The young man was now fairly launched in business. The mystery of manifesting, billing, collecting; the matter of "shorts," "overs," and figuring damages were to him familiar.
The Territory of Minnesota was organized in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, and did not become a State until Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight. In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven there was not a single mile of railway in the Territory. But in that year, Congress authorized the Territory to give alternate sections of public lands to any company that would build a railway through them. Through this stimulus, in the latter part of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, there was organized a company with the ambitious title of "The Minnesota and Pacific Railroad Company." Its line extended from the steamboat-wharf in Saint Paul to the Falls of Saint Anthony. There were ten miles of track, including sidings, one engine, two box cars and a dozen flat cars for logs.
The railroad didn't seem to thrive. There was no paying passenger traffic to speak of. Passengers got aboard all right, but on being pressed for fares they felt insulted and jumped off, just as you would now if you got a ride with a farmer and he asked you to pay. Possibly, a rudimentary disinclination to pay fare still remains in most of us, like the hereditary indisposition of the Irish to pay rent.
No one ever thought it possible that a railroad could compete with a steamboat, and it was a long time after this that Commodore Vanderbilt had the temerity to build a railroad along the banks of the Hudson and be called a lunatic.
So there being no passenger traffic, the farmers carrying their grist to mill, and the logs being floated down the river to the mills, the railroad was in a bad way. Something had to be done, so the Minnesota and Pacific was reorganized, and a new road, the Saint Paul and Pacific, bought it out, with all its land grants. The intent of the new road was to strike right up into the woods for ten or twenty miles above Minneapolis and bring down logs that otherwise would have to be hauled to the river. For a time this road paid, with the sale of the odd-numbered sections of land that went with it.
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-seven, James J. Hill became the Saint Paul agent of this railroad. He had quit his job with J. W. Bass, to become agent for the Northwestern Packet Line; and as the railroad ran right to his door he found it easy to serve both the steamboat company and the railroad.