d Northern
Securities; M. D. Grover, attorney for the Great Northern Railway, said
it would not work. Grover was the brightest attorney the road ever had.
When the scheme failed, Grover never once said, "I told you so," and Mr.
Hill sent him a check for a thousand dollars, over and above his salary.

Colonel Clough was employed at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars,
some years before his real work began. He came from the Northern
Pacific. Mr. Hill, when asked by a leading official of that road what he
thought of the Colonel, replied, "Huh! he's a good man to file
contracts."

Mr. Hill said of Allan Manvel, then General Manager of his road, "He may
make a man some day." Mr. Hill grew faster than any man about him. He
distanced them all. S. S. Breed was Treasurer of the old Saint Paul and
Pacific Railroad. His signature in a bold, fine hand adorned all the
bonds of that road, held mostly by the Dutch. He was made auditor when
the St. P., M. & M. Ry. was formed.

Breed had reached his point of greatest efficiency, but that did not
suffice Mr. Hill, who said to him more than once, for Breed was an
old-timer and well liked, "If you can't do the work I'll have to get
some one who can." Mr. Hill, however, neither fired the old man, nor
reduced his pay. Breed got work up to his death in the Great Northern
Railway office, but at the last he served as a guide for strangers.

Breed was supplanted by Bode as Comptroller, followed by C. H. Warren
and then by Farrington--all three Big Boys.

* * * * *

About Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, Mr. Hill gave an address at a
banquet in the Merchants' Hotel, Saint Paul. With a large map of the
United States and Canada on the wall, he took a huge pair of dividers or
compasses and putting one leg of the dividers on the map at Saint Paul,
he swung the other leg out southeast fifteen hundred miles as the crow
flies, into the ocean off the Carolina Coast. Then with Saint Paul still
as a center he swung the compasses around to the northwest fifteen
hundred miles. "All this country," he said, "is within the wheat-belt."
The leg of the compasses went beyond Edmonton in Alberta. Last year this
new Canadian country produced more than one hundred million bushels of
wheat, and this is only the beginning.

Mr. Hill has always maintained that to call cotton king is a misnomer.
Cotton never was king. Wheat is king, for food is more important than
raiment.

Wheat is