The Great Northern Railway and the Hi-Line

James J. Hill built his railroad across northern Montana without a land grant. Every other transcontinental railroad had been subsidized by federal land, receiving millions of acres of public domain in exchange for laying track. Hill built the Great Northern Railway on private capital alone, beginning in the eighteen eighties and completing the line to Seattle in eighteen ninety-three. He believed that if he put settlers on the land, the land would generate the freight traffic that would justify the railroad, and the railroad would generate the settlers. He was right, for a while.

The Hi-Line is what Montanans call the route of the Great Northern across the northern tier of the state, roughly following the forty-eighth parallel through Havre, Malta, Glasgow, and Wolf Point, on its way to Williston, North Dakota. Hill's railroad did not follow the Yellowstone River corridor that the Northern Pacific had already claimed. Instead it pushed through territory so arid that the Army had not bothered to settle it. Hill planned towns at roughly every eight miles, the distance a wagon could haul grain and return in a day. Town names came from many hands. Havre was suggested by a local settler after Le Havre in France, while Glasgow and Malta are said to have been picked by spinning a globe, which is why you find British and European place names strung across the plains of northern Montana.

The towns Hill built were designed to fill with homesteaders who would break the prairie sod and grow wheat. The promotional literature his railroad published described the northern plains as a garden of abundance. In wet years this was true. In dry years, which came regularly and sometimes consecutively, it was not true at all. The homestead rush of the nineteen-hundreds and nineteen-tens filled these towns with families who arrived from the Midwest and from Europe believing the brochures. The drought years of the nineteen twenties emptied many of the same towns within a decade.

The Hi-Line communities that remain are some of the most geographically isolated in the continental United States. The distance between Havre and the nearest city of any size is measured in hours, not minutes. The people who live there know this and stay by choice.