rned their thoughts to railway work.

Early in the settlement of the northwestern {132} states the need of
railways, and of state aid to railways, was widely realized. In 1857
Congress gave the territory of Minnesota a large grant of public lands
to use in bonusing railway building, and in the same year the
legislature of the territory incorporated a company, the Minnesota and
Pacific, to build from Stillwater through St Paul and St Anthony's
Falls (Minneapolis) to Red River points. The state gave the new
company millions of acres of land and a cash subsidy, municipalities
offered bonuses, and a small amount of stock was subscribed locally.
Five years passed, and not a mile had been completed. The company,
looted into insolvency by fraudulent construction company contracts,
was reorganized as the St Paul and Pacific, heir to the old company's
assets but not to its liabilities, and a beginning was made once more.
Trusting Dutch bondholders lent over twenty millions, and by 1871 the
road reached Breckenridge on the Red River, two hundred and seventeen
miles from St Paul. Again a halt came. Russell Sage and his
associates in control had once more looted the treasury. The Dutch
bondholders, through their agent, John S. Kennedy, a New York banker,
applied for a receiver, and in 1873 one Jesse P. Farley was {133}
appointed by the court. It seemed that the angry settlers might
whistle in vain for their road.

In St Paul at that time there lived two Canadians who saw the
opportunity. The elder, Norman W. Kittson, had been Hudson Bay agent
and head of a transportation company on the Red River. The younger,
James J. Hill, an Ontario farm-boy who had gone west while still in his
teens, owned a coal and wood yard in St Paul, and had a share in the
transportation company. Neither had the capital or the financial
connection required to take hold of the bankrupt company, but they kept
on thinking of it day and night. Soon a third man joined their ranks,
Donald A. Smith. A Highland lad who had come to Canada at eighteen,
Donald Smith had spent a generation in the service of the Hudson's Bay
Company, mainly in the dreary wilds of Labrador and on the shores of
Hudson Bay. When in 1871 he became chief commissioner of the
organization he had served so long and so well, it seemed to most men
that he was definitely settled in his life work and probably near the
height of his career. But Fate knew, and Donald Smith knew, that h