and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare. The distance from the head of the Great Lakes at Duluth to the Pacific coast in the State of Washingto

forests or the mountain ranges. Far southward some progress in the march of civilization had been made; the Union Pacific had linked the West with the East before the eighth decade of the century bega

westward, with a branch to the north joining the Northern Pacific at Brainerd, Minnesota. The St. Paul and Pacific had been acquired in the interest of the Northern Pacific som

ld chair in front of his store and discoursing on current events. This man was not only an interesting talker; he was a visionary, a dreamer-and one of his dreams was to buy the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad and to transform it into a real railway line. Nearly twenty years had passed since he had drifted in, an eighteen-year-old Scotch-Irish boy from Ontario, and had begun work in a steamship office on

trader, Norman W. Kittson, ran two little old stern-wheel steamboats from Breckenridge to Winnipeg. A large part of the freight that Hill and Kittson handled was for the Hudson's Bay Company. It came up the Mississippi, went

e of strange, wild adventure behind him. He had gone when little more than a boy to Labrador to take charge of a station of the Hudson's Bay Company. Among the northern Indians he stayed for thirteen years. In th

making a real railroad out of it. And whenever Smith went to Montreal he talked the matter over with his cousin George Stephen-later Lord Mount Stephen-who was the head of the Bank of Montreal. In 1877 Stephen and Richard B. Angus, the general manager of the Bank, went to Chicago on business. While there, they had

hen was a broad-minded man, wise enough to know that the pest of grasshoppers could not last forever. He was greatly impressed with the ultimate possibilities of the soil and, under the hypn

77 Stephen went over to Amsterdam and secured an option on the bonds at thirty cents on the dollar-less than the accrued interest which was due and unpaid on them. He

the money. Nobody in St. Paul believed in the future of the road. Even the syndicate's attorneys, when offered a choice between taking $25,000 in cash or $500,000 of the new

Minnesota. "Hill's Folly," as it was afterwards called, with its thirty locomotives and few hundred cars, was feverish with success. Hill worked every possible source to get extra cars and went all the way to New York to

e property, and having several millions of dollars in profits, they issued bonds for further developments. This gave them sufficient basis to enlarge their scheme greatly, and in the formation of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad, they created $15,000,000 of stock, which was divided equitably among Hill, Stephen, Angus, Smith, Kennedy, an

erie made their big stock division had grown in 1890 to 2775 miles. It then consisted of a main line reaching from St. Paul and Minneapolis across Minnesota and the northern part of North Dakota, far

this plan had been constantly in his mind while he was building up the system in Manitoba. The original line running up into Manitoba and reaching Winnipeg was all very well as a start. It had paid so well that

wild and uninhabited regions. Especially did they deem it absurd to attempt such an undertaking without government aid, subsidies, or grants of land, pointing to the experience of such roads as the Union Pacific, North

t only kept out of the courts but actually earned and paid annual dividends of five per cent on its stock. The five years from 1896 to 1901 were years of uninterrupted prosperity for the Great Northern Railroad. Each year its credit rose; each year it grew to be more of a force in the Western railway situation. In th

to bore through them; it was always better to find the route which would make long hauls easy and economical. He thus built his road with the idea of keeping down the operating costs and of showing a larger margin of p

which, as we have seen, had been reorganized several years before by the Morgan interests, had been rapidly extending its lines in Oregon and Washington. Hill and his associates, therefore, had been quietly buying a substantial interest in the Northern Pacific property and thus, in the course of time, had come into closer relations with the Morgan group in New York. Soon afterward, under Hill's influence, t

e concerned. In the succeeding years the Great Northern system penetrated to the heart of Manitoba and constructed lines through British Columbia to Nelson and Vancouver. It built other branches to Spokane, Washington, and Helena and Butte, Montana. Moreover by the discovery of extensive ore deposits on the lines of the company in northern Minnesota and by subsequent purchases of other mines, the Great Nor

od, and in 1912, as the result of a United States Government suit for the dissolution of the Steel Corporation, the lease was canceled. Since that time

f capital stock; and the Burlington, whose whole stock is owned by these two roads, has also handed over liberal profits year by year, at the same time accumulating an earned surplus of more than one hundred million dollars and spending an almost equal amount