James J. Hill (1838-1916) was, without question, America’s greatest railroad entrepreneur, and probably not one in a thousand Americans know who he was. He built the US’s best transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern Railway, which not coincidentally was privately funded, received no government land grants, and consequently was not tied up in the government’s strings and red tape that helped put all the other transcontinental lines in repeated bankruptcy. Hill and the Great Northern made appearances in Robert Gore’s novel of the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Pinnacle. The Great Northern became the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Warren Buffett, who knows a great asset, bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2009 and it is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. From Hill, date uncertain:
The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician.
