Guelph, where James went to work in a grocery store. He was now head of the family. His pay was four dollars a month. Though his parents had hoped the lad would become a physician, the matter was dropped when young James, playing Indian with other boys, was struck by an arrow that cost him the sight of one eye.

Hill clerked in the little store for four years. Nothing much happened, save that he continued to read a good deal, often under the benign direction of good Schoolmaster Wetherald. Plutarch charmed him. Byron fairly hypnotized him. He also got good strong doses of the life and times of Napoleon, and came to adore the daughter of another emperor, Lalla Rookh, the heroine of Thomas Moore’s famous poem. It is more than probable that some of this reading prompted young Hill’s first dreamy ambition. He had breathed the wild free air of Byron. He had followed Napoleon up the Nile. He had saturated himself with the romantic melody of Lalla Rookh’s journey from Delhi to Cashmere.

So, in 1856, and not yet turned eighteen, young Hill quit the store at Guelph, said good-bye to mother, brother, and sister, and set forth with the idea of going to the Orient, preferably India. His money got him only as far as Syracuse, New York, where he worked for a farmer, earning enough to permit him to move on to New York City, then to Philadelphia, in one of which he hoped to ship before the mast. But neither here, nor in Richmond, which he also visited, did suitable opportunity present itself for carrying out his original scheme.

He had not yet given up the Orient. Perhaps some port on the Pacific was the proper place to ship. He would go there. He knew the best way to get to the West Coast of the United States. It was by way of one of the trapper’s brigades. A schoolmate at Rockwood Academy who came from the Red River of the North had told him about the brigades. They left Fort Garry and St. Paul every spring and headed for the trapping grounds of the Rocky Mountains, even beyond the Rockies, even to the Pacific ports of Portland and San Francisco. That way lay the Orient.

Hill went to Chicago, then on to the Mississippi, and by river steamer to St. Paul, the rising new metropolis that only recently had ceased to call itself Pigs Eye. Here was the center of a sizable trade in furs. Hill got there in late July 1856, just a week or so too late to join the last brigade of the season, that headed by the redoubtable Major Edwin A. C. Hatch.

Whether or not young Hill was sorely disappointed is not known. The Orient had suddenly receded, and here he was in the unromantic mud of a jerry-built frontier city. In any case, he did not grieve long; Hill could always muster patience when he had to, and this was one of those occasions. Then, too, the sights and sounds of St. Paul, capital of Minnesota Territory, were such as to attract even a more sophisticated youth than this country lad from the Ontario bush.

When Hill arrived there in mid-1856, St. Paul was in its first great boom. The flush times were to continue for a little more than twelve months longer, or until the Panic of Fifty-seven transformed the city, as a local historian described it, into a place of no money, no values, no property, no business, no banks, or banks with empty vaults; no courage, no hope, notes due, mortgages foreclosed, men heavily in debt, land depreciated from 50 to 75 per cent, and no foundation to build on.

Twelve months of flush times, so it turned out, was all