s
line extended from the steamboat-wharf in Saint Paul to the Falls of
Saint Anthony. There were ten miles of track, including sidings, one
engine, two box cars and a dozen flat cars for logs.

The railroad didn't seem to thrive. There was no paying passenger
traffic to speak of. Passengers got aboard all right, but on being
pressed for fares they felt insulted and jumped off, just as you would
now if you got a ride with a farmer and he asked you to pay. Possibly, a
rudimentary disinclination to pay fare still remains in most of us, like
the hereditary indisposition of the Irish to pay rent.

No one ever thought it possible that a railroad could compete with a
steamboat, and it was a long time after this that Commodore Vanderbilt
had the temerity to build a railroad along the banks of the Hudson and
be called a lunatic.

So there being no passenger traffic, the farmers carrying their grist to
mill, and the logs being floated down the river to the mills, the
railroad was in a bad way. Something had to be done, so the Minnesota
and Pacific was reorganized, and a new road, the Saint Paul and Pacific,
bought it out, with all its land grants. The intent of the new road was
to strike right up into the woods for ten or twenty miles above
Minneapolis and bring down logs that otherwise would have to be hauled
to the river. For a time this road paid, with the sale of the
odd-numbered sections of land that went with it.

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-seven, James J. Hill became the Saint Paul
agent of this railroad. He had quit his job with J. W. Bass, to become
agent for the Northwestern Packet Line; and as the railroad ran right to
his door he found it easy to serve both the steamboat company and the
railroad.

You will often hear people tell how James J. Hill began his railroad
career as a station-agent, but it must be remembered that he was a
station-agent, plus. The agents of steamboat-lines in those days were
usually merchants or men who were financially responsible. And James J.
Hill became the Saint Paul agent of the Saint Paul and Pacific because
he was a man of resource, with ability to get business for the railroad.

As the extraordinary part of Mr. Hill's career did not begin until he
was forty years of age, our romantic friends who write of him often
picture him as a failure up to that time. The fact is, he was making
head and gathering gear right along. These twenty-two years, up to the
time that Mr. Hill became a