account and managed it so well that
by 1873, he had accumulated a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars.
There was in Minnesota at the time a little railroad called the St. Paul
& Pacific. It started at St. Paul, but it stopped after it had got only
a few hundred miles toward the Pacific. Hill decided to buy it. The
price was half a million, so he tramped back to Canada and persuaded the
bank of Montreal to let him have the $400,000 he needed. That was surely
one of the most wonderful feats of a wonderful career. The directors of
the bank were severely criticised; men laughed at his purchase, pointing
out that the road had never paid, and prophesying that it never would
pay.

Yet that Jim Crow road was the foundation of the Great Northern system,
the Hill line, stretching across Dakota and Montana to Puget Sound.
Every man who went into the enterprise with Hill now owns his stock in
it as a free gift, for in the intervening years, the cost has been
returned to him in the shape of dividends and bonuses. It has never
failed to pay regular dividends, and has, perhaps, won public confidence
more surely than any other in the country. For James J. Hill has kept
faith in the smallest detail with every man who ever entrusted a dollar
to his hands. The loyalty of the employes of the Great Northern has
passed into a proverb, "Once a Hill man, always a Hill man," and it is
true. He knows his road as few other men do. Before he bought the St.
Paul & Pacific, he traveled over the route in an ox-cart, studying not
only the road, but the people along the way--there weren't many--and the
resources of the country. Before he extended his line to the Pacific, he
went the whole distance on foot and horseback.

People laughed at him when he announced that he was going to extend his
line to the Pacific. No line had ever been built across the continent
without a great subsidy from the government--to secure a subsidy was
always the first step; besides, it was believed that the country through
which the Great Northern was to extend would not even grow wheat, and
the new road was promptly dubbed "Hill's Folly." But in 1893, his line
reached the Pacific. A few years later, the owners of the great Northern
Pacific were begging him to manage that road, too. For he had created
business for his road--a great market in the Orient to fill his
west-bound freight cars, and a great market in the eastern United States
for Puget Sound lumber to fill his e