The Legend Of Jim Hill (June 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 4)

The Legend Of Jim Hill

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Authors: Stewart H. Holbrook

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June 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 4

Long before his death, more than forty years ago, Jim Hill had become a legend in the American West. Whether lie was hero or villain matters little. He died something of a giant in the vast region where many contemporaries came often to think him less a man than an elemental force. Time has not diminished his stature; neither has it quite managed to condemn him nor to put him safely on the side of the angels.

First of all came the blizzards. Then the droughts. Then the grasshoppers, and hard on the leaping legs of the parasites came fames Jerome Hill, Jim Hill, the Little Giant, the Empire Builder, the man who made the Northwest,or who wrecked it—Jim Hill, the barbed-wired, shaggy-headed, one-eyed old so-and-so of western railroading.

Lasting legends arc seldom ready-made. They are built from inconsequential stories laid end to end, or piled one upon the other. Ul two of the best rcmcmbered stories of fini Hill, one shows him as hero, the other as villain. Once, when a crew was trying to clear track for a Great Northern passenger train stalled in a blinding snowstorm, President Hill came out to snatch a shovel from a man and send that working stiff into the president’s business car for hot coffee, while Hill himself shoveled like a rotary plow. One after the other, the gandy-dancers were spelled off and drank fine Java in unaccustomed elegance while the Great Northern’s creator faced the storm. That was Jim Hill for you. Again, because the mayor of a small Minnesota town objected, mildly, to all-night switching in his village, Hill swore that its people should walk. Then he had the depot torn down and set up two miles away. That, too, was Jim Hill.

The legend carries on: Hill began life with nothing. He died lord of an empire that reached from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, from the Canadian border to Missouri and Colorado. He had staked out provinces in China and Japan. He died worth $53,000,000, won in a region so sparsely settled that it was believed by most easterners to be an intact and worthless wilderness. There is more of substance to the Hill legend than shadow.

Born in 1838 in Ontario, Upper Canada, young Hill arrived at eighteen in the raw new settlement at the head of navigation on the Mississippi that was beginning to dislike its pioneer name of Pig’s Eye, and was calling itself St. Paul. The time was mid-1856. St. Paul was in its first notable boom. The prosperity was to last a little more than twelve months longer before the Panic of ’57 turned the city into what a local historian described as a place of “no business, … no banks, … no courage, no hope, … no foundation to build on.”

Twelve months, however, was all young Hill needed. Neither then nor later did panics hurt him. Like his contemporaries, Rockefeller and