Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  THE MAN WHO SETTLED the last stretch of the northland didn’t grow up in the white-gloved world of J. P. Morgan, Pierre Samuel du Pont, or John Jacob Astor III. James Hill was raised in a log cabin in Upper Canada’s Eramosa Township. His father was a journeyman farmer who died when Hill was fourteen. Hill attended middle school and was tutored in math and English by a local reverend. The reverend noticed that his student was an avid reader and excelled in algebra and geometry. Hill was ambitious and independent from a young age and took on extra reading and schoolwork. When he was seventeen, he set out to travel the world. His first destination: the Orient. He got as far as Saint Paul, Minnesota.

  Saint Paul was the northern terminus for more than a thousand steamboats a year coming up the Mississippi in the 1850s. From there, settlers typically headed to northland outposts in Minnesota or Dakota Territory. Hill took a job as a bookkeeper for a steamboat company shortly after he arrived in 1856, then worked for a wholesale grocer. He learned how freight moved, how to cut corners, and how to profit in the transit business. When the railroad came to Saint Paul, he built a warehouse and ferry pier to make transitioning goods between the two easier. The business did well, and he invested profits in the coal trade. When he was thirty-two years old, he started his own steamboat line with a partner—delivering settlers to Winnipeg country and bringing wheat back.

  When the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad went into receivership following the Panic of 1873, Hill bought it with a partner and extended the line to the US-Canada border—where it met the Canadian Winnipeg train. In 1879, the renamed Saint Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway Company was valued at $728,000. Five years later, with Hill at the helm, it was worth $25 million.

  In his memoir, Highways of Progress, Hill writes: “Nations, like men, are travellers. Each one of them moves, through history, toward what we call progress and a new life or toward decay and death.” Hill was not one to understate. He was a towering, thick-set man with a bushy white beard. On a reconnaissance trip for his steamboat company, he rode a dogsled to the Red River and set his guide’s dislocated shoulder on the way home. He scouted potential train routes on horseback, inspecting the terrain and grade. If a locomotive was stuck in the snow, he got out of his private car and shoveled. After service began on a line, he would buy a ticket and ride the train undercover in a fifteen-dollar suit to inspect his employees and equipment.

  The transcontinental-railroad boom was long over when Hill decided to build the Great Northern. The Panic of 1873, caused mainly by overbuilding of railroads, had bankrupted more than a hundred US rail lines, including the Northern Pacific. Hill had made a hobby of flipping bankrupt businesses throughout his career, and he had a reputation for making money where others could not. He founded the Great Northern Railway in 1889 and completed the line to Seattle four years later. The railroad was the only transcontinental built without government subsidies.

  The first passengers boarded the train in June 1893. Selling tickets and hauling cargo was only half of the railroad business. Transcontinental lines in the West built entire civilizations around their tracks to keep the railroad profitable. If a section of the route was unpopulated, they bought a company and relocated its plants alongside the tracks. If workers or homesteaders needed a center from which to conduct their businesses, they built a town, sent out marketing literature, and hired agents to populate it.

  Railroad companies found millions of willing settlers in Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. They offered credit to buyers, free passage across the Atlantic, and land for two to eight dollars an acre. “Buyer expeditions” left American port cities for elaborate reception houses on the plains. Railroads maintained agencies in London, Liverpool, Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia. The Northern Pacific created its own Bureau of Immigration. Buyers could land on the East Coast, transfer directly to a train that would take them to their homestead, and be processed as US citizens along the way.

  Much of the marketing literature was fiction. Holland immigrants in 1892 were told that the climate around a new colony in Alamosa, Colorado, was “Mediterranean.” During their first arctic winter, many died of diphtheria and scarlet fever in dilapidated barracks. The Northern Pacific, on the verge of bankruptcy, told customers: “Every disease in the U.S. West has been cured.” The Union Pacific described the parched Platte Valley as a “flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses and watered by numerous streams.” Brochures pointed to the financial success of farmers like Oliver Dalrymple in North Dakota, claiming that all it took was a plow and some hard work to get going.

  Twenty years after the last spike was pounded in the Great Northern line, the land around it represented some of the last open territory in the West. Hill needed farmers to populate it, but he needed them to grow agricultural commodities—things he could then transport to metropolitan markets. Companies like the Dutch house Prins & Zwanenburg executed his vision, creating entire towns across the northland. The towns Friesland and Groningen, north of Minneapolis, offered prebuilt farmsteads, including a house, barn, and stable on forty acres of land. German investors from the Ruhr Valley bought in, and developers built grain elevators and hotels along the tracks, then sold off parcels around them.

  Hill’s agents curried favor with newspaper editors in Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands by buying full-page ads promoting homesteads. They donated money to churches across Europe and kept close ties with the clergy, who put in a good word for them regarding the integrity and goodwill of the Great Northern Railway. Great Northern brochures stated that “chinook winds” made winters temperate in Montana, that “heat prostrations” were unknown. They claimed that Montana farmers were so prosperous that they all carried checkbooks.

  The US government, which was heavily invested in the railroads, doubled the size of homestead grants to 320 acres in 1909. Homestead entries in Montana grew from five million in 1909 to thirty-five million in 1919. The Great Northern hauled a thousand emigrant cars west in the first three months of 1910. In one month, the railroad’s land office in Havre, Montana, recorded sixteen hundred entries taking possession of half a million acres of land. After the new owners arrived at the station, a locator would find them and take them to their plot. Some turned around and caught the first train east. Others broke down in tears.

  Much of the farmland that Hill was trying to sell along his tracks was located west of the one-hundredth meridian, in the heart of the Great American Desert. Global weather patterns were no match for his vision. He built a laboratory in Saint Paul to examine soil along the railroad and study ways to make it more fertile. He dispatched special “seed improvement” trains to inform farmers about new technology, and he embraced the dry-farming movement of the early 1900s. The sometimes dubious science behind the campaign claimed that techniques like subsoil packing and deep plowing allowed seeds to grow anywhere, without water. The Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Montana State Board of Agriculture, as well as anyone with a stake in western real estate, got on board. The Dry Farming Congress pulled huge crowds throughout the West—and even larger grants for “scientific research.” Promoters, scientists, and US Geological Survey officials added another lucrative theory: “Rain follows the plow.” The concept: steam engines, plowing, and human activity induced precipitation. The Santa Fe railroad advertised its own rain line, a fictitious meridian that progressed west at eighteen miles a year, just in front of new construction.

  Hill proselytized on irrigation, summer fallowing, strip farming, and the virtues of homesteading from the caboose of his train as he rolled through northland settlements like Saint Cloud, Fargo, Grand Forks, Billings, Helena, Portland, and Seattle. He awarded prizes to the most productive farms in the region and set up display cases of golden northland-grown wheat. He hired an agricultural expert to manage forty-five experimental farms along the line—and figure out a way to make something sprout. His sermons caught on, and the northland grew behind him, earning Hill a new nickname: the Empire B
uilder.

  A GUIDED TOUR LEAVES the Glacier Park Lodge lobby every day at 5:00 p.m. I joined a group of elderly tourists and listened to a young guide dressed in railroad overalls. He told us that James Hill’s son Louis W. Hill designed the lodge—and a chain of interconnected alpine hotels in the park. Louis Hill built the lodges between 1910 and 1915 to compete with “healing chalets” in the Alps and marketed them to wealthy easterners. Guests could hike or take a car between each lodge, spending weeks touring the grand peaks of the Northern Rockies.

  The tour shuffled around the ground floor as the guide told stories about the Hills, the Blackfeet, and the many antiques in the lodge. James Hill wanted buffalo skulls to hang in the lobby. Because there were no more buffalo in the West, he hired archaeologists to recover skulls from the site of a Blackfeet buffalo jump. Plaster replicas were illuminated from behind at night. Louis added Japanese lanterns as well—a bid to attract the growing Japanese travel class.

  The tour group itself was a thing of antiquity. I was the only one under the age of eighty. The comb-over on the man beside me was a work of art. It looked like eagle feathers were woven into it. A man on the opposite side of the crowd had his eyes closed for 90 percent of the tour. Most of the trivia that the guide shared was met with blank stares. Hill had hired Blackfeet families to pitch teepees in the hotel’s front yard and wear traditional dress. The Blackfeet wanted ninety dollars an acre for the land when Hill first approached them. Hill refused. He then had Congress pressure the tribe into selling their land for thirty dollars an acre. The price was so good that Hill bought an extra thousand acres for a golf course.

  The guide announced that he had a special treat for the end of the tour. We followed him into a side room where luggage was stored. “You can’t usually get in here,” he said, pushing a few bags to the side. Six large-format, black-and-white photographs, shot by Roland Reed in the late 1800s, hung from the walls. They were stunning pictures of the Blackfeet and the mountains they once lived in. Reed had staged most of his photographs, the guide said, but these were realistic scenes. Behind the riders, massive white glaciers clung to the mountains. There were no roads, buildings, or red buses. Before whites arrived, Blackfeet Indians harvested lodgepole pines, furs, and berries from the Lewis Range in the summer, before heading back to the plains to hunt buffalo.

  “If I could have anything in this lodge,” the guide said, “I would take this one photograph.” The image was of two Blackfeet riders on a grassy knoll. Behind them were a forest and a few high peaks. Their hair was braided. The one in the front wore deerskins; the one behind wore blankets. Mist covered a valley at the foot of the mountains. There was no sun—just a dark line between earth and sky.

  Amid the cedars, buffalo skulls, and antique china, the photo was indeed the only object in the lodge of extraordinary value. It was a split second in time from a lost world. “I like showing people this last,” the guide said. “I like them to know that we weren’t the first people to live here.”

  THE STORM LET UP the next morning. I followed the Great Northern tracks west out of the mountains and across the Idaho border. A black wall of clouds hung over the peaks behind me. The front broke apart twenty miles down the road, and I saw the sun for the first time in three days. Striations of cloud, precipitation, and wind swirled in the foothills. There were clouds within clouds—puffy cumulonimbus up high, lenticulars capping the high peaks—and rain streaking to the prairie.

  Hill’s train, now called the Empire Builder, steamed east on the opposite side of the valley as I turned south toward Coeur d’Alene. Idaho’s northland sits like a bookmark between Washington and Montana. It is a no-man’s-land between the West and the Pacific Northwest. Many northlanders there stand alone as well. I followed the Kootenay River past Ruby Ridge—where white supremacist Randy Weaver was shot by US Marshals and the FBI in 1992. In Coeur d’Alene, a man dressed like Uncle Sam waved a flag at an intersection that read: “Do you know your constitution?” Twenty miles south, in Benewah County, separatists had recently advertised a “fortress” housing community called the Citadel. Requirements for members included keeping an AR-15 rifle and a thousand rounds of ammo nearby at all times, maintaining provisions for at least a year, and being able to shoot targets at twenty yards with a handgun.

  I met a leader of one of Idaho’s many militia groups in Coeur d’Alene. Jeff Stankiewicz cofounded the Idaho Light Foot Militia in 2009. Light Foot battalions—there are eight across the state—call themselves a “constitutional militia.” They recognize their right to exist under the Second Amendment, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

  The line has been interpreted in many ways. To Jeff it represents an obligation to gather regularly in a field, wear a camouflage uniform, carry various “tactical” items, set up communication and medical tents, and shoot thousands of bullets at paper targets. “We are not a political organization, and we are not a private organization,” he said. “We exist mainly because the state legislature isn’t doing what they are supposed to be doing. The legislature is supposed to be arming, equipping, and disciplining the militia, and they don’t. The only part of the militia that they do is the National Guard. And they’re all in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

  Jeff waited for me outside the fabrication company he manages. He is not the kind of muscled militia leader you see in the movies or on the internet. He is average height and a bit portly, with dark-brown hair swept back from his forehead and a thick mustache. He wore a red button-down shirt and blue jeans with an elastic waist the day we met. He gave me the kind of cheery welcome you’d expect from a car salesman, then led me to his office.

  Jeff grew up in Connecticut and moved to Idaho in the 1990s. He migrated to the northland for the same reasons many did—freedom, space, nature, isolation. “I wanted to get away, to be more independent,” he said. “I wanted to rely more on myself for things.” He was walking the aisles of a gun show in Boise when a man sitting at a booth handed him a pocket copy of the Constitution. The booth was run by the John Birch Society, a far-right, anticommunist advocacy group formed in the 1950s. Jeff bought a copy of New American magazine that the man was selling and over the next few months changed his worldview.

  “Look at the ten planks of the communist manifesto and then look at our government,” he said. “The Constitution? We don’t follow that at all. The confines on their power are not there. Almost everything was supposed to be left to the states. Start reading the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, then start to figure out where the founders came from and why they wanted the government this way.”

  Most militia in Idaho’s northland are “secret squirrel groups,” Jeff said, that meet in basements and spend their time collecting and firing guns. “They typically start with one person who declares himself a general, then tells others that they will be his men,” Jeff said. “In Montana, some groups use a cell structure, where only one person in each cell knows the contact information of another.”

  Six jars of preserved cucumbers and carrots sat on a shelf behind Jeff’s desk. He keeps a pump bottle of hand sanitizer next to his keyboard and a three-by-four-foot target of a mustachioed man holding a revolver on the back of his office door. There were ten bullet holes between the man’s navel and forehead. “I did that reaction-shooting at the range,” he said. “Where you don’t aim, you just go.”

  Jeff’s cheeks get red when he gets excited, and he gets excited when he talks about training. He is not a prepper, because part of being in the militia means you have to leave home during an emergency. He does stock up on canned food at the grocery store when it’s on sale and stores fifty-five-gallon barrels of wheat that he buys from a Bonners Ferry farmer. He keeps an AK-47, several pistols, and an 8-millimeter Mauser rifle with plenty of ammo on hand. In training sessions, his battalion practices map reading, land navigation, first aid, battle tactics
, discerning fields of fire, hand signals, field marches, noise and light discipline, patrolling, directing traffic, and “halts.” At a recent training event, members learned how to suture using pig’s feet and how to insert an IV by sticking each other with expired IVs donated by a local EMS unit. A few months before, the Light Foots had been called up in Sandpoint. They wore blaze-orange vests over their camo and managed traffic for a five-kilometer run. “Someone calls the Sheriff every now and then and says there are thirty guys marching down the road in camo,” he said. “It’s funny because our rally point if comms go down is the sheriff’s office.”

  Squirrel groups talk about taking down the government, Jeff said. The Light Foots’ mission is to be ready to help. Scenarios in which the militia might be called on include a meltdown of the US economy and ensuing chaos, invasion by foreign entities, natural disasters, and search-and-rescue missions. Operations that the Light Foots will not undertake are listed on the group’s website: “We will NOT obey orders to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.”

  Jeff walked me outside after the interview. The skies over Coeur d’Alene were deep blue. I said winter would be here soon, and he told me about a training mission nearby where he and his battalion had slept on a mountain peak in two feet of snow. It was fourteen degrees, and a canteen he kept inside his sleeping bag froze solid. In the morning they successfully neutralized their target, which was a pile of crates and cardboard boxes.

  SOMETHING CHANGED THAT AFTERNOON. The landscape flattened. It looked like the northern plains, except there were mountains in the distance. The peaks on the Washington border weren’t tall like those in Montana; they were low and forested like those in Maine. Five hundred miles from the Pacific, the landscapes of the northland were getting mixed up in my head.