Part 45

of life. He sent over to England and bought hundreds of young Hereford bulls, and distributed them along the line of the road among the farmers. "Jim Hill's bulls" are pointed out now over three thousand miles of range, and jokes on how Hill bulled the market are always in order. Clydesdale horses were sent out on low prices and long-time payments. Farm seeds, implements and lumber were put within the reach of any man who really wanted to get on. And lo! the land prospered. The waste places were made green, and the desert blossomed like the rose. * * * * * The financial blizzard of the year Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three was, without doubt, an important factor in letting down the bars, so that James J. Hill could come to the front. The River Valley at that time was not shipping a bushel of wheat. The settlers were just taking care of their own wants, and were feeding the Lady of the Snows up North around Winnipeg. We now know that the snows of the Lady of the Snows are mostly mythical. She is supplying her own food, and we are looking toward her with envious eyes. In the year Nineteen Hundred Nine, the two Dakotas and Minnesota produced more than two hundred million bushels of wheat--worth, say, a dollar a bushel. And when wheat is a dollar a bushel the farmers are buying pianolas. The "Jim Hill Country" east of the Rockies is producing, easily, more than five hundred million dollars a year in food-products that are sent to the East for market. The first time I saw Mr. Hill was in Eighteen Hundred Eighty. He was surely a dynamo of nervous energy. His full beard was tinged with gray, his hair was worn long, and he looked like a successful ranchman, with an Omar Khayyam bias. That he hasn't painted pictures, like Sir William Van Horne, and thus put that worthy to shame, is to me a marvel. Hill has been an educator of men. He even supplied Donald A. Smith a few business thrills. "Tomorrow night I intend to entertain the Governor," once said Smith to Hill. "Tomorrow night you will be on the way to Europe to borrow money for me," said Hill. And it was so. First and foremost, James J. Hill is a farmer. He thinks of himself as following a plow, milking cows, salting steers, shoveling out ear-corn for the pigs. He can lift his voice and call the cattle from a mile away--and does at times. He bought a section of Red River railroad land from himself and put it in his wife's name. The land was swampy, covered with swale, and the settlers had all passed it up as worthless. Mr. Hill cut the swale, tiled the land, and grew a crop that put the farmers to shame. He then started a tile-factory in the vicinity, and sold it to the managers--two young fellows from the East--as soon as they proved that they had the mental phosphorus and the commercial jamake. The agricultural schools have always interested Mr. Hill. That which brings a practical return and makes men self-supporting and self-reliant is his eternal hobby. Four years in college is to him too much. "You can get what you want in a year, or not at all," he says. He has sent hundreds of farmers' boys to the agricultural colleges for short terms. Imagine what this means to boys who have been born on a farm and have never been off it--to get the stimulus of travel, lectures, books, and new sights and scenes! In this work, often the boys did not know who their benefactor was. The money was supplied by some man in the near-by town--that was all. These boys, inoculated at Mr. Hill's expense with the education microbe, have often been a civilizing leaven in new communities in the Dakotas, Montana and Washington. In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba became a part of the Great Northern. Hill had reached out beyond the wheat country into the arid zone, which was found to be not nearly so arid as we thought. The Black Angus and the White-Faced Herefords followed, and where once were only scattering droves of skinny pintos, now were to be seen shaggy-legged Shire horses, and dappled Percherons. The bicycle had come and also the trolley-car, and Calamity Jake prophesied that horses would soon be valuable only for feeding Frenchmen. But Jacob was wrong. Good horses steadily increased in value. And today, in spite of automobiles and aeroplanes, the prices of horses have aviated. Jim Hill's railroads last year hauled over three hundred thousand horses out of Montana to the Eastern States. * * * * * The clothes that a man wears, the house that he builds for his family, and the furnishings that he places therein, are all an index of his character. Mr. Hill's mansion on Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, was built to last a thousand years. The bronze girder that supports the staircase is strong enough to hold up a locomotive. The house is nearly two hundred feet long, but looks proportionate, from the Art-Gallery with its fine pictures and pipe-organ at one end, to its rich leather-finished dining-room at the other. It is of brownstone--the real Fifth Avenue stuff. Fond du Lac stone is cheaper and perhaps just as good, but it has the objectionable light-colored spots. Nothing but the best will do for Hill. The tallest flagpole that can pass the curves of the mountains between Puget Sound and Saint Paul graces the yard. The kitchen is lined with glazed brick, so that a hose could be turned on the walls; the laundry-room has immense drawers for indoor drying of clothes; no need to open a single window for ventilation, as air from above is forced inside over ice-chambers in Summer and over hot-water pipes in Winter. Mr. Hill is a rare judge of art, and has the best collection of "Barbizons" in America. Any one can get from his private secretary, J. J. Toomey, a card of admission. As early as Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one, Mr. Hill had in his modest home on Ninth Street, Saint Paul, several "Corots." Mr. Hill is fond of good horses, and has a hundred or so of them on his farm of three thousand acres, ten miles north of Saint Paul. Some years ago, while President of the Great Northern Railway, he drove night and morning in Summertime to and from his farm to his office. He very often walks to his house on Summit Avenue or takes a street-car. He is thoroughly democratic, and may be seen almost any day walking from the Great Northern Railway office engaged in conversation with one or more; and no matter how deeply engrossed or how important the subject in hand, he never fails to greet with a nod or a smile an acquaintance. He knows everybody, and sees everything. Mr. Hill knows more about farming than any other man I ever met. He raises hogs and cattle, has taken prizes for fat cattle at the Chicago show, and knows more than anybody else today as to the food-supply of the world--yes, and of the coal and timber supply, too. He has formed public opinion on these matters, and others, by his able contributions to various magazines. Seattle has erected a monument to James J. Hill, and Saint Paul and Minneapolis will, I know, erelong be only too glad to do something in the same line, only greater. Just how any man will act under excitement is an unknown quantity. When the Omaha Railway General Offices in Saint Paul took fire, at the first alarm E. W. Winter, then General Manager, ran for the stairway, emerging on the street. Then he bawled up to his clerk on the second floor excitedly, "Charlie, bring down my hat!" But his clerk, young Fuller, with more presence of mind, was then at the telephone sending in word to the fire-department. Everybody got out safely, even to the top floor, but the building was destroyed. One night about ten o'clock, the St. P., M. & M. Ry. offices at Saint Paul caught fire. The smoke penetrated the room where Mr. Hill with his Secretary, Will Stephens, was doing some work after all others had departed. They had paid no attention to the alarm of fire, but the smell of smoke started them into action. Young Stephens hurriedly carried valued books and papers to the vault, while Mr. Hill with the strength of a giant grasped a heavy roll-top desk used by A. H. Bode, Comptroller, pushed it to the wall, and threw it bodily out of the second-story window. The desk was shattered to fragments and the hoodlums grabbed on to the contents. No harm was done to the railway office, save discoloring the edges of some documents. The next morning when Bode, all unconscious of fire or accident, came to work, Edward Sawyer, the Treasurer, said jokingly, "Bode, you may consider yourself discharged, for your desk is in the street." When Conductor McMillan sold his farm in the valley for ten thousand dollars, he asked Mr. Hill what he should do with the money. "Buy Northern Securities," was the answer. He did so and saw them jump one-third. Frank Moffatt was Mr. Hill's Secretary for some years. Frank now has charge of the Peavey Estate. C. D. Bentley, now a prominent insurance man of Saint Paul, a friend of Frank's, used to visit him in Mr. Hill's private office. Mr. Hill caught him there once and said, "Young man if I catch you here again I'll throw you out of the window." Bentley thought he meant it, so he kept away in the future. He told the story once in my presence, when Mr. Hill was also present. Mr. Hill bought red lemonade for the bunch. A porter on his private car was foolish enough to ask him at Chicago once at what hour the train returned. That porter had all day to look for another job, and Mr. Hill's secretary provided another porter at once. Mr. Hill can not overlook incompetency or neglect. Colonel Clough engineered Northern Securities; M. D. Grover, attorney for the Great Northern Railway, said it would not work. Grover was the brightest attorney the road ever had. When the scheme failed, Grover never once said, "I told you so," and Mr. Hill sent him a check for a thousand dollars, over and above his salary. Colonel Clough was employed at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars, some years before his real work began. He came from the Northern Pacific. Mr. Hill, when asked by a leading official of that road what he thought of the Colonel, replied, "Huh! he's a good man to file contracts." Mr. Hill said of Allan Manvel, then General Manager of his road, "He may make a man some day." Mr. Hill grew faster than any man about him. He distanced them all. S. S. Breed was Treasurer of the old Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad. His signature in a bold, fine hand adorned all the bonds of that road, held mostly by the Dutch. He was made auditor when the St. P., M. & M. Ry. was formed. Breed had reached his point of greatest efficiency, but that did not suffice Mr. Hill, who said to him more than once, for Breed was an old-timer and well liked, "If you can't do the work I'll have to get some one who can." Mr. Hill, however, neither fired the old man, nor reduced his pay. Breed got work up to his death in the Great Northern Railway office, but at the last he served as a guide for strangers. Breed was supplanted by Bode as Comptroller, followed by C. H. Warren and then by Farrington--all three Big Boys. * * * * * About Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, Mr. Hill gave an address at a banquet in the Merchants' Hotel, Saint Paul. With a large map of the United States and Canada on the wall, he took a huge pair of dividers or compasses and putting one leg of the dividers on the map at Saint Paul, he swung the other leg out southeast fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies, into the ocean off the Carolina Coast. Then with Saint Paul still as a center he swung the compasses around to the northwest fifteen hundred miles. "All this country," he said, "is within the wheat-belt." The leg of the compasses went beyond Edmonton in