James J. Hill and the Railroad That Built Williston

Williston exists because of a railroad and the man who drove it west. James Jerome Hill, the Canadian-born entrepreneur who built the Great Northern Railway with little federal help, pushed his line across North Dakota in eighteen eighty-seven with a speed that astonished the industry. His crews laid track at a pace that astonished the industry across the high plains, and wherever the line stopped to water its engines or establish a division point, a town was born.

Williston was platted in eighteen eighty-seven as the Great Northern reached this stretch of the upper Missouri country. Hill named it after his friend and financier Willis James, a New York businessman who had backed his railroad ambitions. Within a year the town had a depot, a handful of businesses, and enough settlers to feel permanent.

Hill was aggressively promotional about the agricultural potential of the Northern Plains. He sent agents to Scandinavia and Northern Europe recruiting farmers, particularly Norwegians and Germans from Russia, promising them land that could grow wheat in the short but intense Dakota summer. He ran model experimental farms to improve livestock and crops for his settlers, published pamphlets in multiple languages, and offered reduced freight rates to settlers willing to homestead along his line. The strategy worked: the population of North Dakota more than doubled between eighteen ninety and nineteen ten.

The Great Northern later merged with several other railroads to form Burlington Northern in nineteen seventy, and eventually Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the BNSF. The line through Williston still carries freight, and during the Bakken oil boom that began around two thousand eight, BNSF trains loaded with crude oil tankers became a defining feature of the landscape, shipping what the pipelines couldn't yet handle. Hill's railroad, built to carry wheat, found a second life hauling oil.