Canadian-born Hill broke the monopoly. As a young man, he leveraged a series of freight and coal businesses into railroad stock. When Hill and his associates formed the Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway in 1879— the SPM&M for short—Hill became a multimillionaire. But his dreams were bigger; he envisioned a transcontinental railroad superior to those already in place: better- engineered, safer, faster.

Hill visited Montana Territory in 1884 at the behest of an old Minnesota friend, Paris Gibson, who was planning a city near a series of cascades known as the Great Falls of the Missouri. Hill purchased shares in Gibson’s township company and scouted a rail line. Hill also befriended Copper King Marcus Daly of Butte and Helena banker C.A. Broadwater. Daly desperately needed cheaper freight rates to haul copper from Butte and Anaconda. Helena was the gold mining and banking center of the territory, where Broadwater, on his back foot against the Northern Pacific, faced fierce competition. With Hill already locked into a rivalry with the Northern Pacific, it was a no-brainer to help his Montana allies create the Montana Central Railroad. Broadwater’s crews began grading a railbed in 1886 to connect Great Falls, Helena and Butte, and waited anxiously for Hill’s iron to arrive.

Hill’s line needed to cross Native land and military reserves from Fort Berthold in North Dakota to Fort Assinniboine near present-day Havre, then go over the Continental Divide. To get permission, he lobbied Congress for a right of way in 1886. Such legislation was usually pro forma, but the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto the bill. After enduring months of outrage from Hill’s companies and Montana’s investors, Congress and Cleveland reconsidered and new legislation passed in February 1887.

Hill’s easement ran across northern Montana, following the Missouri River and then the Milk. The railroad could claim additional land for resources and place depots every 10 miles. The stations received names like Harlem, Malta, Kremlin, Inverness, and Glasgow—it’s rumored that postal clerks threw darts at a world map.

[Hill] imported steel rails from Germany, while contracting lumber for bridges, trestles, and three million rail ties. He bought 600,000 bushels of oats to feed 6,600 work horses. Hill scheduled railcars with construction crews, supplies and equipment to be in the right places at the right time. As historian Michael Malone explained, “His genius lay precisely in his ability to master detail while fashioning broad vision and strategy.”

The Sweet Grass Hills Treaty ceded another 20 million acres of Native land to the Federal Government, cramming the Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Assiniboine (Nakoda), Gros Ventre (Aaniih), and Blackfeet (the Piikáni and Kainai signed the treaty) onto three reservations. Popular legend asserts that, unlike the Northern Pacific, Hill built the Great Northern without federal subsidies. However, historian Frederick Hoxie looked at the land deals and called the Great Northern “the most Indian-subsidized railroad in America.”

As Congress wrangled railroad legislation, and surveyors planned a route from Minot, North Dakota to Fort Assinniboine, Montana, Hill spent the severe winter of 1886-1887 organizing. He imported steel rails from Germany, while contracting lumber for bridges, trestles, and 3 million railroad ties. He bought 600,000 bushels of oats to feed 6,600 work horses. Hill scheduled railcars with construction crews, supplies and equipment to be in the right places at the right time. As historian Michael Malone wrote, “His genius lay precisely in his ability to master detail while fashioning broad vision and strategy.”

As 1887 dawned, Hill drove construction relentlessly west. Spring came late, and crews specially graded the roadways so that prevailing winds blew away the snow. Eight thousand workers graded 100 miles a month until the final two months of the construction season, when the pace doubled.

Hill raced back and forth between St. Paul and the construction terminus in his special car, personally supervising progress. Rails reached Fort Assinniboine in September 1887, Great Falls in October, and Helena in November. In total, the SPM&M crews laid down 940 miles of track in 1887, 643 of it between Minot and Helena. Hill claimed his crews laid more mileage in a shorter time than any railroad in history. In 1888, Hill finished the challenging route from Helena to Butte. In 1889, preparing to push further west, he gathered the alphabet soup of the SPM&M, Montana Central, and multiple lines throughout the Upper Midwest, creating a single corporate entity: The Great Northern Railway.

Broadwater and Daly were pleased. Helena allegedly held more millionaires per capita than any city in America and Butte led the world in copper production. But as Hill platted the track left to be laid toward Seattle, Gibson presented a conundrum: He wanted Great Falls on the transcontinental mainline and lobbied Hill to trace a looping route bordering the wheat country of Montana’s Golden Triangle—roughly where US Highways 87 and 89 run today. Hill wanted to drive a straight line across the prairie, leaving the Montana Central as a branch.

The decision hung on finding a pass over the Continental Divide. Surveyor A.B. Rogers located a pass southwest of Great Falls in 1887, but Hill heard Native accounts of another, above the Marias River drainage. He handed the task of finding it to his most talented civil engineer, John F. Stevens. With the soul of an explorer, Stevens set off from the Blackfeet Agency in December 1889 with handmade snowshoes and a Ql̓ ispé (aka Kalispel or Pend d’Oreille) guide. Walking all night on the final moonlit climb so as not to freeze to death, they reached 5,214-foot Marias Pass on December 11, 1889.

The pass shaved 200 miles off Gibson’s preferred route. The father of Great Falls fumed, but in the spring of 1890, Hill headed due west. A settlement on the Milk River called Bull Hook Bottoms, north of Fort Assinniboine, became the staging ground for the Great Northern’s Pacific push. In 1891, Hill’s rails crossed Marias Pass and Bull Hook Bottoms became Havre.

The Great Northern opened northern Montana to the world. The region even got a new name: the Hi-Line. While Hill laid iron to Spokane, John Stevens located another key pass across the Cascades. The ceremonial final spike was driven at Scenic, Washington, on January 6, 1893. The line from St. Paul to Seattle was complete.

Worldwide advertising attracted homesteaders who filed thousands of claims. While dryland farming broke hearts and pocketbooks, the GN’s little Hi-Line towns with their impressive names survived and, from time to time, even thrived. Farm supplies came in, crops went out. Processed ore left the mines of southwestern Montana, and coal shipped from Belt and Sand Coulee. Transcontinental freight moved rapidly to and from the coast.

While the Montana of today is famous for its scenery and wild lands, Hill loved raw tonnage and was indifferent to passenger rail. In 1890, he scoffed at tourism, declaring, “We do not care enough for Rocky Mountain scenery to spend a large sum of money in developing it.” However, scenery was a game piece in the GN and NP rivalry: The Northern Pacific built a branch line from Livingston to Cinnabar in 1883 to bring tourists to Yellowstone National Park.

When the NP expanded its Yellowstone line to Gardiner in 1903, it threw down a gauntlet the GN could not ignore. Hill’s talented third-born, Louis Hill, was inspired by the Rocky Mountain scenery his father ignored. He became president of the railroad in 1907. Throwing the clout of the railroad behind conservationist George Bird Grinnell, Louis lobbied Congress for the creation of Glacier National Park, which was established in 1910. He also took leave from the GN to personally direct the construction of Glacier’s famed lodges; and a GN subsidiary was the park concessionaire until 1960. He considered the Blackfeet a tourist draw, even using them in promotional images.

[During World War I], the GN still needed workers, and decades before Rosie the Riveter, women took over railroad jobs in wartime.

In 1915, a year before James Hill died, my grandfather began working for the railroad. At 21 years old, Knute was a rangy Minnesota Lutheran with youthful brawn and energy. He started as a fireman, tasked with the grunt work of shoveling coal to power steam engines. At family gatherings 50 years later, he still extolled steam power over electro-diesel locomotives. Knute next became a brakeman. His domain was the caboose, from which he monitored the well-being of the entire train. He spoke fondly of cabooses and, luckily, passed away before end-of-train devices replaced them. When a court decision struck down Montana’s law requiring a manned caboose on every train, I could almost hear him rolling over in his grave.

Knute took authorized leave when America entered World War I in 1917. The GN still needed workers, and decades before Rosie the Riveter, women took over railroad jobs in wartime. Knute was gassed in the trenches of France and returned to America with lung damage and tuberculosis. The Great Northern took him back anyway. He rose to become a train engineer, even as he struggled with his health. He stayed “on the boards” of the GN until his retirement in 1948.

Meanwhile, Louis Hill’s love of Glacier National Park inspired the company mascot: “Rocky” the mountain goat, who first appeared on the logo of the company in 1921 and survived every round of corporate rebranding through 1970, when GN became part of the Burlington Northern (now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Railway. Rocky also became a cartoon and one of my earliest memories of the Great Northern. My first train trip was on the GN’s famed Empire Builder passenger line. My mother and I traveled from Havre to Spokane when I was 4 years old. A child of the prairie traveling west, I was fascinated by thick forests of fir and spruce, viewed on a cloudy day through a rain-splattered window. Rocky saved me from boredom. He was everywhere, from the children’s menu in the dining car to the freight cars we passed. It’s poignant to realize I’m the last generation who watched droplets roll down a vibrating water glass and sink onto a Rocky drink coaster.

I rode Northern Pacific’s line only once, in the early ’70s, when it was branded Amtrak. By then the GN and NP had merged, their rivalry settled. Rocky was retired, and I was a middle-schooler, too cool for cartoons. Still, I missed the goat.

As the GN logo faded from freight cars, a piece of Montana history and part of my own story disappeared. Yet, when I hear a Helena expat sing, “I’m an engine driver/On a long run” in an ode to writers, engineers, linemen, and moneylenders, I wonder if James Hill’s spirit still travels the Hi-line from depot to depot, overseeing the route that cemented his legacy.

Experience the Empire Builder Today

Modern travelers can retrace James J. Hill’s route on Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train. While the authentic run is east to west, it’s 13 hours from Williston, North Dakota, to Sandpoint, Idaho, so seeing all of Montana in daylight is a challenge unless you make it a round trip. amtrak.com

If you travel by car, U.S. Highway 2 mostly parallels the railroad from North Dakota to Columbia Falls, Montana. Farther west, it gets complicated, but with a good paper map that shows both rail lines and secondary roads, you can get to the Idaho line. The route has changed a bit over the last 100 years, but sites such as Railfan Road at trains. com have tips on obscure secondary highways and back roads that follow the original line.

A lifelong Montanan, Brenda Wahler is an attorney in her day job as well as an independent historian, freelance writer and horsewoman. On a perpetual journey in search of the authentic American West, she authored Montana Horse Racing: A History and Marcus Daly’s Road to Montana as well as articles for numerous periodicals.