Documentarians Stephen Sadis and Kyle Kegley, drawing on a wealth of archival photos and documents as well as interviews with historians, show how Hill combined settlement incentives with agricultural research and education to install farmers in the high plains of Montana and North Dakota. He then set about populating the finished line's environs with his future customers. Hill built his Great Northern through Blackfoot territory, contributing to a vast reduction in the land left available for the people who were there first. government broke treaties and drove exploitative deals with Indigenous peoples to open land for farming, mining and logging. It's a stunning, sobering story.Īs soon as railroads rendered western land accessible to national markets, the U.S. Underlying Hill's story is the epic of America's industrial transformation, and specifically the role of railroads in enabling the growth of industry from St. When Hill arrived there in the 1850s, the Mississippi River was a pivotal waterway dividing the established eastern states and the wild west.īy the time of Hill's death in 1916, his adopted country had become what would later be called a superpower. The ambitious young man hit the road and found his opportunity in St. Hill and the Great Northern Railway" chronicles Hill's rise from a Canadian farmer's child to one of the world's most influential people. "It took a while for him to build that Interstate Bridge that brought his train across to Duluth, and to do that, he had to move a lot of obstacles, because all the other railroads certainly didn't want the Great Northern in their backyard." "That's why you see the big Great Northern (grain) elevators that were built, were built on the Superior side and not the Duluth side," explained Buehler. Hill would ultimately control the Northern Pacific as well, but first he built his own infrastructure across the harbor in Superior. They came up with the Lake Superior and Mississippi (Railroad), and then of course, Jay Cooke decides he's going to go to Carlton and start building to the West Coast." "Northern Pacific bet its money on Duluth," said Buehler, the Railroad Museum's director. Paul railroad baron's farsighted development of the American northwest, Hill's Great Northern wasn't the first railroad connecting Duluth to the country's growing grid. Hill was late to the party," said Ken Buehler, standing next to a display of Great Northern Railway tableware at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum.ĭespite the St.
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