Chapter XI: Part 11

When I heard Mr. Hill relate this story he told it as simply as he might relate how he went out to milk the cows. One of the men present asked, "Didn't you feel sorry for the fellow, to turn him adrift on that frozen plain, without food or fuel?" Mr. Hill hesitated, and then slowly answered: "I thought of that, but preferred to send him adrift rather than kill him, or let him kill me. Anyway he had only some fifty miles to travel to strike an Indian village. When he was there we were a hundred and fifty miles apart. You see I am a mathematician. It is a great joy to figure out what a long distance you are from some folks."

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In his business of supplying cord-wood to steamboats, Mr. Hill had a partner, grizzled and gray, by the name of Griggs. Griggs was a typical pioneer: he was always moving on. He bought a little stern-wheel steamboat, and shipped its boiler and engine across to Breckenridge, where he had the joy of running the first steamboat, "The Northwest," on the Red River.

Mr. Hill built the second steamboat on the Red River, "The Swallow," on the order of Kittson, who bought the boat as soon as she had shown her ability to run. All the metal used in its making, which of course included engine and boiler, was sent across from Saint Paul. And if the outfit was gotten out of a wrecked Mississippi stern-wheeler, what boots it!

Then it was that Kittson, having also bought the Griggs steamboat, was given the title of Commodore, a distinction which he carried through life.

By this time several things had happened. One was that Hill had brought up to Saint Paul a steamboat-load of coal. This coal was mined near Peoria, on the Illinois River, floated down to the Mississippi, then carried up to Saint Paul. To bring coal to this Newcastle of wood was regarded as deliberate folly.

By this time the Saint Paul and Pacific had gotten a track laid clear through to Breckenridge, so as to connect with Commodore Kittson's steamboats. When Hill first reached Saint Paul, there was no agriculture north of that point. The wheat-belt still lingered around Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. The fact that seeds can be acclimated, like men and animals, was still in the ether.

The Red River Valley is a wonderfully rich district. Louis Agassiz first mapped it and wrote a most interesting essay on it. Here was a wonderful prehistoric lake, draining to the south through the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. By a volcanic rise of the land on the southern end, centuries ago, the current was turned and ran north, making what we call the Red River, emptying into Lake Winnipeg, which in turn has an outlet into Hudson Bay.

Agassiz came up the Mississippi River on a trip in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five. The boat he traveled on was one for which James J. Hill was agent. Naturally, it devolved on Hill to show the visitors the sights thereabouts. And among these sights happened to be our friend Kittson, who, full of enthusiasm, offered to pilot the party across to the Red River. They accepted and ascended to Fort Garry. Agassiz, full of scientific enthusiasm, wrote out his theory about the prehistoric lake. And science, now, the world over, calls the Red River Valley, "Lake Agassiz." With Louis Agassiz was his son Alexander, a fine young man with pedagogic bent, headed for his father's place as Curator of the Museum at Harvard.

From Winnipeg the party was supplied an Indian guide, who took them across to Lake Superior. Then it was that Alexander Agassiz saw the wonders of Lake Superior copper and Lake Superior iron. And Harvard lost a professor, but the world gained a multimillionaire. Louis Agassiz had no time to make money, but his son Alexander was not thus handicapped.

The report of Agassiz on the mineral wealth of Lake Superior corroborated Mr. Hill's own opinions of this country, which he had traversed with dog-sleds. Money was scarce, but he, even then, made a small investment in Lake Superior mineral lands, and has been increasing it practically ever since. A recent present to the stockholders of the Great Northern of an iron tract worth many millions of dollars had its germ in that memorable day when James J. Hill met the Agassiz party on the levee in Saint Paul and unconsciously changed their route as planned.

Mr. Hill's experience would seem to prove that life after all is a sequence, and the man who does great work has long been in training for it.

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There are two ways for a traveling-man to make money: one is to sell the goods, and the other is to work the expense-account.

There are two ways to make money by managing a railroad: one is through service to the people along the line of the road; the other is through working the bondholders.

It was the eventful year of Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, before James J. Hill really got up steam. He was then thirty-eight years old. He was agent for the Saint Paul and Pacific, and in this capacity he had seen that the road was being run with the idea of making money by milking the bondholders.

The line had been pushed just as long as the bondholders of Holland would put up the money. To keep things going, interest had been paid to the worthy Dutch out of the money they had supplied. Gradually, the phlegmatic ones grew wise, and the purse-strings of the Netherlanders were drawn tight. For hundreds of years Holland had sought a quick Northwest passage to India. Little did she know she was now warm on the trail. Little, also, did Jim Hill know.

The equipment--engines and cars--was borrowed, so when the receiver was appointed he found only the classic streak of rust and right of way. No doubt both of these would have been hypothecated if it were possible.

Mr. Hill knew the Northwest as no other man did, except, possibly, Norman Kittson. He had traversed the country from Saint Paul to Winnipeg on foot, by ox-carts, on horseback, by dog-sledges. He had seen it in all seasons and under all conditions. He knew the Red River Valley would raise wheat, and he knew that the prosperity of old Louis Agassiz meant the prosperity of the railroad that ran between that rich valley and Saint Anthony's Falls, where the great flouring-mills were situated, the center of the flour zone having been shifted from Rochester, New York, to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

To gain possession of the railroad and run it so as to build up the country, and thus prosper as the farmers prospered, was his ambition. He was a farmer by prenatal tendency and by education, a commission man by chance, and a master of transportation by instinct. Every farmer should be interested in good roads, for his problem is quite as much to get his products to market as to raise them. Jim Hill focused on getting farm-products to market. While he was a Canadian by birth, he had now become a citizen of the United States. His old friend, Commodore Kittson, was a Canadian by birth, and never got beyond taking out his first papers. The Winnipeg agent of the Hudson Bay Company was Donald Alexander Smith, a hardy Scotch bur of a man, with many strong and sturdy oatmeal virtues. He had gone with the Hudson Bay Company as a laborer, became a guide, a trader, and then an agent. Hill and Kittson laid before Smith a plan, very plain, very simple. Buy up the bonds of the Saint Paul and Pacific from the Dutch bondholders, foreclose, and own the railroad!

Now, Donald A. Smith's connection with the Hudson Bay Company gave him a standing in Montreal banking circles, and to be trusted by Montreal is to have the ear of London. Donald A. Smith went down to Montreal and laid the plan before George Stephen, Manager of the Bank of Montreal. If the Bank of Montreal endorsed a financial scheme it was a go. Only one thing seemed to lie in the way--the willingness of the bondholders to sell out at a figure which our four Canadians could pay. Mr. Hill was for going to Holland, and interviewing the bondholders, personally. Stephen, more astute in big finance, said, bring them over here. Hill could not fetch them, Kittson couldn't and Donald A. Smith couldn't, because there was no dog-sled line to Amsterdam.

The Bank of Montreal did the trick, and a committee of Dutchmen arrived to look over their Minnesota holdings with a view of selling out. Mr. Hill took them over the line--a dreary waste of slashings, then a wide expanse of prairie broken now and again by scrub-oak and hazel-groves; deep gullies here and there--swamps, sloughs and ponds, with assets of brant, wild geese, ducks and sand-hill cranes.

The road was in bad shape--the equipment worse. An inventory of the actual property was taken with the help of the Dutch Committee. The visiting Hollanders made a report to the bondholders, advising sale of the bonds at an average of about forty per cent of their face-value, which is what the inventory showed.

Our Canadian friends secured an option which gave them time to turn. Farley, the Receiver, was willing. The road was reorganized as the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad. George Stephen was President, Norman Kittson, First Vice-President, Donald A. Smith, Second Vice-President, and James J. Hill, General Manager. And on Mr. Hill fell the burden of turning a losing property into a prosperous and paying one. From the very day that he became manager he breathed into the business the breath of life.

He sent over to England and bought hundreds of young Hereford bulls, and distributed them along the line of the road among the farmers. "Jim Hill's bulls" are pointed out now over three thousand miles of range, and jokes on how Hill bulled the market are always in order. Clydesdale horses were sent out on low prices and long-time payments.

Farm seeds, implements and lumber were put within the reach of any man who really wanted to get on. And lo! the land prospered. The waste places were made green, and the desert blossomed like the rose.

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The financial blizzard of the year Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three was, without doubt, an important factor in letting down the bars, so that James J. Hill could come to the front. The River Valley at that time was not shipping a bushel of wheat. The settlers were just taking care of their own wants, and were feeding the Lady of the Snows up North around Winnipeg. We now know that the snows of the Lady of the Snows are mostly mythical. She is supplying her own food, and we are looking toward her with envious eyes.

In the year Nineteen Hundred Nine, the two Dakotas and Minnesota produced more than two hundred million bushels of wheat--worth, say, a dollar a bushel. And when wheat is a dollar a bushel the farmers are buying pianolas.

The "Jim Hill Country" east of the Rockies is producing, easily, more than five hundred million dollars a year in food-products that are sent to the East for market.

The first time I saw Mr. Hill was in Eighteen Hundred Eighty. He was surely a dynamo of nervous energy. His full beard was tinged with gray, his hair was worn long, and he looked like a successful ranchman, with an Omar Khayyam bias. That he hasn't painted pictures, like Sir William Van Horne, and thus put that worthy to shame, is to me a marvel.

Hill has been an educator of men. He even supplied Donald A. Smith a few business thrills. "Tomorrow night I intend to entertain the Governor," once said Smith to Hill. "Tomorrow night you will be on the way to Europe to borrow money for me," said Hill. And it was so.

First and foremost, James J. Hill is a farmer. He thinks of himself as following a plow, milking cows, salting steers, shoveling out ear-corn for the pigs. He can lift his voice and call the cattle from a mile away--and does at times. He bought a section of Red River railroad land from himself and put it in his wife's name. The land was swampy, covered with swale, and the settlers had all passed it up as worthless. Mr. Hill cut the swale, tiled the land, and grew a crop that put the farmers to shame. He then started a tile-factory in the vicinity, and sold it to the managers--two young fellows from the East--as soon as they proved that they had the mental phosphorus and the commercial jamake.

The agricultural schools have always interested Mr. Hill. That which brings a practical return and makes men self-supporting and self-reliant is his eternal hobby. Four years in college is to him too much. "You can get what you want in a year, or not at all," he says. He has sent hundreds of farmers' boys to the agricultural colleges for short terms. Imagine what this means to boys who have been born on a farm and have never been off it--to get the stimulus of travel, lectures, books, and new sights and scenes! In this work, often the boys did not know who their benefactor was. The money was supplied by some man in the near-by town--that was all. These boys, inoculated at Mr. Hill's expense with the education microbe, have often been a civilizing leaven in new communities in the Dakotas, Montana and Washington. In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba became a part of the Great Northern.

Hill had reached out beyond the wheat country into the arid zone, which was found to be not nearly so arid as we thought. The Black Angus and the White-Faced Herefords followed, and where once were only scattering droves of skinny pintos, now were to be seen shaggy-legged Shire horses, and dappled Percherons.

The bicycle had come and also the trolley-car, and Calamity Jake prophesied that horses would soon be valuable only for feeding Frenchmen. But Jacob was wrong. Good horses steadily increased in value. And today, in spite of automobiles and aeroplanes, the prices of horses have aviated. Jim Hill's railroads last year hauled over three hundred thousand horses out of Montana to the Eastern States.

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The clothes that a man wears, the house that he builds for his family, and the furnishings that he places therein, are all an index of his character. Mr. Hill's mansion on Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, was built to last a thousand years. The bronze girder that supports the staircase is strong enough to hold up a locomotive.

The house is nearly two hundred feet long, but looks proportionate, from the Art-Gallery with its fine pictures and pipe-organ at one end, to its rich leather-finished dining-room at the other. It is of brownstone--the real Fifth Avenue stuff. Fond du Lac stone is cheaper and perhaps just as good, but it has the objectionable light-colored spots.

Nothing but the best will do for Hill. The tallest flagpole that can pass the curves of the mountains between Puget Sound and Saint Paul graces the yard. The kitchen is lined with glazed brick, so that a hose could be turned on the walls; the laundry-room has immense drawers for indoor drying of clothes; no need to open a single window for ventilation, as air from above is forced inside over ice-chambers in Summer and over hot-water pipes in Winter.

Mr. Hill is a rare judge of art, and has the best collection of "Barbizons" in America. Any one can get from his private secretary, J. J. Toomey, a card of admission. As early as Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one, Mr. Hill had in his modest home on Ninth Street, Saint Paul, several "Corots." Mr. Hill is fond of good horses, and has a hundred or so of them on his farm of three thousand acres, ten miles north of Saint Paul.

Some years ago, while President of the Great Northern Railway, he drove night and morning in Summertime to and from his farm to his office. He very often walks to his house on Summit Avenue or takes a street-car. He is thoroughly democratic, and may be seen almost any day walking from the Great Northern Railway office engaged in conversation with one or more; and no matter how deeply engrossed or how important the subject in hand, he never fails to greet with a nod or a smile an acquaintance. He knows everybody, and sees everything.

Mr. Hill knows more about farming than any other man I ever met. He raises hogs and cattle, has taken prizes for fat cattle at the Chicago show, and knows more than anybody else today as to the food-supply of the world--yes, and of the coal and timber supply, too. He has formed public opinion on these matters, and others, by his able contributions to various magazines.

Seattle has erected a monument to James J. Hill, and Saint Paul and Minneapolis will, I know, erelong be only too glad to do something in the same line, only greater.

Just how any man will act under excitement is an unknown quantity. When the Omaha Railway General Offices in Saint Paul took fire, at the first alarm E. W. Winter, then General Manager, ran for the stairway, emerging on the street. Then he bawled up to his clerk on the second floor excitedly, "Charlie, bring down my hat!" But his clerk, young Fuller, with more presence of mind, was then at the telephone sending in word to the fire-department. Everybody got out safely, even to the top floor, but the building was destroyed.

One night about ten o'clock, the St. P., M. & M. Ry. offices at Saint Paul caught fire. The smoke penetrated the room where Mr. Hill with his Secretary, Will Stephens, was doing some work after all others had departed. They had paid no attention to the alarm of fire, but the smell of smoke started them into action. Young Stephens hurriedly carried valued books and papers to the vault, while Mr. Hill with the strength of a giant grasped a heavy roll-top desk used by A. H. Bode, Comptroller, pushed it to the wall, and threw it bodily out of the second-story window. The desk was shattered to fragments and the hoodlums grabbed on to the contents. No harm was done to the railway office, save discoloring the edges of some documents. The next morning when Bode, all unconscious of fire or accident, came to work, Edward Sawyer, the Treasurer, said jokingly, "Bode, you may consider yourself discharged, for your desk is in the street."

When Conductor McMillan sold his farm in the valley for ten thousand dollars, he asked Mr. Hill what he should do with the money. "Buy Northern Securities," was the answer. He did so and saw them jump one-third. Frank Moffatt was Mr. Hill's Secretary for some years. Frank now has charge of the Peavey Estate. C. D. Bentley, now a prominent insurance man of Saint Paul, a friend of Frank's, used to visit him in Mr. Hill's private office. Mr. Hill caught him there once and said, "Young man if I catch you here again I'll throw you out of the window." Bentley thought he meant it, so he kept away in the future. He told the story once in my presence, when Mr. Hill was also present. Mr. Hill bought red lemonade for the bunch. A porter on his private car was foolish enough to ask him at Chicago once at what hour the train returned. That porter had all day to look for another job, and Mr. Hill's secretary provided another porter at once. Mr. Hill can not overlook incompetency or neglect. Colonel Clough engineered Northern Securities; M. D. Grover, attorney for the Great Northern Railway, said it would not work. Grover was the brightest attorney the road ever had. When the scheme failed, Grover never once said, "I told you so," and Mr. Hill sent him a check for a thousand dollars, over and above his salary.

Colonel Clough was employed at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars, some years before his real work began. He came from the Northern Pacific. Mr. Hill, when asked by a leading official of that road what he thought of the Colonel, replied, "Huh! he's a good man to file contracts."

Mr. Hill said of Allan Manvel, then General Manager of his road, "He may make a man some day." Mr. Hill grew faster than any man about him. He distanced them all. S. S. Breed was Treasurer of the old Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad. His signature in a bold, fine hand adorned all the bonds of that road, held mostly by the Dutch. He was made auditor when the St. P., M. & M. Ry. was formed.

Breed had reached his point of greatest efficiency, but that did not suffice Mr. Hill, who said to him more than once, for Breed was an old-timer and well liked, "If you can't do the work I'll have to get some one who can." Mr. Hill, however, neither fired the old man, nor reduced his pay. Breed got work up to his death in the Great Northern Railway office, but at the last he served as a guide for strangers.

Breed was supplanted by Bode as Comptroller, followed by C. H. Warren and then by Farrington--all three Big Boys.

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About Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, Mr. Hill gave an address at a banquet in the Merchants' Hotel, Saint Paul. With a large map of the United States and Canada on the wall, he took a huge pair of dividers or compasses and putting one leg of the dividers on the map at Saint Paul, he swung the other leg out southeast fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies, into the ocean off the Carolina Coast. Then with Saint Paul still as a center he swung the compasses around to the northwest fifteen hundred miles. "All this country," he said, "is within the wheat-belt." The leg of the compasses went beyond Edmonton in Alberta. Last year this new Canadian country produced more than one hundred million bushels of wheat, and this is only the beginning.

Mr. Hill has always maintained that to call cotton king is a misnomer. Cotton never was king. Wheat is king, for food is more important than raiment.

Wheat is the natural food of man. The civilization of ancient Greece was built upon the Nile Valley wheat. It is the one complete, perfect, vegetable food. It contains all the elements necessary to the making of the human body. The supply of wheat is the arterial blood that makes this world of ours do something. Without wheat we would languish--go quickly to seed, as China has.

Saint Paul and Minneapolis lie at the head of navigation on the Mississippi River--a little less than two thousand miles by water from the Gulf and about the same distance from Puget Sound tidewater by rail.

These cities are in the middle of the wheat-belt. To this point came Mr. Hill, a green country youth.

Transportation was his theme, and transportation of wheat has been the foundation of his success. Wheat is of more importance to us than anything else--than gold or cotton or coal or timber or iron.

Mr. Hill carries all these over his railroads. The Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy--over twenty thousand miles of track--are in the hollow of his hand.

He directs, controls, even to minute details, this great transportation system. His seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated a year ago last September. Still he fails not. He has given up the Presidency of the Great Northern Railway, retaining, however, the title, "Chairman of the Board." But we all know that his hand is felt just the same in every part of the working of these miles of track.

Rareripes rot. But the man who comes into his own late in life has a sense of values and trains on. Mr. Hill does not ask for taffy on a stick. And while he prizes friendship, the hate or praise of those for whose opinions he has little respect are to him as naught. No one need burn the social incense before him in a warm desire to reach his walletosky. He judges quickly, and his decisions are usually right and just. It isn't time yet to write his biography. Too many men are alive who have been moved, pushed and gently jostled out of the way by him, as he forged to the front. Perspective is required in order to get rid of prejudice. But the work of James J. Hill is dedicated to time; and Clio will eventually write his name high on her roster as a great modern prophet, a creator, a builder. Pericles built a city, but this man made an empire. Smiling farms, thriving schools, busy factories and happy homes sprang into being in the sunlight of prosperity which he made possible, and as yet the wealth of the "Hill Country" is practically untapped.

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SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT BUSINESSMEN," BEING VOLUME ELEVEN OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD: EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII.