JAMES J. HILL 239 laboriously to the city of St Paul, Minnesota, in July, 1856. Here he obtained employment in the office of a River Steam- ship Company, working hard all day and spending the nights in study of the economic necessities of his adopted city and of the transportation problems of the Mississippi valley. He was now in the service of a Railway Company as station agent. Li 1873 the St Paul and Pacific Railway Company went into the hands of a receiver. This young man, who in seventeen years of hard work had had time to dream dreams now saw before him the first great opportunity of his life. Enlisting the assistance of three associates he took over what were believed to be the worthless properties of the bankrupt railroad encumbered by the enormous debt of over $33,000,000. For the first time James J. Hill had control of a railroad. Six years later, the road still in feeble condition described as two streaks of rust reaching out into a desert" was ex- tended to the Red River and connected with the government Une from Winnipeg, and the first opening of the great wheat country of the Northwest was made. True, the great Rail- road King had but a feeble empire. No one believed in the country, no one beUeved in the railroad, and few there were who had any confidence in the man who was directing affairs. Those two streaks of rust, however, carried the thrill of life into the Red River Valley, and where barren sands had stretched as far as the eye could reach, great fields of grain waved in the sunlight. Soon the road was able to pay divi- dends, surplus was collected, and despite the most violent criticism on all hands, the line was extended to Helena, Mon- tana, in 1883. Ten years later Mr. Hill proposed the extension of the road from Montana to Puget Sound. Between what was then the terminal of the road and the proposed new terminal on the Pacific were the Rocky Mountains, the most insuperable bar- riers which nature ever placed in the way of railroad con- struction. But worse than mountain grades, bad as they were, was the fact that the great panic of 1893 was sweeping over the country. The proposal for the extension of the road in the face of these difficulties first awakened ridicule, then
