(wind blowing) (haunting music) - [Narrator] In the dead of winter in 1870, a young man clad in fur was on a 500-mile trek from Fort Garry, Canada to St. Paul, Minnesota.

He had traveled by dogsled, on horseback, and now by foot, in the growing darkness of the evening.

Deeply exhausted and covered with snow, he arrived at an inn in the town of Caledonia in the Dakota Territory.

The innkeeper took one look at him and refused to rent him a room.

Forced to backtrack 15 miles, he arrived at a farmhouse where a widow graciously allowed him to stay for the night.

James Jerome Hill would never forget the woman's kindness nor the innkeeper in Caledonia who had refused him shelter.

A decade later, Hill was now in control of a burgeoning local railroad, and intentionally built his line to avoid Caledonia and instead pointed it towards the town of the woman who had taken him in.

Caledonia would disappear from the map while the widow's town became the new county seat.

In 1881, it was renamed Hillsboro, and continues to this day to be known for its hospitality.

The iron horse symbolized the very essence of America; opportunity, progress, and the spirit of westward expansion.

It also represented unbridled capitalism and forever altered the way of life for America's indigenous people.

- I look back at it and I think it's amazing we survived at all, sometimes.

- The railroads were the glamor industry of their day.

They worked a paradigm shift, really, in the American economy, where we worked, how we worked.

- The train of course, helped turn the American wilderness into civilization.

It helped the rise of industry, corporations.

- They're a vital part of the industrialization of America, as well as the settlement of it.

- [Narrator] In an era in which four railroads already spanned the North American continent, James J. Hill took on the unthinkable task of building his own transcontinental railway.

And he would do so largely without the aid of federal land grants.

- It is a huge undertaking.

- He launches these construction crews, thousands of men, animals, supplies, in a record-breaking race across the Great Plains.

- He was driven.

I mean, you couldn't do these things unless you were driven.

(lively music) - [Narrator] He was known as the Empire Builder, and the Devil's Curse.

Streets, towns and counties were named in his honor, along with a persistent and invasive weed.

He was mythologized in novels and was the subject of folk songs and union battle cries.

- He had unlimited energy.

He was as stubborn as the day is long.

- He had a temper.

Every now and then he would fire somebody.

And then the next day, "Why didn't you come to work today?"

"Well, you fired me yesterday."

- That arrogance, supreme arrogance, is just fascinating.

- [Narrator] He would do more to transform the northern tier of the United States than any other individual.

In the process, Native tribes were displaced from their homelands to make way for immigrants and homesteaders.

- It's a matter of capitalism versus spiritualism.

- [Narrator] Wherever he pointed his line, new towns emerged, and countless others prospered from the economic boon.

- And that's what Hill referred to.

He said, "Some people build great monuments.

This railroad is my monument."

- [Narrator] He was a catalyst for the agriculture, timber, and mining industries of the west, and did more to open new markets in Asia than anyone of his generation.

- He was thinking globally.

That's what makes him truly a transportation genius.

- [Narrator] Over time, he recognized the impact the railroads had on the nation's natural resources and became a leading advocate for the environment.

At the helm of his empire, he weathered economic panics and staggering recessions, guiding the only transcontinental railroad to go unscathed by bankruptcy.

He battled labor unions and industry titans, fought back hostile takeovers, and tested the limits of how big a corporation could be.

- Hill was not above using his power.

He liked a good turf fight.

- It allows you to see capitalism in the raw.

What is fair and what is unfair?

- How big can a company be before perhaps it poses a danger?

- Hill was a giant of his time in his vision, in his execution, and certainly in the public eye.

- He knew he wasn't just building a railroad.

The railroad was the lifeblood to an empire.

- I think what he did could only be described in one word.

Audacious.

- Audacious in boldness, in visionary thinking, in master planning.

He not only changed trade, he changed the way the world worked.

There absolutely was no equal.

(soft music) - [Narrator] On September 16th, 1838, James Hill was born on a small farm in the Eramosa township of Ontario, Canada.

He was the middle child of three born to James Hill Sr. and Anne Dunbar Hill, both of whom were Irish immigrants.

Their 50-acre farm was not particularly prosperous, and James recalled lying in bed at night, looking at the moonlight through the cracks in the ceiling.

He was adept with a fishing rod and an excellent shot with a rifle.

While playing with his younger brother, a bow and arrow he had made out of branches snapped, propelling the arrow backward and dislodging his right eye from its socket.

The local doctor was able to reset the eye, but he would always be blind from that side.

He was an avid reader and absorbed the small collection of books his father brought from his homeland; a volume of Robert Burns poems, the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and Walker's dictionary.

James' abilities in elementary school caught the attention of Reverend William Wetherald, founder of the Rockwood Academy, who granted him free tuition.

- When Hill was a young boy, he was very much inspired by the example of Napoleon.

So he took the name James Jerome Hill after Napoleon's brother, taking on, if you will, that Napoleon romantic mystique of the early 19th century.

- [Narrator] James became proficient in algebra, geometry, land surveying, and had a writer's command of the English language.

He was particularly intrigued by maps of the United States in which the territory west of the Mississippi River was simply marked "unexplored regions".

The eighth grade, however, would be his last year in school.

During the winter of 1852, James Senior contracted an illness, and on Christmas Day, he took a turn for the worse and passed away.

At the age of just 14, James was now the man of the household, and quit school to support his family.

He found work at a general store, doing odd jobs for the Scottish owner, who saw the boys' potential and taught him the practice of double entry bookkeeping.

- One story I heard from his early days, somebody came to visit the house and left his horse at the bottom of the drive.

My great-grandfather went down with a bucket of water and gave it to the horse.

And the man was so impressed, he gave my great-grandfather a newspaper from the United States and said, "Son, if you have that kind of initiative, you should go to the States.

They're looking for people like you."

- [Narrator] With his sister now married and his younger brother able to manage the farm, James set his sights beyond the borders of Rockwood, taking courage from the Hill family motto, "Ne Tentes Aut Perfice".

"Do not attempt what you do not intend to accomplish."

- He decided to migrate to the United States to seek his fortune.

(lively music) - "My dear grandmother, it is with a feeling of the greatest pleasure that I undertake to keep my word with you by writing as soon as I was settled.

After leaving New York, I went to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and Pittsburgh, spending a good deal of both time and money.

I took a notion to go and see St. Paul.

So on the 11th of July, I left."

James Hill, age 17.

- [Narrator] He traveled north by steamboat on the Mississippi River, arriving in St. Paul on July 21st, 1856.

By the time he had docked, a conversation with a fellow passenger turned into a job offer as a bookkeeper.

The young teenager was awed by the spectacle of freight and passengers loading and offloading along the waterfront.

Thousands of steamboats arrived yearly, turning the town of St. Paul into a crucial transportation hub for the region.

- "I like this country very well and I think I shall like it still better the longer I live here.

Your affectionate grandson, James Hill."

- St. Paul was actually a very logical place to go if you were trying to seek your fortune, if you were on the make.

James quickly immersed himself in things related to the Mississippi River trade.

Warehousing, shipping and receiving.

- Hill was like a sponge.

He acquired from those he was around.

He learned from those he was around.

- [Narrator] Within two years, James' bookkeeping job at J.W.

Bass & Company now included work as a shipping agent, tracking freight and unloading steamboats.

- He was required to have a command of the accuracy of invoices and the accuracy of receipts and the accuracy of measures and weights.

His whole livelihood depended on this.

- [Narrator] He was now earning twice the salary he had made back home.

While the town had grown from 1,000 residents to over 10,000 in its first decade, St. Paul was still referred to by many as Pig's Eye, after a popular Tavern owned by the first white settler to the area.

- It was a pretty rough frontier environment.

A lot of saloons, a lot of gambling, a lot of prostitution, all those things that go with frontier environments.

- [Narrator] One night while walking home from work, Jim and a friend were approached by a notorious gang known as the Chicago Star Cleaners who insisted the two join them for a drink.

- "I told them I did not drink.

We attempted go on, but they tried to have us go back.

So I hauled off and planted one-two in the paddy's grub grinder and knocked him off the sidewalk about eight feet."

James J. Hill.

- [Narrator] Jim had been stabbed just below the ribs, but despite doctor's orders to stay in bed, he was soon back to work.

Now employed at Borup & Champlin, the young shipping agent became a well-liked figure on the waterfront, with everyone calling him Jim Hill, as if it were just one word.

Jim's boss, Theodore Borup, remarked that over the four years with his firm, his young employee had never made a single mistake and was an indefatigable worker.

Borup had also witnessed Jim jump fully clothed into the Mississippi River to save a young immigrant boy from drowning.

- He was gregarious.

He knew people, and you could count on him.

As a consequence, he was a very good and successful agent.

- He was considered an up and coming young man.

- [Narrator] During the winter months when the river would freeze and work was slow, Jim started a side business, traveling deep into Northern Minnesota to purchase wood, coal, and grains while prices were at their lowest.

- "I have been up country most of the time since fall, and have to make another 160-mile trip tomorrow, but knocking around agrees with me.

I have not had first rate luck in business this season.

However, will come out all right side up with care."

James J. Hill, 1860.

- [Narrator] Jim's luck did change.

As spring approached, his lower rates resulted in a lucrative contract providing 15,000 bushels of oats to the United States Army at Fort Snelling.

While renting a room at the Merchants Hotel, Jim often dined at the restaurant below, where he was particularly smitten with a beautiful 17-year-old Irish waitress.

Her name was Mary Theresa Mehegan, and he was immediately attracted to her strength and independence.

- Mary was born in New York City.

Her parents were Irish immigrants.

I think her family was fairly financially desperate.

- [Narrator] Over a number of conversations, he learned that she too had lost her father at an early age, also at Christmastime, and a bond and a friendship were soon forged.

- I think it was love at first sight.

They quite quickly knew that they were going to get married and it was decided that Mary needed more education.

- [Narrator] Jim asked for her hand in marriage and paid for her to attend St Mary's Institute in Milwaukee to further her education in the arts, music, and customs of genteel society.

- She was there for three years and James Hill made frequent trips, so they got to spend time together.

- [Narrator] During the time of their courtship, rumors of Southern states threatening to secede from the union reached the Midwest.

Hill joined Minnesota's Pioneer Guard to protect St. Paul and enlist with the North if necessary.

One evening at the restaurant, he struck up a conversation with a man traveling through town named Ulysses S. Grant.

The two talked long into the night about preserving the Union, and Hill invited him to stay for the evening on his folding sofa.

Months later, on April 12th, 1861, Confederate forces launched a barrage of artillery on Fort Sumter, sparking "the war between the states."

Hill tried twice to enlist in the Union Army, but was denied each time due to his childhood eye injury, which may well have kept him alive.

In the midst of the war, President Lincoln signed two bills that reinforced America's notion of Manifest Destiny, the belief that westward expansion was divinely ordained.

The Homestead Act of 1862 drew settlers to the West, offering 160 acres to anyone who applied and agreed to improve the land for five years.

Just 41 days later, Lincoln put his pen to the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the government to offer loans and land grants to railroad owners for every mile of track laid from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.

Lincoln felt that a railroad line to the West Coast would help stitch the nation together and strengthen the Union.

By 1863, the nation's first transcontinental railroad was under construction, with the Union Pacific building west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific laying track east from San Francisco Bay.

- The United States had an incentive to jump from the East Coast to the West Coast and fill in the middle.

- [Narrator] In St. Paul, the novelty of rail travel would soon become reality.

The recently organized Minnesota and Pacific Railroad ordered the state's first locomotive, which arrived by barge in the fall of 1861.

Hill was part of the large crowd gathered along the Mississippi to get their first look and to help hoist the 27-ton locomotive onto temporary tracks.

The enthusiasm of the day, however, soon turned to frustration.

Debate over the railroad's route delayed construction and bankrupted the company.

A year later, the line was reorganized as the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad and on June 28th, 1862, Hill boarded the train for its maiden run from St. Paul to St. Anthony, a distance of 12 miles.

The locomotive would later be named the "William Crooks" in honor of the former Civil War colonel and the railroad's chief engineer.

At long last, in the spring of 1865, the traveling gentleman Hill had befriended accepted the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, ending the brutal Civil War.

On the levy in St. Paul, the shipping business began returning to pre-war levels.

As Hill went about his business, he watched dock workers unload cargo from steamboats onto horse and oxcarts, and then haul it a few hundred feet uphill only to be reloaded onto rail cars.

It was an inefficient system, and it wasn't long before he came up with a better idea.

At age 27, he withdrew most of his savings, $2,500, and established the James J. Hill Company.

He built a two-story warehouse on the riverbank.

The first floor was level with the dock, while the second was even with the railroad - eliminating an entire step.

Local newspapers took note.

- "This remarkable young man has kept accurate statistics for many years of all the freight coming into..." - "J. J. Hill is prepared to give shippers the lowest rates ever quoted from here to Eastern points."

- "He beats all his competitors and in return gets the bulk of the transportation business.

When Mr. Hill starts to accomplish a thing, he does it complete."

- One day in St. Paul, while he was working at his warehouse, one of his horses pulling a wagon bolted, ran all over the city, wild, destroyed the wagon.

He proceeded to reclaim every battered portion of the wagon and have the wagon reconstructed.

That's the kind of man I'd want as a CEO of my company.

- [Narrator] In 1867, Mary returned to St. Paul, where she and Jim were soon married.

A year later, their first child, Mary Francis, was born.

Hill's continued success afforded them a lavish French-style residence in the Lowertown neighborhood, with a gallery added later to hold their growing art collection.

With his eye on his next venture, Hill partnered with one of St Paul's most prominent businessmen and fur traders, Norman Kittson.

Though a generation apart, Hill and Kittson's business dealings turned into a long-lasting friendship.

When Mary gave birth to their first son in 1870, they honored Kittson by naming him James Norman.

Hill took over Kittson's fur-trading business that operated along the Red River from St. Paul to Fort Garry, a trading post 70 miles north of the Canadian border.

While Fort Garry was mostly populated by the 200 traders and trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the surrounding region was filled with some 10,000 Metis, people of mixed French and Indian heritage.

For 200 years, the Hudson's Bay Company operated as the defacto government of the Canadian territory and dominated the fur and transportation business of the North American heartland.

Hill wasn't intimidated by the corporate giant, and grew Kittson's fur-trading business by offering the lowest rates to St. Paul furriers.

Seeing the influx of new settlers to the Red River Valley, Hill also partnered with Civil War Colonel Chauncey Griggs, and established Hill, Griggs & Company.

Coal, wood, and brick were in high demand along the Red River, and their business flourished.

The trade route, however, was soon in jeopardy when the region was thrown into civil unrest.

The Dominion of Canada, established just a few years earlier, purchased what was known as Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company.

- When the move was made in 1870 to establish Manitoba as a province, there was real fear that the Metis land rights would not be recognized.

- [Narrator] Under the leadership of Louis Riel, the Metis rebelled and set up their own provisional government, escalating tensions that would result in the execution of a pro-Canada resident who threatened to murder Riel.

Hill's concerns over the interruption of his trade business prompted him to contact the Canadian government.

- He wanted to go and see for himself.

And he proposed to John A. Macdonald, who was Canada's first prime minister, that he would go have a look and report.

And that suggestion was accepted.

He headed out in March, for God's sakes.

And as we know, in Minnesota and in Manitoba, March is the dead of winter.

That trip that he made, it should be the stuff of legends.

- [Narrator] The 500-mile journey began easily enough, traveling by rail from St. Paul to St.

Cloud.

From there, he traveled over 100 miles to Breckenridge by stagecoach, which he and his fellow passengers frequently had to dig out of the snow.

He rode the next 200 miles on horseback to the border, where he hired a dogsled team.

As he entered territory inhabited by the Metis, he contemplated a safer route on the other side of the river.

- Now he was going through territory that was inhabited by people who might not look fondly on him.

In other words, who might want his head.

So in order to avoid any settlement, he chose to take off his clothes, put his clothes on top of a homemade raft, and he and the dogs got across to the other side of the river somehow.

- [Narrator] At long last Hill reached Fort Garry, where he met with Louis Riel as well as Hudson's Bay executive Donald Smith, who was there to negotiate on behalf of Canada.

- Information was always a key element of Hill's success.

He read constantly, but he also sought out people to find the very latest and the most reliable information.

- And he was lucky in the sense that he had bumped into some really high-powered persons who were in a position to do well for him in the future.

- [Narrator] After another arduous trek back to St. Paul, Hill returned home after seven weeks, where Mary was relieved that she had not been widowed.

Hill drafted a report to the Canadian prime minister, who put into motion a payout 500,000 acres to the Metis.

Manitoba was admitted to the Dominion of Canada, and three years later, Fort Garry was renamed Winnipeg.

With their Red River trade growing, Hill and Griggs commissioned the construction of a 110-foot stern wheeler.

The Selkirk was launched in April, 1871, carrying 105 tons of freight, 100 passengers, and a delighted James J. Hill ringing the bell on the top deck.

By its second journey, Hill and his partner were turning a profit.

Competition soon arrived when the Hudson's Bay Company entered the steamboat business, led by Hill's new acquaintance, Donald Smith.

Throughout the summer, the two were locked in a heated rate war until Hill discovered a largely neglected maritime law prohibiting foreign ships from operating in American waters.

Hill persuaded the U.S. Treasury Department to enforce the law.

The British company countered by transferring the ownership of its steamboats to Hill's friend Norman Kittson, who was an American citizen, ironically unlike Hill.

After a year of trying to outmaneuver one another, the two agreed to merge their companies under the banner the Red River Transportation Company, giving them a monopoly.

As one Hill biographer wrote, "When competition suited him, he competed fiercely, but when competition became wasteful, he hesitated not a whit to end it, even if it meant joining with enemies."

(wistful music) - I think the train is an archetypal symbol for the rising American empire.

The sheer bulk, the tonnage, the power.

the great locomotives, when they would come through, you could feel the air moving.

The windows would rattle.

Some of those trains were as long as the towns they went through.

Virtually every major poet in American history has written a train poem.

Walt Whitman wrote the very first major train poem, "To a Locomotive in Winter".

The train was for Whitman the Industrial Revolution incarnate.

- [Narrator] The train was both a symbol of progress and a harbinger of the world to come for Native Americans.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho had been living comfortably on a large territory of the Central Plains confirmed by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

But the U.S. Government broke that treaty, substantially reducing their land to clear a path for the first transcontinental railroad.

The newly available homesteads brought a wave of new settlers to the region.

Military forts built to protect them were breeding grounds for fatal diseases.

Angered by the intruding settlers and the death of countless tribal members, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, led by Chief Black Kettle, launched raids on U.S. forts.

Civil War General William Sherman, now in command of the U.S. Army, authorized retaliatory strikes.

After the two sides declared a truce, a band of 675 volunteer soldiers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village along Sand Creek.

230 tribal members, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were slaughtered.

The Sand Creek Massacre was widely condemned as an act of genocide.

As the bloodshed continued for years, Sherman argued that the only solution was to keep moving the Indians further away or exterminate the buffalo and starve them into submission.

On May 10th, 1869 in Promontory, Utah, the final spike had been struck into place connecting the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific.

Western states and territories were now stitched together with the rest of the country by the nation's first transcontinental railroad.

- Railroads shrank distances dramatically and overcame the impediments that nature imposed on the land.

People moving to the far west in the days of, say, the Oregon Trail, they often thought of it as analogous with death.

Their old life would never be picked up again.

I mean, if you spent five months on a wagon train, the chances of doing that in the opposite direction are almost nil.

- It brought far things closer together, enough so that we could begin to think about the notions of community and nation.

- At that point, we became truly a bi-coastal nation, and our population started growing rapidly.

- [Narrator] The transcontinental sparked immigration to the West and a boom in trade between the two American coasts.

Between 1866 and 1873, 35,000 miles of track were built, including the emergence of the Northern Pacific, a new transcontinental to the north.

As the Northern Pacific built west from Minnesota, more land was also taken from the Sioux and given to the railroad as land grants.

In 1874, the territory was reduced again after General George Custer's expedition confirmed the discovery of gold in the Black Hills.

Miners and settlers poured into the area, building towns within a matter of months.

Following in the gold miner's footsteps, thousands of hunters arrived in Indian territory, drawn by the high demand for buffalo hides.

- After the Civil War, it was discovered that buffalo hump hide was the longest-lasting fabric for machine belts for the Industrial Revolution.

- [Narrator] Railroads offered buffalo-hunting excursions and hired hunters to clear the plains.

A good hunter could kill 2,000 buffalo in a single season, making the equivalent today of $60,000.

One hunter, William Frederick Cody, earned the nickname Buffalo Bill after killing over 4,000 bison in one 18-month stretch.

- "There was now myriads of carcasses.

The air was foul with a sickening stench and the vast plain was a dead, solitary, putrid desert."

U.S. Army Colonel Richard Dodge.

- [Narrator] The market demand for hides was fulfilling General Sherman's desire to scorch the earth of the Plains Indians.

As the construction of the Northern Pacific continued west, the railroad's major investor, Jay Cooke, needed to choose a city on Washington Territory's Puget Sound, where the line would terminate.

- Everyone assumed the Northern Pacific had to come to Seattle.

This was the reigning seaport.

- All the Seattle movers and shakers had bribed as many people as they could think of, sent as many gifts as they could.

- Then in July of 1873, the Northern Pacific announced it was going to terminate in Tacoma.

Tacoma was 100 people in 1872.

- In many ways it was just the head of a bay.

Seattle was an established big town.

There was a shock and a sense of misery and betrayal and "Oh no, what will we do now?"

- [Narrator] As Cooke built his rails to Tacoma, he grossly underestimated construction costs.

He had also overextended his finances with the purchase of the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad.

And when he failed to sell several million dollars in railway bonds, it sent the U.S economy into a tailspin.

Dubbed "The Panic of 1873," it closed the New York Stock Exchange for 10 days.

18,000 businesses failed.

The Northern Pacific, the St. Paul & Pacific, and 189 of the country's 364 railroads went bankrupt.

By 1876, unemployment reached a staggering 15%.

The era would become known as the Great Depression, a term that would last until a new standard was set more than 50 years later.

- The St. Paul & Pacific went through a very, very difficult time, as did a lot of railroads across the nation.

The Panic of 1873 was nasty.

- [Narrator] Hill, however, seemed inexplicably immune to these economic forces.

In the intervening years, he had built a coal business from the ground up and soon watched it grow by over 500%, helping turn the Twin Cities into one of the most important fuel distribution centers in the country.

- Hill was very adept to recognize what are the needs of a quickly emerging society.

He worked what one biographer has called "an energy revolution."

He was a major figure in this transformation, shifting from wood to coal.

- He was an excellent entrepreneur, an excellent businessman.

He turned out a high quality product at a reasonable price.

And as a consequence, he did come to control a large portion of the market.

- That was a big part of his first fortune before he entered railroading.

- [Narrator] With the St. Paul & Pacific in bankruptcy, it was now controlled by Dutch bond holders, who were looking to unload their investment.

For years, Hill had talked incessantly to anyone who would listen about what he would do if he ran the line, and was now in a position to make a play on it.

He put together a syndicate that included Norman Kittson, Donald Smith, and Smith's cousin George Stephen, president of the Bank of Montreal.

They would be known collectively as The Associates.

- Of The Associates, Hill is very much the junior member.

He's the local guy.

Trust was in pretty short supply in Gilded Age America.

There were all kinds of charlatans promising the moon, and then absconding with the money.

One of the ways he earned the trust of these senior members of these Associates is he delivered the goods.

- [Narrator] Hill carefully studied the value of the St. Paul & Pacific's 533 miles of track, but more importantly, he saw the market potential of the 2.6 million acres of Minnesota land grants that were attached to it.

- Hill had been around long enough so he understood the landscape of Minnesota and the potential of agriculture and so on.

- [Narrator] But the land grants could only be gained on the condition that the main railway be built to the Canadian border along with dozens of branch lines, all within the next 12 months.

Hill then calculated that the railroad and its extensions were worth approximately 4.9 million and that construction costs to obtain the land grants would take another 900,000.

- And so putting all these variables together, I think he felt relatively comfortable about influencing The Associates to pool these monies and take on this franchise.

- [Narrator] In 1878 Hill was 40, a father of five, and the owner of several successful businesses.

He could easily have continued on as he had, amassing a considerable fortune, but instead he gambled everything on a railroad that had gone bankrupt three times and was now referred to as "two streaks of rust and a right of way."

- "We are ready and entirely willing to risk everything we have got in the world upon our faith in this property."

James J. Hill.

- [Narrator] With his background as a bank president and his broad financial connections, the Associates sent George Stephen to England to find investors.

Stephen assured the others not to give his mission a second thought, but he returned empty-handed.

Ironically, it was just the luck they needed.

When word spread that the Associates could not raise the funds overseas, the Dutch began to wonder if they would ever unload the railroad.

Hill traveled to New York to meet with John S. Kennedy, the agent representing the Dutch bond holders in the negotiations.

Kennedy needed to walk a delicate line.

He had to secure the highest price on behalf of his client, but as a major investor in a railroad supplies business, keeping Hill satisfied could have future value.

The Associates negotiated a $280,000 down payment on an $11 million purchase price.

On March 13th, 1878, the Dutch accepted the offer.

- The Dutch could have done a better job of figuring out what the asset base was here.

- Certainly there were some who felt they'd been hornswoggled, that is, they were not getting their full investment dollar back.

- Maybe the Dutch had just had a bellyfull of the Panic of 1873 and were willing to sell out.

- From Hill's standpoint and The Associate's standpoint, it certainly was a good business deal.

- [Narrator] The agreement between the four Associates included a fifth share to be extended to a future partner who could secure financing for the 100 miles of railroad construction necessary to receive the land grants.

If they failed to build the tracks by the state's deadline, they would forfeit the grants and lose possession of the line.

Kennedy, the Dutch representative, emerged as the Associates' fifth partner, bringing with him the necessary capital.

Hill immediately went to work putting his full weight into moving construction forward.

- He was learning as he was going along.

He didn't go to Harvard and say, "I'm gonna study civil engineering and become a railroader."

He began to understand the nature of railroading and the necessity for efficiency.

How do we squeeze the operating ratio down?

How do we put a cap on expenses so we can in fact make a profit?

He was good at that.

- [Narrator] Hill went to the construction site, where he cajoled and coerced his crews to work harder.

As one biographer wrote, "He learned many of the men's names and would walk along the grades, calling out to them familiarly, even spelling them from their picks and shovels while they retired for a cup of hot coffee.

On the other hand, he routinely fired shift bosses when they failed to perform to satisfaction.

When one whole crew rebelled, he faced them off and fired the entire entourage."

- Hill was a hands-on manager if there ever was one.

- I think James J. Hill ran roughshod over people.

- Well every now and then he get crosswise with somebody and they knew they were being chastised.

- And there were some scrapes, as you might have guessed, because he came in with a rather stern demeanor and expected things to be done his way.

He always expected things to be done his way.

- [Narrator] Hill had an endless capacity to work day and night.

Fellow Associate George Stephen warned him that it was impossible to go on working as he had been, that he was only slightly softer than steel and will too break down.

- "I would certainly rejoice if I could have more time to rest and be with my children.

They're getting to an age when I might be of used to them, but I have been up at the front of both lines and I find it pays to be where the money is being spent."

James J. Hill.

- [Narrator] On November 5th, 1878, the St. Paul & Pacific reached the Canadian border.

96 miles of rail had been spiked into place.

Hill would call it the breathless year.

He had beaten every deadline and received all 2.6 million acres of land grants.

Hill and an entourage of friends took a celebratory ride from St. Paul through Breckenridge and then onto the border town of St. Vincent.

Pulling the train was the William Crooks, the same iron and brass locomotive Hill had helped lift from the docks 17 years earlier.

The St. Paul Daily Globe reveled in the moment, stating, "It brings an empire to our very doors."

The next day, Hill sent every man available to help the Canadians finish their end of the line from Winnipeg to the U.S. border.

In the spring of 1879, the Associates formally took possession of the railroad, with Hill as the general manager.

The line was renamed the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway, referred to by most as the Manitoba.

- "James J. Hill, or Jim Hill, which everybody here calls him, is a young gentleman that one of these days will contest the kingship in railway chess playing."

The St. Paul Daily Globe.

- [Narrator] A series of events then occurred that would later be attributed to what was called "Jim Hill's luck."

The nation awoke from the economic slumber of the Panic of 1873.

Immigrants arrived in the Midwest in record numbers, traveling north on Hill's trains while a bumper crop of wheat filled his cars heading south.

The land Hill projected to sell for $2.50 per acre was selling for five.

Hill even found an accounting error made by the previous owner, resulting in a $200,000 windfall.

Just another bit of Jim Hill's luck.

- Hill, while he was lucky, was always looking for those opportunities, was always thinking.

- Hill and the Associates were at the right spot at the right time.

If the Dutch had held on, maybe the Dutch would've been at the right spot at the right time, but it didn't work out that way.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Across the country, the railroad gave individuals of more modest means the ability to visit distant sites with the relatively new experience of a vacation.

Hill saw an opportunity and built the grand 300-room Lafayette Hotel along the shore of Lake Minnetonka.

The town of Wayzata, Minnesota was proud of the hotel, billed as the finest of its kind west of New York City.

But over time complaints about the noise and smoke from Hill's railway grew, and the village council passed a law requiring him to move his tracks from the shoreline.

Hill ignored the law and out of spite tore down Wayzata's depot, forcing residents to walk an extra mile to catch the train.

More than two decades later, the town reconciled with Hill and in return, he built them one of the railroad's finest stations and even furnished it with his own desk.

At the first sign of spring, Hill would ride his business car along the line, constantly looking for defects and weak tracks.

His pen flew across the pages of his diaries, noting poor housekeeping at depots, engine repairs, and station agents absent from their posts.

- I think he must have been a very difficult man to work for.

Clearly, he was what we would call a micromanager, constantly going back and forth along the line, inspecting the most minute details of the railroad's operation.

- [Narrator] The payroll for the Manitoba grew to some 600 employees.

Engineers, firemen, conductors, brakeman, and baggage men, the vast majority of whom were born in the United States.

Construction laborers, however, were a mix of immigrants who had come here to farm, but needed the extra work.

Hill had strict rules of conduct and fired employees at an alarming rate for indecent language, general unworthiness, and drunkenness.

Those who demonstrated faithful service and initiative, however, were often rewarded with pay raises and the occasional bonus.

Hill was also busy working on the Manitoba's infrastructure, constructing a three-story office building in St. Paul and a roundhouse and machine shops at the northern edge of town.

He worked with other railroad owners to build a multi-line union depot in St. Paul and donated the land for its construction.

And when the Manitoba railway needed to cross the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Hill underwrote the construction of the Stone Arch bridge, and enduring icon of the city.

News from Minneapolis that local businessmen Charles Pillsbury was going to build the world's largest and most advanced flour mill fed Hill's hunger for expansion.

- Hill realized because of the bonanza farms that he could generate a lot of revenue, a lot of haulage in the valley.

So instead of building the line up to the Canadian border and then going straight west, he built the line up and then he went back and he riddled the valley with branch lines so that every little wheat community in the Red River had a railroad stop.

And then that wheat could be funneled out to the wheat capital of Minneapolis.

- [Narrator] During his idle time traveling up and down his line, Hill, not wishing to waste a single moment, pored over all varieties of literature, geologic surveys, and agricultural reports.

- His private car in the railroad, which by the way, was very spartan except for one thing.

And that is it was loaded with books.

He would read Emerson, Webster, and Thoreau for insight into human nature.

- He must have had a photographic mind, the way he would go over the surveys, the detail that he inhaled.

I mean, he knew his stuff.

- On a train ride once to the coast with two other associates, a quote was delivered from the Bible and then Hill paused and offered the next sentence almost verbatim.

And he did this not just on one occasion, not just on two occasions, but three separate occasions in that conversation.

So the photographic memory was driven by a deeper desire to have a command and mastery of knowledge.

And this applied not just to his recreational reading, but to every aspect of his business life.

(lively music) - [Narrator] By 1883, the St. Paul Minneapolis & Manitoba had reached Devil's Lake in the Dakota Territory and its vast expanse of fertile land.

Hill knew the success of his line depended on enticing settlers to the region.

Remarking that "even a railway built to the Garden of Eden was bound to fail if it had only Adam and Eve to serve."

To lure settlers, the Manitoba distributed thousands of pamphlets touting the Red River as the "Nile of the North."

- Hill actually employed an army of agents to go around to state fairs and slip leaflets into farmers' buggies.

- The railroad had representatives in Europe who were trying to attract farmers to immigrate to the U.S. - Immigrants, for all railroads that were in this part of the world - absolutely essential.

- The late 19th century was a time of great belief in a hierarchy of races and ethnicities.

And of course at the top were the Northern Europeans.

And so he sent Max Bass out to Germany and Scandinavia to recruit settlers.

- There was some ethnic arrogance in this.

He saw that the potential was greater among Northern and Western Europeans to come and be productive quicker than perhaps other ethnics would be.

He was very effective working with steamship companies and Eastern railroads so that when people got on the vessel at Oslo, let's say, they had a ticket that would run all the way through to North Dakota or wherever.

- Oftentimes resettling whole villages.

According to one story, Hill actually had a box car outfitted as a church and he had a steeple that could be placed atop the box car.

- You had a built-in community if you brought a whole congregation.

- [Narrator] By the time of the next U.S. census in 1890, Scandinavians and Germans accounted for 44% of the Midwest population, forever altering the region's ethnic mix.

In 1880, James J. Hill became a U.S. citizen.

Ironically, he looked to his Canadian birth country to play his next hand.

Some 10 years earlier, the Dominion of Canada had also embarked on a transcontinental railroad, but its efforts were mired in scandal.

- Money was going everywhere but into the construction of railroads and into a lot of pockets and it brought down the government.

- [Narrator] Recognizing an opportunity, Hill convince the Associates to take control of the Canadian Pacific Railway and relaunched its construction.

- But Hill was very familiar with the terrain.

He would pore through the details of the surveys and he demanded in detail what's the curvature gonna be like, what are the grades gonna be like?

Almost immediately Hill sensed the two engineers he had building westward from Winnipeg were not doing the job, at least not the job he expected.

- Hill recommended the hiring of William Van Horne, general manager of the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railway.

- Hill saw a great opportunity to number one, get who he described to George Stephen, incidentally, as the best railroader that was available anywhere in North America.

But secondly, he saw an opportunity maybe to get rid of the thorn in his side from Milwaukee Road because Van Horne even then was giving him fits with his talk of westward expansion.

So he hired him.

He hired him away from his competitor, offering him at that time the richest contract in railroad history.

- [Narrator] With his railway already connected to Winnipeg, Hill wanted to use the Canadian Pacific as a means to reach the West Coast.

But the Canadian government wanted to head east to Montreal, across the thin-soiled Canadian shield, instead of heading south using Hill's line.

- Hill fervently believed that a Canadian Pacific railway, in other words, a trans-Canada railway operation would be foolish if it doesn't route through the United States instead of going across the Canadian shield, which he thought was impenetrable.

And there wasn't any traffic up there, so why in the world would shrewd businessmen go there?

- [Narrator] But the Canadian government's hands were tied.

Prime Minister John Macdonald had promised to build an all-Canadian line, a key condition to British Columbia joining the Canadian Confederation.

With Hill voicing his dissent and British Columbia threatening to secede, the prime minister met with George Stephen, Donald Smith, and William Van Horne.

- Now, Hill had asked Van Horne to vote against that and to oppose it, but after hearing out Macdonald and understanding the rationale of the all-Canadian line, he did not support Hill's vision.

- Hill felt rather stabbed in the back when the Canadian Pacific decided to in fact build across that Canadian shield.

And it sort of checkmated the opportunity for his Manitoba railroad.

- "The Canadian Pacific now assumes the position of a deadly enemy.

I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I fear the result much more than I can tell you."

James J. Hill.

- And there were some egos involved.

He and Van Horne had once been close friends and associates, but they became, shall we say, bitter rivals.

- [Narrator] Hill quietly sold his interests in the Canadian Pacific, regretting the distraction it had created.

By 1885, the Northern Pacific and the Canadian Pacific both had reached the West Coast.

Undeterred, Hill began to contemplate extending his line to the Pacific Ocean.

- These are very powerful railroads with enormous resources, enormous land grants.

They bracket, one to the north and one to the south.

If they do nothing, one of these two powerful entities will simply take them over or run them out of business.

- Hill, in his knowledge of the landscape, could see that there was a more efficient, economical, productive route.

And even though there were two mountain ranges, and even though there was limitless prairie, he knew it could be done.

And it turns out to be, in retrospect, one of the great decisions, not just in railroad history, but American business history.

(lively fiddle music)