James J. Hill

James J. Hill–1910

At the end of his life, James J. Hill was asked by a newspaper reporter to reveal the secret of his success. Hill responded with characteristic bluntness, "Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then more work."

Hill became a pivotal force in the transformation of the Northwest as his railroad served as the backbone of white American settlement, agricultural development, and commercial expansion.

Born in southern Ontario in 1838, Hill began his career in transportation in 1856 as a 17- year-old clerk on the St. Paul levee. After 20 years working in the shipping business on the Mississippi and Red Rivers, Hill and several other investors purchased the nearly bankrupt St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in 1878.

Over the next two decades, he worked relentlessly to push the line north to Canada and then west across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Renamed the Great Northern Railway in 1890, it remained the "great adventure" of Hill’s life. "When we are all dead and gone," he said, "the sun will still shine, the rain will fall, and this railroad will run as usual."

Hill pursued a broad range of other business interests: coal and iron ore mining, Great Lakes and Pacific Ocean shipping, banking and finance, agriculture and milling. In later years, he explained his economic philosophy in the book Highways of Progress and continued the campaign to convert the farmers of the Northwest to the principles of scientific agriculture.

After amassing a personal fortune estimated at $63 million, James J. Hill died in his Summit Avenue home on May 29, 1916, one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures of America’s Gilded Age.

• Watch a clip from the video, "James J. Hill: Empire Builder"