James Jerome Hill (September 16, 1838 – May 29, 1916), was a noted Canadian-American railroad executive. He was the chief executive officer of a family of lines headed by the Great Northern Railway, which served a substantial area of the Upper Midwest, the northern Great Plains, and Pacific Northwest. Because of the size of this region and the economic dominance exerted by the Hill lines, Hill became known during his lifetime as the Empire Builder.
Life
Childhood and youth
Hill was born in Eramosa Township, Wellington County, Upper Canada (now Ontario). A childhood accident with a bow and arrow blinded him in the right eye. He had nine years of formal schooling. He attended the Rockwood Academy for a short while, where the head gave him free tuition. He was forced to leave school in 1852 due to the death of his father. By the time he had finished, he was adept at algebra, geometry, land surveying, and English. His particular talents for English and mathematics would be critical later in his life.
After working hard as a clerk in Kentucky (during which he learned bookkeeping), Hill decided to permanently move to the United States and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the age of 18. His first job in St. Paul was with a steamboat company, where he worked as a bookkeeper. By 1860, he was working for wholesale grocers, for whom he handled freight transfers, especially dealing with railroads and steamboats. Through this work, he learned all aspects of the freight and transportation business. During this period, Hill began to work for himself for the first time. During the winter months when the Mississippi River was frozen and steamboats could not run, Hill started bidding on other contracts and won quite a few. Particularly of note was his contract to provide wood fuel to the nearby Fort Snelling.
The young businessman
Because of his previous experiences in shipping and fuel supply, Hill was able to enter both the coal and steamboat businesses. In 1870, he entered the steamboat business and by 1872 he had a local monopoly by merging (with Norman Kittson). In 1867, Hill entered the coal business, and by 1874 it had expanded five times over, giving Hill a local monopoly in the anthracite coal business. During this same period, Hill also entered into banking and quickly managed to become member of several major banks' boards of directors. Even with all of this, Hill still managed to grab at any extra business opportunities that came his way. He often bought out bankrupt businesses, built them up again, and then resold them—often gaining a huge profit.
Virtually all of this early and stunning success was due to a few key traits—traits that would reappear again as Hill made his way through the world of business. First, he was incredibly hard-working. It takes a huge amount of diligence to tackle more than one grand project. Hill was not only undertaking to monopolize the steamboat business; he was monopolizing coal, getting friendly with bankers, and buying other businesses at the same time. All of that requires a large degree of dedication. Hill noted that the secret to success was, "Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then more work."
Second, he was almost maniacally competitive. He took it almost as a point of personal honor to be the best, the biggest and the most competitive of any business out there.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hill was simply brilliant and a brilliant leader. He was able to quickly pick up the nuances of working in any new business. All of these traits had a role in Hill's precipitous rise to power most especially his almost uncanny ability to predict the future of business, as shown by the way he entered the railroad business in 1877.
Entry into Gilded Age railroading
During the Panic of 1873, a number of railroads, including the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (StP&P), had gone bankrupt. The StP&P in particular was caught in an almost hopeless legal muddle. For James Hill, a man with the intelligence and perseverance to fix the problems, it was a golden opportunity. For three years, Hill researched the StP&P and finally concluded that it would be possible to make a good deal of money off of the StP&P, provided that the initial capital could be found. Hill teamed up with Norman Kittson (the man he had merged steamboat businesses with), Donald Smith, George Stephen and John S. Kennedy. Together they not only bought the railroad, they also vastly expanded it by bargaining for trackage rights with Northern Pacific Railway. In May 1879, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway Co. (StPM&M) formed—with James J. Hill as general manager. His first goal was to expand and upgrade even more.
By all accounts, Hill was a hands-on, detail-obsessed manager. He wanted people settling along his rail lines, so he sold homesteads to immigrants and then imported them to their new homes (on his rail lines, of course). He imported grains from Russia and sold this to farmers. He even sold wood to farmers in order to encourage them to buy his wheat. When he was looking for the best path for one of his tracks to take, he went on horseback and scouted it personally. Under his skillful management, StPM&M prospered. In 1880, its net worth was $728,000; in 1885 it was $25,000,000.
One of his challenges at this point was the avoidance of federal action against railroads. If the federal government believed that the railroads were making too much profit, they might see this as an opportunity to force lowering of the railway tariff rates. Hill cleverly avoided this by investing a large portion of the railroad's profit back into the railroad itself—and charged those investments to operating expense. It was at this point that Hill became the official president of StPM&M (not that he hadn't been the man behind the curtain before), and decided to expand the rail lines.
The "Empire Builder"
Between 1883 and 1889, Hill built his railroads across Minnesota, into Wisconsin, and across North Dakota to Montana. Hill and his men worked in spite of all obstacles—including a presidential veto of a bill that would have allowed Hill legally to build through American Indian territory (the law preventing Hill from laying track across Indian territories was later repealed under President Grover Cleveland, who like Hill was a Bourbon Democrat).
When there was not enough industry in the areas Hill was building, Hill brought the industry in, often by buying out a company and placing plants along his railroad lines. By 1889, Hill decided that his future lay in expanding into a transcontinental railroad.
"What we want," Hill is quoted as saying, "is the best possible line, shortest distance, lowest grades, and least curvature we can build. We do not care enough for Rocky Mountains scenery to spend a large sum of money developing it." Hill got what he wanted, and in January 1893 his Great Northern Railway, running from St. Paul, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington — a distance of more than 1,700 miles — was completed. The Great Northern was the first transcontinental built without public money and just a few land grants and was one of the few transcontinental railroads not to go bankrupt.
Hill chose to build his railroad north of the competing Northern Pacific line, which had reached the Pacific Northwest over much more difficult terrain with more bridges, steeper grades, and tunnelling. Hill did much of the route planning himself, travelling over proposed routes on horseback. The key to the Great Northern line was Hill's use of the previously unmapped Marias Pass first discovered by Santiago Jameson. The pass had been discovered by John Frank Stevens, principal engineer of the Great Northern Railway, in December 1889, and offered an easier route across the Rockies than that taken by the Northern Pacific.
The Great Northern reached Seattle in 1893.
The Hill Lines: The 1890s
Six months after this amazing feat came the depression called the Panic of 1893. Hill's leadership became a case study in the successful management of a capital-intensive business during the economic downturn. In order to ensure that he did not lose his patronage during the crisis, Hill lowered rail tariff shipping rates for farmers and gave credit to many of the businesses he owned, so they were able to continue paying their workers. He also took strong measures to economize—in just one year, Hill cut the railway's expense of carrying a ton of freight by thirteen percent. Because of these measures, Hill not only stayed in business, but also increased the net worth of his railroad by nearly $10 million. Meanwhile, nearly every other transcontinental railroad went bankrupt. His ability to ride out the depression garnered him fame and admiration.
Part of Hill's success during the depression also was due to repeatedly cutting his employees' wages. That, and his hard micromanaging practices, eventually led to a railway-wide strike and the workers' unionization under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. Hill and Debs agreed to arbitration by other business owners led by Charles Alfred Pillsbury. The result was restoration of the workers' wages to pre-depression levels.
The Northern Pacific and the "short squeeze" of 1901
With 1901 and the start of the new century, James Hill now had control of both the Great Northern Railway, and the Northern Pacific (which he had obtained with the help of h
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