The Daily Morning Astorian

HIS ELY HISTORY
A Graphic Description of J. J. Hill's Life.
NOT THE SORT OF MAN
To Sail on Broken Promises on a Sea of Blood-Success Due to Frugal Start.
Chicago Times-Herald.

In discussing the apparently well authenticated report that Jim Hill has acquired the control of the Northern Pacific railroad in addition to that of the Great Northern, I have noticed that the newspapers are giving him such titles as "the Jay Gould of the west" and "the Napoleon of railway managers." These titles are not only uncomplimentary, however good the intention behind them, but they are unfair and anything but descriptive of James J. Hill.

Of Napoleon it is said that he made his conquest of Europe by sailing on broken promises on a sea of blood. Hill is not that sort of a man. Neither is he a Jay Gould, for he has not destroyed the property of others to build his own, nor corrupted the courts, nor used the printing press to water stock or pervert public opinion.

Jim Hill went to St. Paul soon after its incorporation and began life in the capacity of a mud clerk on the levee. A mud clerk, you must know, was the man who stood at the outer end of the gang plank as a steamboat came up to the levee and checked the goods as they came ashore. It was often necessary to jump into the mud in the hurry of being at his post on the minute hence the title.

Before he left the levee Hill filled every position on it, ending that chapter in his career by being a clerk in the warehouse under Miller, an agent of the steamboat line. Then he married and that is an interesting story with a strong tinge of romance, but it can be told another time.

When the first railroad in Minnesota was built Hill found employment as clerk in the freight house. His duties were not only to keep the account of freight received, but to roll barrels of salt and sugar and handle the freight generally with his own hands. It was a tradition of those days somewhere between 186 and 1871, that Jim Hill could roll more barrels of salt and pile them higher than any other hand about the place.

Soon he became the local agent of the St. Paul and Pacific railway, and in that capacity became familiar with and impressed with the resources and possibilities of the country then traversed or to be reached by the charter of the company. Meanwhile he displayed his ability as an economizer of time and money. and he soon made a proposition to Superintendent Delano of the St. Paul & Pacific to run the St. Paul station on contract for about half what it was then costing the company.

This proposition and his being visionary generally led to his being called Crazy Jim Hill. However, the company accepted his offer and he made good his promise and developed the business so much that ridicule quickly gave way to respect.

They say that in those days, boss as he was, Hill carried a dinner pail, while his associates and subordinates dined at the Merchants' hotel; moreover he worked early and late and never looked at the clock. He saved money and made his first little investment in a transportation scheme on the Red River of the North.

This and his railway connection led to an acquaintance with Norman Kitson, agent of the St. Paul & Hudson Bay company, the principal shipper of freight to the new northwest. As the country developed in spite of the depression of 1873 he interested Kitson in a scheme to acquire the control of the St. Paul & Pacific road, which was then bankrupt and in the hands of foreign holders, chief of whom was Donald Smith of Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), ex-officio director of the banks of Montreal, of which George Stephen (now Lord Mount Stephen) was the president.

Through Smith and Stephen money was raised to carry out a plan of reorganization and in this deal the good offices of John S. Kennedy of New York were enlisted. The result was the formation of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad company, then owning about 700 miles of road, including valuable terminals at St Paul and Minneapolis and a land grant of about 3,000,000 acres in Minnesota.

Originally the Northern Pacific owned a large majority of the stock in this company, but being thoroughly infatuated with a magnificent transcontinental proposition and taking no interest in local business they surrendered this stock to Hill and his associates of the new company. The Great Northern thus came into existence with Jim Hill as the guiding star of its destiny.

From the time that he and his associates came into possession of the property it has been managed by Hill individually from St. Paul as headquarters, instead of maintaining an expensive organization in New York. He has gradually extended his lines of the new company through districts well selected for local business until it reaches through the business centers of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington to the Pacific coast.

His success has been so phenomenal as to falsify all predictions. and he has, to the surprise of his own following, regularly paid interest on bonds and dividends to the stockholders. This, too, in a time of great business depression. when one company after another in rapid succession has gone to the wall.

Hill's principal, and I might say only competitor from the beginning, has been the Northern Pacific, a company endowed with a land grant which embraces an empire of 40,000,000 acres, but which through its entire existence has suffered from Wall street manipulation. It is what remains of this splendid property that seems about to pass into the hands of Jim Hill, the mud clerk of twenty-five or thirty years ago, who was for years the subject of the ridicule of so-called experts in finance and railway management.

With such a combination in his hands Hill will control and dominate the transportation business of a section of the republic unequaled in resources and easily capable of sustaining a thrifty population of 20,000,000 people. I think you will agree with me that a man who has made such a record of advancement on his merits and of magnificent achievement by national and logical methods, can be compared with Napoleon and Gould only in respect to the magnificence of his conquest.