By Will Clausman
Spring 2025
James J. Hill, often known as the “Empire Builder” was a railroad industrialist and owner of The Great Northern Railroad. The railroad stretched from the Twin Cities to the port cities of Seattle and Portland.1 Hill envisioned a single railroad that would connect port cities on the Pacific Ocean, which would import luxury goods from Japan and China, to cities and markets located on the Upper Midwest and East Coast. While Hill and the Great Northern are often remembered today for their philanthropic contributions to the Twin Cities, and Hill is even seen as a “city builder,” it is necessary to understand Hill’s philanthropy and career as part of a wider movement of colonial violence inflicted on the Indigenous people in what is now Minnesota.2
James J. Hill began his career as a cleric on the Mississippi River in the Minnesota territory in the 1850s. In 1879, Hill purchased the struggling St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, which was the recipient of land grants from the territorial government of Minnesota.3 Land grant railroads were a way for states on the frontier to incentivize railroad construction and infrastructure, and were fairly common for railroad construction West of the Mississippi.4 This infrastructure was often critical in the larger process of railroad construction by the American state to further an agenda of marginalization against Indigenous communities. In addition to building through lands acquired by the territorial government of Minnesota through exploitative treaties, such as the treaty of Traverse Des Sioux in 1851, in which the Dakota nation ceded much of what is now Southwestern Minnesota to the United States.
In 1870, Hill was tasked with helping to quash the Métis Rebellion of Louis Riel, who led a resistance movement against English and Scottish-Canadian settlement in what is now Western Manitoba, where the majority of the population were Métis, a group of people with mixed Indigenous-European traditions and lineage.5 By the 1860s, English and Scottish Protestant settlers from Eastern Canada were moving West and began to settle in the Red River Valley. These settlers began to encroach on Metis land and strip them of political rights. In response, Louis Riel and a group of Métis to arms against the colonial government of Manitoba.6 Hill, an investor in the Canadian fur trade, offered to journey North and report the happenings of the rebellion back to his investors.7 Despite receiving help from multiple Métis guides and households of settlers, chose to depict the journey as one of an individual white man triumphing over nature and “untrustworthy” non-white natives.8 Hill’s narrative, ideological outlook, and profit from the colonial expansion of the United States are often pitched as secondary concerns by the popular narrative surrounding him, which whitewashes his legacy, especially within the Twin Cities. Social scientist David Hugill describes Hill’s part in the creation of the Twin Cities could more accurately be described as a “wealth transfer” from Indigenous communities to white settlers.9
While the Great Northern is often remembered as a railroad that brought Norwegian, Swedish, and German immigrants to Minnesota and as a mode of transportation that helped to open the state to farming practices, this narrative completely ignores the Dakota and Ojibwe people already living there, whom the Great Northern took advantage of by means of the unfair treaties that created the land that we now call “Minnesota.” Hill utilized the fertility of the Red River Valley to draw further settlement of the area through the promotion of “bonanza farms.”10 Bonanza farms were plots of land that were bought by investment firms from the US Government following the relocation of Dakota communities, which was comparable to the infamous Trail of Tears.11
Discussions surrounding railroads and pioneers should not rely on the narrative of “terra nullius,” the notion that land prior to European colonization of the Americas was simply “empty” or “undeveloped” but rather, must take into account the testimony and experience of Indigenous people living in these lands prior to European-American settlement. Rather than building his empire as an individual businessman who was self-made and self-reliant, James J. Hill profited off of the wider displacement and violence against Indigenous people who lived in North America prior to the creation of the Great Northern Railroad.
Works Cited:
Foust, Clifford. “The Great Northern.” In John Frank Stevens: Civil Engineer, 39–66. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzntg.7.
Hugill, David. “The Urban Politics of Settler-Colonialism: Articulations of the Colonial Relation in Post War Minneapolis, Minnesota , 1945-1975 (and Beyond).” Doctoral Dissertation, 2015.
Rae, John B. “The Great Northern’s Land Grant.” The Journal of Economic History 12, no. 2 (1952): 140–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2113221.
Storm, Claire. “Introduction.” In Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West, 3–12. University of Washington Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnxsz.4.
Storm, Claire. “Trial and Error, 1878–1893.” In Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West, 13–39. University of Washington Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnxsz.5.
Thomas, Lewis. “RIEL, LOUIS (1844-85).” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 19, 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/riel_louis_1844_85_11E.html.
- Clifford Foust, “The Great Northern,” In John Frank Stevens: Civil Engineer, 39–66, (Indiana University Press, 2013,) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzntg.7, 76-77.
↩︎ - David Hugill, “The Urban Politics of Settler-Colonialism: Articulations of the Colonial Relation in Post War Minneapolis, Minnesota , 1945-1975 (and Beyond),” Doctoral Dissertation, 2015, 79.
↩︎ - John B. Rae, “The Great Northern’s Land Grant,” The Journal of Economic History 12, no. 2 (1952): 140–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2113221, 141.
↩︎ - Claire Storm, “Introduction,” In Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West, 3–12, University of Washington Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnxsz.4, 6.
↩︎ - Lewis H. Thomas, “RIEL, LOUIS (1844-85),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 19, 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/riel_louis_1844_85_11E.html.
↩︎ - Thomas, “RIEL, LOUIS,” 1.
↩︎ - Storm, “Introduction,” 3.
↩︎ - Storm, “Introduction,” 4.
↩︎ - Hugill, “Urban Politics,” 76-77. ↩︎
- Claire Storm, “Trial and Error, 1873-1893,” In Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West, 13–39, University of Washington Press, 2003 http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnxsz.4, 15.
↩︎ - Storm, “Trial and Error,” 15-16.
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