The Genghis Khan of the Railroads

Long before Custer and Little Big Horn, the Northern Pacific Railroad was building westward from St Paul, MN at the hands of one James J Hill.  Mr Hill was the most powerful single architect of the Northwest destiny.  He took the railroad from the millions of acres of rich arable land of the prairies across North Dakota and Montana, to a land of mists and rains with the densest growth of timber available to logging in the world. 

The way Hill saw the country, it was fields of corn and wheat, pigs and cows in Dakota and Montana, with passenger traffic to populate it all with lumber in 100 car trains coming out of the Blue Mountains and the Cascades...all going in his endlessly deep pockets. The way to tap all this fortune was on the flanged wheels rolling on steel rails behind coal burning engines.  Hill considered wood as a revenue, not a fuel. s

J J Hill had many nicknames: The Genghis Khan of the Railroad, the Emperor of the Railroad, the Man who Wrecked MN, SD, MT and Puget Sound, The Evil One of Homesteaders, The Devil's Curse...in reality  he was a shaggy haired, one eyed SOB of the Western Railroads.  Few men opposed him, none succssfully, and communities that crossed his whims found themselves ghost towns.  He ran his railroad around them and they perished.  Some traces of such communities can still be found in MT, OR, WA, ID where the history, legends, folklore and pictures remain.


Hill's vision encompassed the Pacific, Japan, China, Oriental Trade, NW Agricultural...The Great Northern Railroad went on to become the Northern Pacific and Hill went on to control the entire Pacific Northwest railroad empire.