Sublime

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

The “Q” was truly one of America’s best and most-profitable roads. Well capitalized, well constructed, and well managed by two of the giant figures of American railroading, John Murray Forbes and Charles Perkins, along with their New England associates, it served a densely populated and fertile agrarian hinterland stretching across Illinois and Iow

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.

But he realized better than others that the SP&P had great potential—if, that is, its lines could somehow be completed before the deadlines expired for completing the trackage and securing the land grants. As a steamboater on the Red, he knew the potential value of the farmlands lying along the Saint Vincent Extension, many of these lands the p

JAMES J. Hill ranks among the great organizers and managers of the American West. Born in Canada in 1838, Hill moved nearly two decades later to the Twin Cities, where he quickly exhibited the tireless energy and foresight that characterized his entire career. By his early forties he had helped organize major new transportation systems in Canada an

The master of the academy, William Weatherald, had a major impact on the boy, implanting in him a love of literature and the essentials of mathematics and other practical sciences and fostering more than a little of the gentle religiosity of Quakerism.