The Great Northern Railway changed Northwest Montana forever. Who else but Americans could have built it?

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

The Empire Builder Documentary: https://greatnorthernfilmworks.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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[bell clanging and train sound approaching]

Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[train horn sounds]

Daniel Lombardi: Just about every day I hear the rumble of trains throughout West Glacier. Whether I'm inside or out, the sound of trains punctuate a lot of daily life in Glacier.

Michael Faist: And that line, running along the park's southern boundary, has been in service since the steam engine nearly 130 years ago. And anything with that long of a legacy leaves a mark. Tell me this, Daniel. What do you think the most common name for a business is around here?

Daniel: I feel like Glacier being in the name of a lot of things.

Michael: Yes. There's a lot of businesses named Glacier.

Daniel: Glacier cat groomers, Glacier golf, Glacier gas. There's a bunch.

Michael: So that shouldn't be surprising. But close behind are businesses named Great Northern. There's the Great Northern Veterinary Office, Great Northern Concrete, Great Northern Llama Ranch, close to 40 other businesses that share that name in Flathead County alone. So today our local railroad is serviced by Amtrak and BNSF, or Burlington Northern Santa Fe. But it was their predecessor, the Great Northern Railway, that started it all.

Old Film: [audio sounds crackly and tinny; the narrator’s accent is of the early 1900s] Great Northern skirts the southern boundary, of Glacier Park for 57 miles. [ambient music begins to play in the video] This is Great Northern. Not the railroad or the train, but this car and its contents. A rolling inventory of America's wealth.

[Headwaters season 3 theme begins playing; starting with mandolin]

Michael: My question: who built the Great Northern Railway?

[theme continues; a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments come in, before the music finishes]

Daniel: History is shaped by great men wielding absolute power, men with vast vaults of money and epic dreams. Executives. Kings. Presidents. Generals. It is these men who bend the world and shape history into new chapters. The rest of us are mere pawns. Or at least that's how one theory goes. [a subtle electronic beat begins] You're listening to Headwaters, a podcast about how Glacier National Park connects to everything else. This is Season Three: Becoming. It's about the people, the profit margins, and the promises that defined the West before a national park tried to do the same. This episode starts with one of history's great men, James J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway. He cut a literal line across the country through towns, tribes and the edge of what would become Glacier National Park.

Michael: And in the process became one of the most powerful businessmen of his time, even if it didn't start that way.

Daniel: And you've been looking into that history of the Great Northern, both from the bottom up and the top down.

Michael: Yeah, from a lot of different angles. Working here, you hear about Great Northern all the time. You get to hear a lot about all the things they would go on to do to shape the park. But what I've never understood is how did they get here in the first place? Like who built the Great Northern Railway? And how, after eight years of living here, have I never ridden the train?

Daniel: So where do we start?

Michael: We start at the beginning.

Michael: [to Stephen] Assuming I have never heard of him before, who is J.J. Hill? And why should I know his name?

Stephen Sadis: [on the phone] Who is James J. Hill?

[dramatic violin music begins]

Empire Builder Documentary: [movie narrator voice] He was known as the Empire Builder and the Devil's Curse. Streets, towns and counties were named in his honor, along with a persistent and invasive weed. He was mythologized in novels and was the subject of folk songs and union battle cries.

[music fades out]

Michael: I called Stephen Sadis, a producer and filmmaker who just finished a four-part docu-series called The Empire Builder: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, which you'll be hearing clips of throughout. At just 17 years old, Hill moved from Ontario, where he was born, to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Within 15 years, he went from a job as an entry level bookkeeper to running a warehouse of his own and operating a steamship company. He had made a name for himself.

Empire Builder Documentary: [different narrators voice each quote, with fiddle music beneath] Local newspapers took note. "This remarkable young man has kept accurate statistics for many years of all the freight coming in." "J.J. Hill is prepared to give shippers the lowest rates ever quoted from here to Eastern Points." "He beats all his competitors and in return gets the bulk of the transportation business. When Mr. Hill starts to accomplish a thing, he does it complete."

Michael: If you needed to ship something or have something shipped to you, he could do it faster and cheaper than the other guy. He was like Amazon, if they used ox carts and steamboats.

Stephen: He had a good reputation. He said what he meant and did what he said and people trusted him.

Michael: [to Stephen] Why did he want—why did he get into the railroad business?

Stephen: You know, I think he had visions of a transportation empire. I mean, it's very clear in early Saint Paul history, when the town got its first locomotive, I mean, he was constantly saying to other people what he would do if he would run the line. I mean, it's to the point where people were like, “Yeah, yeah, Jim, we know you'd do a much better job.”

Michael: Hill had an incredible track record for a young entrepreneur. And yet, when he finally bought a small bankrupt railroad and announced his plans to build it all the way to the West, people called him an idiot.

Daniel: I need to know more. Why?

Michael: Well, there were a few reasons. First of all, honestly, he was late to the game. He wanted to build a transcontinental line through Montana and onto the coast. But that line already existed. The Northern Pacific ran through southern Montana, and the Canadian Pacific, just to the north, ran through Alberta.

Stephen: So it was a fourth transcontinental that would thread a line between these other two, and it was unnecessary. It was ridiculous.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice with violin music beneath] The New York Times stated that no sane man could think of paralleling these lines without inviting bankruptcy, and dubbed the notion "Hill's Folly."

Daniel: So it sounds like there just wasn't a need, basically. Right.

Michael: Like, the region already has two railroads. Why would it need a third?

Daniel: Yeah.

Michael: But the other reason people called this idea Hill's Folly was the money. Building 3000 miles of railroad isn't cheap, but for a while there, the U.S. government would pay you if you tried.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice with violin music beneath] Lincoln put his pen to the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the government to offer loans and land grants to railroad owners for every mile of track laid from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.

Michael: This policy worked. It jumpstarted railroad construction, but it also encouraged railroad companies to game the system, building curvy lines in order to gobble up as much land as possible.

Stephen: I mean, really, the real estate business began with the railroads. At one point, the railroads owned like 6% of all the land in the United States, which is, you know, mammoth.

Michael: By the time Hill was getting started, Congress had caught on. They stopped giving out land or loans to railroad companies. And without this assistance, Hill had to find private funding. He had to convince people that this line, which The New York Times was calling a bad idea, was a worthwhile investment.

Daniel: Okay. So what's different here is that all the other railroad companies, they were getting federal aid.

Michael: Right.

Daniel: But Hill, he had to pay his own way for the Great Northern.

Michael: Exactly. And letters from the Times suggest he found raising money to be the hardest part of the job. Networking, schmoozing, owing favors. But it paid off. He sold investors on the idea that his line could be built better and more efficiently than any other.

Stephen: His mantra was the lowest grade, least curvature, and shortest distance, and everything banked on that.

Michael: What was next was finding a route that would make that possible.

Stephen: As Hill's heading west, he's—he's chosen his route. And it happens that he needs to get through Indian territory.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice, with sad violin music beneath] Beginning in 1851, the Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, River Crow, and Assiniboine were restricted to reservation land that spread across much of Montana territory. But over the course of 30 years, the reservation had been reduced nine times by treaty and executive order.

Michael: But tribal land was still in Hill's way. He couldn't build through the Fort Berthold or Blackfeet reservations in present day North Dakota and Montana without a right of way. So in 1886, he started putting pressure on Congress and the president to open the land.

Stephen: Hill was working backchannels in order to get that approval to bring h...