Steel Through the Divide:

James J. Hill and the Transformation of Montana

Introduction: A Canadian in the American West

James Jerome Hill did not set foot in Montana for most of the years he was reshaping it. Born on September 16, 1838, in a log house in Rockwood, Upper Canada, Hill moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, at the age of eighteen and spent the better part of two decades learning the transportation trade along the upper Mississippi and Red River corridors. By the time his railroads began reaching into Montana Territory in the mid-1880s, he was already a seasoned operator who had built his reputation not through federal patronage but through sustained commercial competence. His Great Northern Railway would ultimately become the defining institutional force in Montana’s economic, demographic, and even its landscape history, and its effects – productive, destructive, and ambiguous – continue to reverberate across the state more than a century later.

Building Toward Montana: The St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway

Hill’s advance toward Montana did not begin with the Great Northern. The vehicle of his initial westward push was the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway, which he and his associates, including Canadian financiers George Stephen and Donald Smith, reorganized from the failed St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in 1878. Through the early and mid-1880s, Hill pressed this line steadily westward across Minnesota and Dakota Territory, cultivating agricultural traffic along the way. His operating philosophy was distinctive among the railroad builders of his era: he believed that long-term profitability depended on building a physically efficient road that generated genuine freight demand rather than speculative land sales. Because the Manitoba, and later the Great Northern, received no federal land grant of the scale that enriched rivals such as the Northern Pacific, Hill was compelled to think about haulage revenues from the outset (Strom, Profiting from the Plains, University of Washington Press, 2003, pp. 1-5).

In the spring of 1887, Hill launched a construction campaign of unusual intensity. Using roughly eight thousand men and thirty-three hundred teams of horses, his crews drove the Manitoba across eastern Montana at a pace that attracted widespread notice. On August 8, 1887, at a level stretch of prairie, workers laid a record 8.3 miles of track in a single day. By October of that year, the line had reached Great Falls, at the falls of the Missouri River, where Hill had already identified a site for a new townsite and hydroelectric development. The Manitoba connected there with the Montana Central Railroad – a subsidiary Hill had organized – which extended the system south to Helena and Butte, placing the railroad in direct relationship with the copper industry centered at Anaconda. The Manitoba formally arrived in Helena on November 16, 1887, giving Hill a presence at the heart of Montana’s territorial economy (Franz, “The Empire Builder,” Flathead Beacon, March 7, 2018, www.flatheadbeacon.com/2018/03/07/the-empire-builder/, accessed April 3, 2026).

The Question of Marias Pass

Reaching central Montana was an achievement of the first order, but it left Hill’s railroad stranded at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The Northern Pacific, his primary competitor, had already secured Mullan Pass through a more southerly alignment, and the Canadian Pacific dominated the crossings to the north. Doubters argued there was no suitable pass remaining. Hill disagreed, and in 1889 he dispatched engineer John F. Stevens to survey the terrain of northern Montana for a viable route. On December 11, 1889, Stevens located Marias Pass, threading the Continental Divide at 5,215 feet above sea level – the lowest crossing of the Rockies in the entire region. The pass had been noted, though not precisely located, by Lewis and Clark in 1805, and had remained elusive to subsequent searchers for more than eighty years. Its discovery allowed Hill to build through the mountains without a major tunnel and without the steep grades that plagued the Northern Pacific’s alignment, giving the Great Northern a lasting advantage in operating costs (Great Northern Railway Historical Society, “Great Northern History,” www.gnrhs.org/gn_history.php, accessed April 3, 2026).

On January 6, 1893, workers drove the final spike near Scenic, Washington, completing the Great Northern’s transcontinental line from St. Paul to Seattle. The railroad had been built almost entirely without federal subsidy – a point Hill emphasized repeatedly throughout his career. Where other transcontinental projects had relied on federal land grants and government loans, the Great Northern’s route was financed through private capital, bond sales, and the discipline of careful construction. Critics who had dismissed the project as commercially implausible were confounded. The Great Northern not only survived the severe Panic of 1893, which pushed the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Santa Fe into receivership, but emerged from the depression solvent and in a stronger competitive position than when it entered (PBS American Experience, “James J. Hill,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/streamliners-hill/, accessed April 3, 2026).

Montana’s New Geography: Towns, Industry, and Copper

Hill’s intervention in Montana was not limited to laying rails across prairie and mountain. From early in his planning, he sought to create the economic conditions that would generate freight. Great Falls is the most instructive example of this approach. Hill had recognized the potential of the Missouri River site before his tracks arrived, and he organized the Great Falls Water Power and Townsite Company with other investors to develop the location systematically. A hydroelectric facility was established at the site of what became the Black Eagle Dam, providing power for the Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company smelter, which began processing ore from Butte in 1892. The coal mines at Sand Coulee, roughly eighteen miles east of Great Falls, supplied fuel for the trains; the trains carried copper ore and refined metal to distant markets. In this model, every element of the local economy reinforced the railroad’s traffic base, and Hill made no secret of the integrated logic behind his investments (“James J. Hill, Empire Builder,” Distinctly Montana, www.distinctlymontana.com/james-j-hill-empire-builder, accessed April 3, 2026).

Hill also worked closely with Marcus Daly and the Anaconda Mining Company in Butte, ensuring that the copper industry – Montana’s dominant extractive enterprise in the late nineteenth century – moved a substantial share of its output over Great Northern tracks. By the early years of the twentieth century, Hill’s system had achieved what a contemporary observer characterized as a near-total presence in the state’s railroad geography: by 1905, according to the account of one historian quoted in the regional press, virtually every railroad operating through Montana was under Hill’s control (Franz, Flathead Beacon, 2018). This degree of market concentration gave Hill enormous leverage over freight rates and commodity flows, and it made Montana farmers and mining companies alike dependent on his goodwill and his pricing decisions.

Agricultural Ambitions and Their Limits

No aspect of Hill’s relationship to Montana was more consequential – or more contested – than his promotion of agriculture. Because the Great Northern, unlike land-grant railroads, could not profit from land sales, it was structurally dependent on generating freight revenue from whatever economic activity developed along its route. For Hill, this meant that the prosperity of Montana’s farmers was inseparable from his own balance sheet. He pursued that connection with energy and occasional eccentricity.

Hill hired agronomy professor Frederick Crane to conduct soil analyses across Montana, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. He rented experimental plots from farmers along his lines and paid them to cultivate those plots according to expert instructions from his St. Paul staff. By 1915, nearly one thousand five-acre demonstration plots were enrolled in the program. He also ran informational trains into rural areas, sponsored livestock improvement programs, and distributed purebred bulls and Berkshire hogs to model farmers who could demonstrate better husbandry to their neighbors. The Great Northern promoted immigration from Germany and Scandinavia with agents stationed in Europe, offering reduced passenger fares – in some accounts as low as ten dollars for a half-continental journey – to bring settlers to land along the line (Strom, “James J. Hill, Empire Builder as Farmer,” Minnesota History, vol. 54, no. 6, 1995, pp. 242-253, available at storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/54/v54i06p242-253.pdf, accessed April 3, 2026).

The result was a massive wave of homestead settlement. Between 1890 and 1920, Montana’s population grew by approximately three hundred percent, much of it concentrated in the dryland plains of the north and east where Great Northern promotion was most intense. Hill himself, speaking at Havre in 1909, declared his intention to see a farm family on every quarter or half section of the northern Montana plains. Dozens of new towns materialized along the High Line – the informal term for the Great Northern’s main corridor north of the Missouri River – including Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Plentywood, Scobey, Jordan, and Baker (Historic Homesteads, Distinctly Montana, www.distinctlymontana.com/historic-homesteads, accessed April 3, 2026).

Yet the agricultural program contained a structural vulnerability that Hill was unwilling or unable to acknowledge fully. The historian Claire Strom, writing in Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2003), argues that Hill’s vision for Montana farming was based substantially on his own farm experience and ideological commitment to the Jeffersonian model of diversified, family-scale agriculture, rather than on a realistic assessment of the region’s aridity. Agriculture on the northern plains, Strom contends, moved inexorably toward extensive, mechanized, monoculture wheat production – the very model Hill sought to avoid – because the climate and the economics of the region made intensive mixed farming impractical for most settlers. In Strom’s assessment, Hill “failed in other things too” and the agricultural program, whatever its energy and ambition, largely “came to pass” in forms he did not intend and would not have endorsed (Minneapolis Federal Reserve, interview with Claire Strom, www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2007/claire-strom-on-james-j-hills-legacy-and-influence-on-the-northern-great-plains, accessed April 3, 2026).

The agricultural boom collapsed with particular severity in northern Montana beginning in 1917, when drought struck isolated areas and then spread across the entire eastern and central portions of the state. Temperatures reached between one hundred and one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit, hot winds stripped the plowed soil, and grasshoppers consumed what remained. The Havre Plaindealer described the catastrophe as the worst in the state’s history. By 1919, a postwar collapse in wheat prices compounded the disaster. An estimated sixty thousand people left Montana during the 1920s, and between 1919 and 1925, roughly two million acres passed out of production while approximately eleven thousand farms – about twenty percent of the state’s total – were abandoned. Montana became the only state to lose population during the decade commonly described as a period of national prosperity (Historic Homesteads, Distinctly Montana, 2026). The Great Northern’s promotions had helped to attract settlers into an ecological margin where the risks of dryland farming were not adequately understood, and many of those settlers paid heavily for the miscalculation.

The Glacier National Park Connection

If Hill’s agricultural legacy in Montana was ultimately ambiguous, his role in the creation of Glacier National Park represents a more durable, if also complicated, contribution to the state’s identity. The Hills – father and son – approached Glacier from the beginning as a business proposition as much as an aesthetic one. George Bird Grinnell, naturalist and longtime editor of Forest and Stream, had been visiting the northwestern Montana mountains since 1885 and lobbying for their protection for years. Louis W. Hill, who succeeded his father as president of the Great Northern in 1907, recognized that a national park adjacent to the railroad’s route through the mountains could generate substantial passenger traffic for the line. Working behind the scenes, Louis helped persuade Congress to establish Glacier National Park in 1910, and President William Howard Taft signed the legislation that year (Young and McCormack, “He Had a Great Flair for the Colorful: Louis W. Hill and Glacier Park,” Ramsey County History, Summer 2010, Ramsey County Historical Society, rchs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RCHS_Summer2010_YoungMcCormack.pdf, accessed April 3, 2026).

Louis Hill then invested heavily in the park’s visitor infrastructure, commissioning a series of Swiss chalet-style hotels and lodges, including Glacier Park Lodge at East Glacier and Many Glacier Hotel in the park’s interior. He promoted the destination under the slogan “See America First,” commissioning artists and photographers to produce images that circulated widely through Great Northern advertising. The campaign was innovative in the history of American tourism, linking a private railroad directly to the promotion of a federal public land in a manner that blurred the line between civic enhancement and commercial marketing. Louis’s relationship with the Blackfeet Nation, whose ceded lands formed the park’s eastern strip, was correspondingly complex: the Hills employed Blackfeet tribal members in seasonal capacities at the hotels and chalets and incorporated Blackfeet imagery into the park’s promotional identity, while the creation of the park had simultaneously restricted Blackfeet access to lands they regarded as part of their ancestral territory (PBS, “The Empire Builder,” Episode 4, www.pbs.org/video/episode-4-kpqfto/, accessed April 3, 2026).

Legacy and Assessment

James J. Hill died in St. Paul on May 29, 1916, with an estate valued at approximately sixty-three million dollars. By then he had been retired as railroad president for nearly a decade, though he remained active in business and public affairs until near the end of his life. His son Louis continued to manage the Great Northern until his own retirement, and the railroad itself eventually merged into Burlington Northern in 1970, then into BNSF Railway in 1995 – the direct institutional descendant of the line Hill built through Montana more than a century earlier.

Hill County, Montana, which encompasses Havre and the Hi-Line country that was the heartland of Great Northern promotion, bears his name still. The Amtrak Empire Builder, which runs daily from Chicago to Seattle over much of the original Great Northern alignment through Montana, carries forward the nickname that defined him. Marias Pass, where John Stevens located the critical crossing in the bitter cold of December 1889, remains the lowest rail crossing of the Continental Divide in the United States.

The historical meaning of that legacy, however, is not reducible to commemoration. In Montana as elsewhere, Hill’s railroad reorganized space, redirected commerce, and created the demographic and economic conditions for both prosperity and devastation. The copper industry of Butte and Anaconda shipped its production over Great Northern tracks. The homesteaders of the Hi-Line were encouraged to break ground in a climate that ultimately could not sustain the agricultural system they were sold. The tourism infrastructure of Glacier National Park drew millions of visitors across generations, while the Blackfeet paid in land and sovereignty for the park’s existence. To assess Hill’s Montana legacy honestly is to hold all of these outcomes simultaneously, without collapsing them into a single narrative of either progress or exploitation. His was a presence that remade a territory across every dimension of its life, and the consequences of that remaking have outlasted the man by more than a hundred years.

Works Cited

Franz, Justin. “The Empire Builder.” Flathead Beacon, 7 Mar. 2018, www.flatheadbeacon.com/2018/03/07/the-empire-builder/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Great Northern Railway Historical Society. “Great Northern History.” Great Northern Railway Historical Society, www.gnrhs.org/gn_history.php. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Martin, Albro. James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest. Oxford University Press, 1976.

Minneapolis Federal Reserve. “Claire Strom on James J. Hill’s Legacy and Influence on the Northern Great Plains.” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 28 Feb. 2007, www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2007/claire-strom-on-james-j-hills-legacy-and-influence-on-the-northern-great-plains. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

PBS American Experience. “James J. Hill.” American Experience, WGBH Educational Foundation, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/streamliners-hill/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

PBS. “The Empire Builder, Episode 4.” Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/video/episode-4-kpqfto/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Strahn, Derek. “Historic Homesteads.” Distinctly Montana, www.distinctlymontana.com/historic-homesteads. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Strom, Claire M. “James J. Hill, Empire Builder as Farmer.” Minnesota History, vol. 54, no. 6, 1995, pp. 242-253, storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/54/v54i06p242-253.pdf. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.

Strom, Claire M. Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West. University of Washington Press, 2003.

Young, Biloine W., and Eileen R. McCormack. “He Had a Great Flair for the Colorful: Louis W. Hill and Glacier Park.” Ramsey County History, Summer 2010, Ramsey County Historical Society, rchs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RCHS_Summer2010_YoungMcCormack.pdf. Accessed 3 Apr. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​