The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-05-29
James J. Hill
 Is Dead At 78
tconttnued from Page l.,

fConttnued from Page 1.) 4O0, 900 farms and he blazed a trail for transportation which reached eventually from Buffalo to Asia, with a total mileage of rail and steamship facilities that would nearly girdle the earth.
 That but roughly spans the story of his achievement.
 Near Guelph, Ontario, where James Jerome Hill was born in 1888, the son of an Irish-Canadian farmer who died when the boy was 15, there stands tree stump labeled. The last tree chopped by James J. Hill"
 It marked the lads resolution to go to the United States. He had been prompted by an odd incident. Ac- cording to the story that is told, a strange traveller had stopped at the farm to take dinner, and left his horse at the gate. Young Hill saw the imal was tired and he carried it pail of water. The stranger was pleased with the lads thoughtfu1ness and as he drove off he tossed him a news paper from the United States, and called out gravely:
 Go there, young man. The coun- try needs youngsters of your spirit
 Hill read the paper carefully It contained glowing accounts of oppor- tunfties in the States He resolved to investigate for himself. It was the next morning that he chopped his last tree.
 As mere roustabout lad of IS, he toured from Maine to Minnesota. When, in 1856, he disembarked from a Mississippi river packet at St. Paul that place was a frontier town of 5000 inhabitants. At the sign of W. T. Bass & Co.,, agents for the Du- buq1e 6 St. Paul Packet Co, he found a job as both stevedore and clerk
 In the Is years that followed he seized every opportunity to study the whole problem of river transporta- tion-t He gathered no end of experi- ence and a little capital with which he launched his own firm of Hill, Griss & Co., which promptly display ed it's initiative by bringing the first load of coal that had ever veen seen in that section into St. Paul. Two years later, with f1at-bottomed steamer he established the first regu- lar rJcommunication with St. Paul and the MIanitoba ports of the fertile Red River Valley.
 At about that time S. Paul was having it's first experiment. in railroad building. Eighty miles had been laid , to St. Cloud, 316 miles to Brecken- ridge both of which terminals were at the southern end of the Red River Valley, and there were about 100
 
 and ended in that same indefinite spots9 This venture ran up debt of 33,000.0O0 and collapsed with it's only assets being "a few streaks of rust and a right of way
 Hill had had sufficient success in the region to be seized with a com suming desire to purchase the de- funct property. After five years of financial dickering. including the sale of all his other interests, which net ted afortuIle d of $100. .O00. he and al syndicate of three others1Sir Donald A Smith. George stephen and Nor man W. Kiatson-obtained the object of this desire.
 Y The St. Paul, Minnesota and Mani toba Railway was formed to operate the property with Hill as general manager. When in 1883 MT. Hill was elected president he undertook the extension of the road from it's Dakota and Minnesota homestead to the Pacific ocean. He was confront ed by three great competitors to the south, each of which had received big bonuses as governme ment aid. wh ere as the Manitoba or the Great North ern, as it came to be known, did not have a dollar of government subsidy or an acre of grant to forward it's pro- gress from the Minnesota boundary to the sea-
 Tn this light, HiIPs plan was wide- 4 ly deemed pure folly, but he pressed It to conclusion by building and pop ulating he built. For several years he laid rails westward at the rate of a. mile day and at cost of S3OOOO' as mile and as he went he left a trail of J embryonic farms by the railside
 With the line to Puget Sound once laid, he turned Empire Builder He introduced the live stock industry ln- to vast areas of bunch-grass plains, and developed them by importing blooded stock; he sent dem onstration trains through the country with men who showed the people, how to raise more wheat to the acre; he made an outlet for the grain by establishing a cheap. rate by rail and steamship to Buffalo. where he built great eIevators;f in fact for upwards of 20 years he left nothing in his power undone to develop the country, where he had staked out his claim as the great com mon carrier.
 But at the Pacific tide-water he was not satisfied for he saw in the Orient still further opportunities. He or ganized a fleet of Pacific steamships for the commercial invasion of Japan and China. Japan at the time wanted steel rails, but proposed getting them from England, as the rates were less. It is related that when John W.Gates the steel magnate of Chicago, came to Hill with the proposition of getting American rails to Japan, the latter re- piled:
 ''I will make you rate of $8 a ton from Chicago or Pittsburgh to Yoko-