James J. Hill: The Empire Builder

The locomotive that runs through Minot's story is inseparable from one man: James Jerome Hill, known to history as the Empire Builder. Hill was born in Ontario in eighteen thirty-eight and lost his right eye in a childhood archery accident, a disability that kept him out of the Civil War but sharpened his focus in business. He settled in Saint Paul in eighteen fifty-six, worked in freight and river transport, and by the eighteen seventies had spotted the defining opportunity of the age: a railroad that could tie the Northern Plains to the Pacific Coast.

Hill's genius was his insistence on self-sufficiency. The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific had been built on the federal government's dime, receiving millions of acres of land grants in exchange for laying track. Hill refused that model. He believed a railroad built on giveaways would have no reason to be efficient, and he was right. When the Northern Pacific collapsed in the Panic of eighteen ninety-three, Hill's Great Northern, built across terrain just as difficult but without federal subsidy, kept running.

Hill understood that the railroad was only as good as the traffic it carried, and traffic required people. So he dispatched agents to Scandinavia and Germany, promising affordable land and easy rail access to markets. He brought in cattle breeds suited to the Northern Plains, advised farmers on grain varieties, and encouraged better farming practices among the immigrants. He was not a philanthropist; he needed the settlers to fill his freight cars.

In North Dakota, towns like Minot and Rugby exist largely because Hill's railroad placed them there. He chose the routing, the division points, the station locations. The Empire Builder nickname was applied to Hill long before Amtrak recycled it as a route name. Standing anywhere in northern North Dakota, you are standing in terrain that Hill effectively organized.