The short, paunchy, neuralgic man who strode purposely between two newly scraped lanes of prairie west of Minot, Dakota Territory, that April day in 1887 was in a hurry, as always. If the ground had not thawed, blast it loose with black powder: It was time to lay rail.

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James Jerome Hill’s fortune was already made. He admitted he had more money than he could ever use, and ‘all that would be good for his nine children and their offspring. And still his mind seethed with possibilities as thick as the dirt clouds that swirled around his 3,300 grading gangs as they urged their spans west along the right of way. He was 50, his remaining fringe of hair and beard a tangle of white, yet just beginning his life’s greatest challenge. This prairie without people was a desert. He was determined to change that with his railroad. But first he had to build 643 miles of track to Helena, Montana Territory, before winter shut him down.

No railroad had ever laid that much track in one season. And this track had to be laid from Minot west, taking along every length of timber, rail, keg of spikes, maul, can of beans and load of grain that 10,000 men and 3,500 teams needed to get the job done. Jim Hill had spent months getting it all to Minot, which the arrival of his innovative St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad had brought to life just months before.

Hill’s engineers had already roped and wrestled huge stacks of timber into a six-story trestle to carry the tracks over Gassman Coulee, three miles west of Minot. Now, as quickly as horse-drawn drag shovels mounded the graders’ heaps of broken ground onto the untouched center strip, it was leveled, packed and ready for the tie wagons. New workers quickly learned the old man watching from the buckboard did not tolerate the slightest deviation from the route he had tramped over, chosen and marked.

Hill was one of the first railroad builders to realize the grade fixes the load. It was crucial that the Manitoba’s climb to the Rockies–someday across, all the way to Puget Sound–be as gradual as possible so engines could pull heavier loads.

Hill, who would become known as the Empire Builder, was a visionary, a genius at seeing two or three steps beyond what is to what will be if one had the nerve–the drive–to make it happen. Doubters scoffed that a northern Plains harvest could yield nothing but buffalo bones, and when the buffalo were gone, the country would go back to the Indians. In truth, in March 1887 shrinking snowdrifts on the northern Plains were yielding ruinous numbers of cattle bones, victims of drought, blizzard and ranchers’ mismanagement. Yet Hill pictured farm families settled happily on every quarter section.

He’d long ago realized that railway profits depended on nearby customers with ample products to ship. The railroad is in partnership with the land, he often said. Montana mines already needed shippers for copper, gold, silver and coal. Livestock and hopper cars heaped with grain might be far in the future, but he could see his railway populating these wasted northern Plains with settlers forever grateful to James J. Hill.

He never imagined bitter farmers spitting out his name as a curse and labeling a noxious weed in his honor. A devoted father, he never dreamed that Montana schoolchildren would grow up chanting:

Twixt Hill and Hell there’s just one letter;Were Hill in Hell we’d feel much better.

That April of 1887, slackers who thought they had found an easy berth in one of Hill’s three-story freight car dormitories might have sung the same song. Hill detested waste, laziness and incompetence and didn’t expect to give orders twice. If a man worked hard until the day’s work was done, he had Hill’s appreciation and loyalty. If not, he was gone. It pays to be where the money is being spent, Hill told his partners, and he was there as often as possible that hot, hard summer, pushing, prodding, urging greater speed as the track crept west.

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