| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West. By Claire Strom. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. x + 228 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, $35.00.
In Profiting from the Plains, Claire Strom offers a thorough examination of railroad magnate James J. Hill's agricultural enterprises. As the only transcontinental railroad that lacked significant land grants, Hill's Great Northern Railway relied on agricultural development projects to generate traffic and to attract permanent settlement to the northern plains. Although the Great Northern's route from St. Paul to Tacoma offered access to rich forest and mining resources, it also traversed a vast expanse of semiarid land that was ill-suited to conventional agriculture.	1
Hill (1838–1916) has a reputation as a robber baron, but as Strom shows, he also was a passionate defender of the yeoman farmer. Guided by a Jeffersonian faith in agrarian values and small family farms, Hill personally directed and funded a number of projects intended to shape agricultural practice and land use in the American West. For instance, Hill vigorously promoted "dual-purpose" cattle, bred for both dairy and beef production, since he believed that animal husbandry was essential in small and diversified farming operations. He tried to develop a variety of corn adapted to the northern growing season, and he supported an experiment station in northwest Minnesota that would serve the interests of an emerging sugar beet industry. Hill also endorsed various irrigation projects, which he hoped would entice small farmers to settle the plains.	. . .

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