een closely
identified with Ripley's business career, and its record during these
two decades has been an enviable one. Steady progress from year to
year in volume of business, in general development of the system,
in improvement of its rights of way, terminals, and equipment, has
characterized its history through periods of depression as well as
times of prosperity. Its resources have grown to vast totals; its credit
equals that of the best of American railroads; its stocks and bonds are
prime investments; and each year it pours millions of dollars of profits
into the hands of its stockholders.

CHAPTER IX. THE GROWTH OF THE HILL LINES

The States which form the northern border of the United States westward
from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times
larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room
to spare. The distance from the head of the Great Lakes at Duluth to the
Pacific coast in the State of Washington is greater than the distance
from London to Petrograd or the distance from Paris to Constantinople,
and three times the distance from Washington, D.C., to Chicago.

Fifty years ago these States, with the single exception of Wisconsin,
were practically a wilderness in which only the Indian and buffalo gave
evidences of life and activity. No railroads penetrated the forests
or the mountain ranges. Far southward some progress in the march of
civilization had been made; the Union Pacific had linked the West with
the East before the eighth decade of the century began, and the Northern
Pacific project was being painfully pushed through the intermediate tier
of States during the seventies. But the material resources of the Great
Northwest had still to be discovered.

When the Northern Pacific Railway failed in 1873, the crash involved a
little railroad known as the St. Paul and Pacific, running out of St.
Paul for a couple of hundred miles westward, with a branch to the north
joining the Northern Pacific at Brainerd, Minnesota. The St. Paul and
Pacific had been acquired in the interest of the Northern Pacific some
years earlier but was now regarded as a property so worthless that
its owners would be glad to get rid of it, if only they could find a
purchaser rash enough to take it over.

During the three years following the panic of 1873 the crops of
Minnesota were practically eaten up by the grasshoppers, and poverty
reigned among the farmers. At that time a shor