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Reviews
Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West
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Claire Strom
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $35.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by John C. Hudson
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
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| A century has passed since James J. Hillwas at the helm of the Great Northern Railway, directing workers and machines, shaping and reshaping the geography of the northwestern states. Historians' fascination with Hill has scarcely diminished over the past century, and books written about the man continue to appear with regularity. No other individual had such a lasting impact on the region. Was his influence for ill or for good? Claire Strom's short book is the latest addition to the list of Hill studies. She does a good job of balancing Hill's better and less admirable qualities, giving us yet another perspective on the man known as the Empire Builder. |
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Although Strom's title suggests she will offer a critique of railroad capitalism, much of her book is devoted to a different but equally familiar theme. Hill both preached and practiced improved cattle breeding and livestock raising. He stumped the Northwest, expounding to groups of farmers the advantages of improved herds, agricultural diversification, and the general introduction of improved farming practices. He seemed to enjoy the conflict with agricultural scientists that his widely publicized views produced and scorned the advice of professionals while trumpeting his own views, which he regarded as common sense. Strom does an excellent job of summarizing these developments, which form the heart of the argument in her book. |
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She takes the peculiar view that "agricultural specialization ... was beyond the financial reach of most of the families attempting to settle the plains" (p. 26). In other words, small farmers had to be diversified. She believes that Hill had learned this first-hand in his native Ontario, Canada. As an alternative to wheat specialization, he urged the production of fodder crops that would promote beef and dairy cattle production. |
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The question that Strom might have asked at this point is: why did Hill take such a stance? He was, first and foremost, a railroader. Every bushel of wheat harvested by farmers along the Great Northern was hauled on Hill's railroad every mile of some hundreds of miles to Minneapolis or Duluth-Superior. If he truly wished to profit from the plains to the maximum extent, why would he urge farmers to raise livestock, a far less lucrative trade for railroads, then or now? Railroads have not hauled livestock or milk for most of the past half century, yet they still haul the bulk of all grain produced in the Northwest. |
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I would argue that it was precisely the small-farm family that needed to specialize, because it was the sale of crops for cash that brought by far the greatest return per acre. Furthermore, it was obvious to Hill that this is what nearly all farmers — large or small — would ultimately do. They would become specialized grain growers, the economic activity for which the region was undoubtedly best suited. It was grain farming that, in the short run as well as the long, earned the revenue to retire the bonds sold for constructing all of those miles of track reaching out into every wheat-raising district tapped by the Great Northern. |
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Hill's railroad profited from the plains, without a doubt. That this profit came in some measure because farmers specialized in wheat and did not follow Hill's advice to diversify into livestock might be a topic for some future historian's efforts. Whether Hill's ideas about livestock were worth the farmers' time to ponder is debatable. Strom convincingly shows that, by the end of his life, Hill's advice on such matters was given little attention. Yet James J. Hill rarely made bad decisions in the railroad business. He was foremost among the railroad men who saw the plains as a gigantic field of golden grain that could provide revenue for every railroad serving the region, indefinitely into the future. |
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A century after he left the scene, very few of the miles of railroad Hill constructed have been abandoned. Whenever U.S. or Canadian railroads are in the mood to sell part of their trackage in grain-producing regions to smaller rail operators, there is no lack of investors eager to get into the business. What worked in the late nineteenth century seems to work just as well in the twenty-first. Can one think of any other region or any other agricultural specialization that has changed as little — that has been as "sustainable," in current jargon — as the one Hill put in place? That, surely, is the true measure of the man's insight. |
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