t, stocky man with long
hair, one blind eye, and the reputation of being the greatest talker
in town, kept a coal and wood store in St. Paul. His name was James J.
Hill. For years he had been a familiar figure, sitting in his old chair
in front of his store and discoursing on current events. This man was
not only an interesting talker; he was a visionary, a dreamer--and
one of his dreams was to buy the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad and to
transform it into a real railway line. Nearly twenty years had passed
since he had drifted in, an eighteen-year-old Scotch-Irish boy from
Ontario, and had begun work in a steamship office on the levee at St.
Paul. Now, in 1876, he was thirty-eight years old and a town character.
And the town felt that it had his measure. He had already tried
a variety of occupations, and at this time was agent for lines of
steamboats on the Mississippi and the Red River. Everybody knew him
and liked him, but no one took him very seriously. The idea of his
controlling the St. Paul and Pacific was even amusing.

Now the most promising part of the St. Paul and Pacific when it failed
in 1873 was the line from St. Paul to Breckenridge on the Red River.
Hill was the Mississippi steamboat agent at one end; at the other, an
old Hudson Bay trader, Norman W. Kittson, ran two little old sternwheel
steamboats from Breckenridge to Winnipeg. A large part of the freight
that Hill and Kittson handled was for the Hudson's Bay Company. It
came up the Mississippi, went across on the St. Paul and Pacific to
Breckenridge, and then down the Red River on Kittson's steamboats until
it was received at Fort Garry, Winnipeg, by Donald Alexander Smith, then
commissioner for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Smith, who became afterwards Lord Strathcona and High Commissioner for
Canada in England, was a tall, lean, urbane Scotchman with a soft manner
and a long red beard. In 1876 he was fifty-six years old, with a life of
strange, wild adventure behind him. He had gone when little more than a
boy to Labrador to take charge of a station of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Among the northern Indians he stayed for thirteen years. In the sixties
he was practically king over all the savage territory of the company
along the waters entering Hudson Bay. By the seventies he was a man of
means and he had some influence in the new Dominion of Canada.

It would be a great advantage to Smith to have a good railroad from St.
Paul to Winnipeg as the Red Riv