James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest (The Oklahoma Western Biographies Book 12)

One of James J. Hill’s favorite themes, voiced repeatedly in the years to come, stressed the community of interest, the mutual interdependence, between the railroads and the regions they served. The two must, he reasoned, be rich or be poor together; and any regional carrier, even one with a de facto monopoly, would only harm itself if it gouged co

“The more I think of it the more I am convinced that the thing for us to do is to ‘take the bull by the horns’ and get control of the Northern Pacific, and by one stroke settle all questions at once. This will cost less money and will bring the best results in the least time. . . . A starving man will usually get bread if it is to be had, and a sta

And its financial strength, quite simply, lay at the heart of the competitiveness of the newly completed transcontinental: it was tightly capitalized at low rates of interest. Although its land grant did not, generally speaking, extend beyond the western border of Minnesota, the GN also possessed other, more subtle advantages. The GN’s major Americ

In his conceptualization of the Asian market, Jim Hill was both a prophet and a dreamer. He did foresee the remarkable evolution of the Pacific Rim–Southeast Asian economies that would come to fruition more than a half-century after his demise.

To many, Hill always seemed the embodiment of cold and analytical practicality; but even as a boy, he revealed how realism and romanticism can coexist in the same mind, how in fact the interaction between the two can form the personality.

As always, attention to and investment in infrastructure formed one of the two core elements in mapping strategy for the GN. The other core element lay, as always, in meeting and besting the regional competition.

In this, their first meeting, Hill and Stephen hit it off well; the two very strong personalities thus began a long lifetime of friendship and give-and-take.

everyone around the Saint Paul levees came to know “Jim” Hill, his name usually rendered as one word, “Jimhill,” a man who always seemed up on anything and everything that went on.

In this, as in so many other ways, he was without peer, the preeminent builder of the frontier economy of the Northwest. By controlling the transportation structure of the region—a near-monopoly railroad that, at the time of his death, was only beginning to feel the competition of automobiles and public highways—he exercised more sweeping economic