The life of James J. Hill

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Chapter Two

JAMES J. HILL arrived in St. Paul, July 21, 1856. An alien by birth, without an acquaintance or a friend, without means of support, he was left upon the confines of civilization to make terms with his new environment. One can almost fancy the ironic humour of Destiny observing these insignificant conflicts out of which mighty things were to be born. With difficulty, however, since events now move so swiftly, can one frame a true picture of the Northwest as it was in the middle of the last century. From this remote outpost only a few high spirits were gazing at the beacons lighted on the Pacific by the recent discovery of gold in California, across the expanse of what all except some enthusiasts, who were tacitly accepted as fanatics, agreed to dismiss with finality from future consideration as "The Great American Desert."

In 1856 St. Paul was a little town of from 4,000 to 5,000 people. The territorial census of 1855 optimistically gaveit 4,716. Minnesota Territory, of which St. Paul was the capital, contained from 100,000 to 150,000 inhabitants. The federal census of 1860 made it 172,000, Its limits included the present area of the state together with 24 the country now embraced in the Dakotas, to the Missouri and White Earth rivers. Its industries, agricultural, lumbering, and fur trading, were, with the exception of theilast-mentioned, mostly local. Means of communication with the outer world were too circuitous and slow to permit rapid development. At the World's Fair, held in New York in 1853, the contributions from Minnesota consisted, exclusive of daguerreotypes, unmanufactured products of the country, furs, grains, minerals, and Indian curiosities, in all amounting to sixty-two diflFerent articles. Settlement was confined to the river valleys. Along the Mississippi and the Minnesota were rich farms and flourishing "villages. Back of these were the open prairie and the Big Woods, where the Sioux and the Chippewa still lorded it undisturbed. The Red River Valley, which was to play so important a part in the new commonwealth and to witness the first great achievement of the raw boy now hunting for employment on the streets of St. Paul, was as desolate as nature had made it. From east to west, from north to south, it was known only to the Indian and the half-breed; a level waste, the home of buffalo and antelope, the hunting ground of the fox and the wolf. One might travel from the headwaters of the Bois de Sioux down to the Red River and follow its course to Pembina without meeting a human being or a domesticated animal. Farther south [this condition varied only as, year by year, new settlers pushed out from their base of supplies along the larger watercourses.

Life was primitive in its isolation. The upper Mississippi River country had as yet no rail communication with the East. All intercourse between them was by way of Galena or some other Mississippi River point, and thence to Chicago. The air, it is true, was full of great projects and a few certainties of development. In 1856 a railroad was already built for one hundred miles west of Chicago, with promise of reaching Prairie du Chien in another year. Another was building from Milwaukee to the Mississippi. Everything was growing. The amount of public lands entered or located by warrant in the territory in 1855 was more than a million and a quarter acres. This, the most fertile land in the world, was valued at about one dollar per acre. But there was not a foot of railroad in the territory, and industry necessarily was restricted to its crudest forms.

St. Paul was a typical river town of the period. Its first inhabitant dated from the year when Mr. Hill was born. Founded by the natural law which placed a settlement at the head of navigation of every river, it had received its first charter from the Minnesota legislature in 1854, and was now bustling with the importance of the convention to frame a constitution for the state that was to be. Its site was unpromising. Rugged bluffs rose from the river bank, with sluggish streams oozing through the marshy ground between. All activity centred on the levee; the strip of ground, reached often by rough plank-ways across sloughy spaces, along the river that was the only highway to the world. There was life. There business was to be done. On that hung the enterprise of the primitive business concerns, the frame hotels, the rude residences of the frontier capital. The buildings clustered around the landing places or ran up the rough slopes of the hills. But red blood raced in every vein and leaped to every touch of promise and of hope.

A daily line of boats plied between St. Paul and Galena, the port of arrival and departm-e for river trade above St. Louis. A dozen steamboats ran between St. Paul and settlements on the Minnesota River. Each of these was crowded on every trip with freight and passengers; volunteers for the occupation of the rich wilderness that lay beyond. In 1855 the niunber of boats engaged in the river trade at St. Paul was sixty-eight, and it had increased 59 per cent, a year for the last five years. The town, consequently, was enjoying the doubtful benefits of a "boom." Rents were high and vacant houses hard to find. A four-room house, one story high, was worth from twenty to thirty dollars a month. And during the long, rigorous winter of that clime, before the first boat came through in the spring with supplies from without, prices soared. On April 10, 1856, says an old account, "flour sold at ten dollars a barrel, oats were eight-five to ninety cents a bushel, butter forty-five cents a pound, and eggs and poultry were not to be had for love or money." Of money, indeed, there was an annual famine; since the currency supply was cut off in winter and exchange did not exist. But people lived happily on notes of hand and orders on business houses, that would be paid when lumber and furs and cranberries and a little grain went out in the spring and the cash came back. The community, at any rate, was heart-whole and care-free; with the splendid audacity of youth and a supreme confidence in its own future. History was in the making, and every man was intensely alive. No weakling could live in such an atmosphere; but to the strong it was like heady wine.

Peering over the rim of this little crater of activity, northward ^nd westward, the newcomer viewed a debatable land. Between St. Paul and the Pacific Coast, where the early founding of Astoria and the growth of Portland had already erected stations of settlement and sent vague messages of invitation to adventurous spirits in the East, stretched two thousand miles of territory held by some of the fiercest of the aboriginal tribes. Over its quality, over the mere possibility of adapting it to agricultural uses, the best-informed men of the day wrangled hotly. Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institute, an authority whom it was then almost blasphemy to question, had rendered his emphatic judgment in these words : " The whole space to the west, between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains, is a barren waste over which the eye may roam to the extent of the visible horizon, with scarcely an object to break the monotony. The country may also be considered, in comparison with other portions of the United States, a wilderness, unfitted for the use of the husbandman, although in some of the mountain valleys, as at Salt Lake, by means of irrigation, a precarious supply of food may be obtained." To the great majority of people, outside the northwestern country itself, this was final. But it was vigorously combated by those who had explored the region through which it was hoped that a new route to the Pacific might be found. Their testimony was necessarily ex parte. There were no resident witnesses to call to the stand. In the year 1856 one might draw a north and south line from the Red River to the lower boundary of Nebraska, and in all the northern half of the country west of it, from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains, he would find no settlement, no pioneers, nothing but "savage beasts and still more savage men."

But the Smithsonian could not put down Major Isaac I. Stevens, governor of the Territory of Washington. He had himself explored this country, with a view to the railroad of the future that had already captured the imagination of a few bolder spirits. He could talk of what he himself had seen. In an address delivered in 1858 he said of the country denounced by Henry: "Nearly the whole is susceptible of continuous occupancy by our people. There is no such thmg as a desert, properly so speaking, on the entire route. There are gaps or intervals where it is only a grazing country; there are portions of the country occupied by mountain ranges which would not admit of profitable cultivation; but, as a whole, the country is fitted for settlement, and must be settled and occupied at an early day." He carried the war into the enemy's country by proclaiming this heresy in an address the same year before the American Geographical and Statistical Society. Yet the controversy was not ended or the public mind convinced. In 1875, after settlement had pushed out upon the prairies and a northern transcontinental line had been partially built, General Hazen, a scientific authority, then stationed at Fort Buford and supposedly acquainted with every detail, published a pamphlet to establish the position he had announced a year before; that "there can be no general agriculture between the 100th meridian west, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the British Possessions, and Mexico." Even so late as 1860, when William H. Seward was at St. Paul and made the famous speech that has heartened its people ever since, proclaiming it the site of the future great city of the continent, his genius for making people feel happy went no further in the practical line than the rather Delphic utterance, "God ordained that what is useful to be done should be done." Yet that aphorism might fall significantly upon the ears of a young man who had lived for 30 four years in St. Paul upon hard work and gorgeous visions of a future in which he was to play a not inconspicuous part.

Only to the northwest, up beyond the Red River country, where Lord Selkirk's enthusiasm had planted the first outpost for the real agricultural and commercial conquest of the interior of the continent, did the rim of the crater break away to reveal in the distance civilized life instead of savage wilderness. Great visions were to enter through that gap, but the time for them and for an account of this most interesting Red River settlement will come later in this story. Meanwhile, James J. Hill looked about him in the Uttle Minnesota town where his travels had terminated for the present, to see what could be done. Here he was to work nine years for independence; here he was to build up a flourishing business of his own; here he was to conceive and carry through the negotiations that started him upon his career as the greatest constructive railroad genius of his age; and until he made the bond purchases of a worse than bankrupt system that startled his associates and revealed him either lunatic or genius, he had not moved his business office or the centre of his active life five hundred feet from the spot on the Mississippi levee in St. Paul where he first found employment and set himself to work with a will.

Between 1856, when Mr. Hill reached St. Paul, and 1865, when he went into business for himself, the years, though critical in their bearing upon the future as every such formative period must be, were empty of startling events. It was a second and rougher but not less decisive schooling. The boy of eighteen, without friends or capital or equipment of business experience, turned for occupation to the centre of activity in the new community. This was the levee. The willing could always find work there; and he became a clerk for J. W. Bass & Co., agents for the Dubuque & St. Paul Packet Company's line of Mississippi River steamboats. By the river route all the commerce of the little town and the outlying settlements tributary to it was carried on. The shipping clerk was not a specialized employee in those days. He received incoming and discharged outgoing freight. He looked after the contents of the warehouse. He made out waybills and had an eye open for new business. He had to be ready to do anything, and on occasion must work as hard as a roustabout. This was a splendid all-around education for a live young fellow. After one season's experience with it, the journey to the Red River country and thence westward was no longer considered. Work had ousted adventure; and when the firm of Brunson, Lewis & White succeeded Bass & Co. in the packet company agency, they took over as part of the assets the young shipping clerk, who remained with them three years. After that he spent a year with Temple & Beaupre, and four years with Borup & Champlin, who were agents for the Galena

Packet Company and the Davidson line of steamboats.

These outwardly uneventful years were among the busiest of a life seldom equalled in intensity of application . The characteristics of the youth persisted. His vivid imagination made the day's work interesting, because invested with unknown possibiUties. His head teemed with ideas and schemes, new and old. He still dreamed of business conquests that might one day be made in the Orient. Now his new experience came into play, and he thought Seriously of the project of building steamboats like those which carried traffic on the Mississippi to operate on the rivers of India. But it was no longer a wild vagary. The more disciplined mind was already learning how fact and fancy may be made to work in double harness. He studied steamboat construction and operation. He read everything available about India. He knew exactly what sort of boats would be required and how much travel they could hope to secure. Fifty years later his judgment affirmed the soundness of the venture that he had dreamed of on the Ganges when, as a raw boy, immured in mid-America, he had ascertained that the district between Delhi and Allahabad offered the most promising field for a beginner. Nor was the scheme finally stricken from the list of future possibilities until the period of general railway building began. Then his mind, as swift to grasp the meaning of events as to act upon its own conclusions, realized the mighty scope of the coming development in the United States; and all thought and effort were turned in that direction. But who can wonder that the young associates in 1858 or thereabouts, in a frontier town in Minnesota, of a boy who not only imagined but talked seriously during long walks with his companions of creating a transportation system in India by placing steamers on the Hoogly and the Brahmaputra, should not understand him; should set him down as a dreamer or a "romancer"?

This did not prevent him from being immensely popular with the youth of full blood and high spirits who breathed the air of a community so vivid and so crude. He was the life of their somewhat rough society, the leader in many a madcap freak. He was a perpetual fountain of practical jokes. The Celtic sense of humour, which he never lost, overflowed in him. High spirits had their way. Here is one of his very few letters of this time that have been preserved. It was written to one of his boy friends back in Rockwood, and the envelope bears on the flap the stamp "Borup- Champlin, Grocers, St. Paul":

Saint Paul, February 11, 1858.

Dear William:

Your epistle bearing date of seventeenth ult. came to hand on

good time and your fertile imagination can scarcely conceive what

an amount of pleasure I derived from it, as it was the first epistle

of William to James at St. Paul for a "long back." My surprise

at receiving your letter was only surpassed by my surprise at not receiving one from you after you left St. Paul, or sometime during the ensuing season. Still, a good thing is never too late or "done too often." It gave me much pleasure to hear that you were all well and enjoying yourselves in the good and pious (as I learn) little town of Rockwood. I did intend to go to Canada this winter, but it is such a long winter trip I thought I should defer it until summer, when I hope to be able to get away, as I intend to go on the river this summer if all goes as well as I expect. Capt. W. F. Davidson wrote me from Cincinnati about going with him as first clerk on the side-wheel packet Frank Steele, a new boat about the size of the War Eagle. The Captain is Letter A, No. 1, and I think I shall go with him. If not, I have two or three good offers for coming season on the levee, besides my present berth, which is nevertheless very comfortable.

I think it mighty strange that some (of my letters) have not reached home as I wrote several times to my brother Alex, and I never was more surprised in my life than when old Bass handed me a letter of inquiry as to my whereabouts. But after the boats stop nmning our mails are carried so irregularly that whole bags of mail matter are often mislaid at way stations for weeks, and some finally lost or otherwise destroyed. On the tenth of November last I was retiu^ing from the Winslow House with Charley Coffin, Clerk of the War Eagle, about eleven o'clock, and when we were coming down Fourth Street passing one of those rum holes, two Irishmen, red mouths, came out and, following us, asked us if we would not go back and take a drink. Charley said "no," and we were passing on when two more met us who, along with the other two, insisted that they meant no harm and that we should go in and drink. I told them that I did not drink and that, generally speaking, I knew what I was about. We attempted to go on, but they tried to have us go back, so I hauled off and planted one, two in Paddie's grub grinder, and knocked him off the sidewalk about eight feet. The remainder pitched in and Charley got his arm cut open and I got a button hole cut through my left side right below the ribs. The city poUce came to the noise and arrested threei of them on the spot and the other next day and they turned out to be Chicago Star Cleaners, a name given to midnight ruffians. I was not compelled to keep my bed, but it was some two months before I was quite recovered from the eflFects of the cut. One day on the levee I was going aboard one of the boats and slipped on the gang plank and sprained my knee, which laid me up for about two weeks. About a week ago my pugnacious friend who gave me his mark escaped from the penitentiary at Stillwater, along with all the rest of the prisoners confined at the time. I am sincerely very grateful to you for your generous oflFer in your letter and fully appreciate your kindness. But notwithstanding my bad luck I have still "a shot in the locker," about $200, which will put me out of any trouble until spring. Our winter here has been very mild and open. We have scarcely had any snow, but what was altogether imprecedented, rain storms lasting three or four days in succession. Times have been mighty dull here this winter and money scarce. Write to me as soon as you receive this and give me a bird's eye view of Rockwood and its inhabitants

Believe me

Yours sincerely J. J. Hill.

Send me some papers.

This is life and adventure with a will. Nor is it uninteresting to consider James J. Hill as fortified against misfortune and provided for a northern winter's siege by that heavy "shot in the locker," a saving of about $200 to stand between him and the world. He lived, in a sense, much alone. Just as his associates could not understand his tropical imagination as applied to practical things, so they would not share in the severe regimen that he prescribed for himself in other ways. His artistic sense, innate and true, expressing itself later in one of the finest private collections of paintings known to this country, turned to work with water colours as a favourite recreation. He read and studied increasingly, unceasingly. It was already his habit, whenever any new subject came within his horizon, to search out the highest authority he could find, to ask for a list of the best books on the topic that could be had, to send for them and devour them in the hours that could be spared from work. He covered their margins with notes of his own. Once mastered, the contents were his for all time. The extraordinary memory, rivalling that of Lord Macaulay, which characterized the man, served well the purpose of the boy. He was omniverous in his search for information; he tore the heart out of his subject and made it so thoroughly his own that it was at his service ever thereafter. One of his young acquaintances of this time says: "Mr. Hill was a studious young man and did not read trash. I remember on one occasion my brother was sick and Mr. Hill volunteered to sit up with him at night. My mother found him reading a book; and, looking over his shoulder, found it was a book on engineering. She asked him if he intended to be an engineer, and Mr. Hill replied that he did not know what he might be 'You see I am only a young man yet, and a little knowledge about engineering may prove useful some day.' " That is the way this particular twig was bent.

Kindness of heart and love of reading and study — here are two fundamental and lasting traits again illustrated by two other stories of those early days. While Mr. Hill was rooming as a bachelor in St. Paul and boarding at the hotel, one of the young fellows, not an intimate but an acquaintance, fell ill. The trouble was pronounced typhoid fever, which in those days was thought to involve danger of contagion. After asking of the others who would sit up with the sick man and receiving no reply, Mr. Hill appeared that night and took charge of the friendless youth. On his recovery Mr. Hill asked him "how he was fixed." Receiving the reply that the last dollar was about gone, he handed the convalescent fifty dollars, saying that it would give him a start and when he was earning money again he could pay it back. He was always ready to be kind, always generous, always particularly sensitive to the call of a real need. And as to his chosen delight. Archbishop Ireland, who knew him from 1861 onward, told this story in his presenceyears afterward at a banquet where the completion of the Great Northern was being celebrated: "Mr. Hill once told me an incident of his early career which reveals him so clearly that I cannot refrain from repeating it. In the winter, when the river was closed by ice, the steamboats wintering at St. Paul were tied up for the season at the levee. It was desirable for someone to have an eye on them for the owner, and one winter young Hill's residence was the cabin of such a boat. He took into the cabin, with a few pieces of rough furniture, an armful of books — Gibbon's 'Rome,' several scientific treatises, and the like. When, in the following spring, the ice loosened around his boat, he

ARMS AND THE MAN had read and annotated all Ids books. He wasted in foolish frolics neither his money nor his time, he resolved to grow into a useful man, and he grew into a great man. This is why he discovered opportunities and was able to form wise plans. This is why he is the successful man."

His intensely practical mind, however, never failed to grip what came nearest to it, and all was grist that came to his mill. The country to which he had come and the business in which he had engaged furnished material for learning and the stimulus of novelty. Incessantly he investigated. His occupation was something to be mastered, systematized, and improved upon. It gave him his first lessons in the theory and practice of transportation. Painstakingly he took up each detail. He came in these years to a thorough knowledge of the mechanics of steamboating; of the gentle art of soliciting business and getting it awa,y from a competitor; of the chemistry and kinetic value of fuels, which he studied with the resistless energy that was now becoming a fixed characteristic. He forgot neither amusement nor recreation; but the day's work was the first thought, and the day's duty the master of every hour that its complete performance demanded. And all his wide reading, historical, scientific, and technical, fell instantly into place and order in relation to the practical work of his life and its as yet undreamed-of realization. He was ready for anything.

A Buffalo manufacturing company made a contract with the house in St. Paul for which he was working, to take an agency for selling three new reaping and threshing machines. These were almost as complicated a curiosity as a flying machine is now. The house asked him if he could set the machines up. He said he thought he could if he could go out and see one running. Here is a reminiscence of his own about it: "I took an old horse that we used to drive in a dray, and went up back of Fort Snelling and found Cormack threshing on what we used to call Eden Prairie. After looking over the machine and noting it carefully, I felt quite competent to set one up in running order; and within a few days a customer came along and I sold him a machine. I was young and felt a good deal of confidence in my ability to run a threshing machine. There is a good deal in having nerve." That incident epitomizes much of his after life. It is hardly necessary to add the epilogue: the machine was set up one evening, started on trial, and worked all right.

Here is another story in his own words : "I remember when we used occasionally to run a boat up to St. Anthony, or more properly I might say MinneapoUs, because the warehouse was on the Minneapolis side of the river. The pilot wouldn't steer the boat above Mendota; and having no license and a good deal of confidence in myself — I was younger then — I used to steer the boat. I was pilot, and I came very near on 40 one occasion to leaving the steamer Itasca on a pile of rocks up below Cheever's bar. We only broke about thirty timbers. The wind was blowing and we just had to jump her, and we didn't leave her on the rocks; but when we got her down to St. Paul she was about half full of water." Most of his enterprises, then and after, came through the rapids all right. These years are full of such experiences. They bespeak the daring, the seU-confidence and, behind them both, the ability to make good which were to turn the years as they came into servitors.

Another glimpse at short range appears in a letter to the same boy friend in Rockwood to whom he had written his lively experience of two years before. It is on a letterhead of "Borup & Champlin, Wholesale Grocers, Forwarding and Commission Merchants."

St. Paul, January 30, 1860.

Your letter of the 17th was received yesterday, and I hasten to answer it as it was the first I have received from Home for a period of nearly three months. I am glad to hear you are all well, and also glad to say that my health never was better in my life; weight 166 lbs., gross; huge, ain't it.'' As regards the farm, I would say simply that I would prefer selling it; but if I cannot sell it, I am in no mind to give it away. I want you to write me particulars, what it is worth and what it would rent for, for 1 or 10 years; also, if it is not too much trouble, if James Black or some of the neighbours would not rent it. As regards the rent for the past year, pay my mother some considerable part of it, and afterwards in amounts as in your judgment she wants it.

Write me particulars about everything and everybody. I have been up country most of the time since fall, buying grain, and have to make another 160-mile trip to-morrow. But knocking around

agrees with me. Have not had first rate luck in business this

season; however, will come out all right side up with care, marked