Documentary looks at the life of railroad giant James J Hill

After more than two decades in production, a new documentary about James J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway, is receiving glowing reviews.

Produced and directed by Stephen Sadis and Kyle Kegley and released on the Vimeo streaming service Sept. 30, “The Empire Builder: James J. Hill and The Great Northern Railway” tells the story of one of the nation’s most influential industry titans from his birth in Ontario, Canada in 1838 to his death in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1916.

The idea for the documentary began in 1996 when Sadis was looking for a new project after completing a film chronicling the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban Railway, but Sadis soon found his new subject was not quite what he expected.

“I thought I was pursuing a story in which there was going to be a lot of unscrupulous machinations going on and backroom deals and things of that nature. I thought it was going to be filled with that kind of drama, but every stone I unturned never seemed to produce that type of story,” Sadis explained. “Instead, the opposite happened. I continued to gain more and more respect for this fellow’s integrity and drive and greater ambition for building something.”

From his days working as a shipping agent on the shores of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota, to his ownership of highly successful coal and steamboat businesses, Hill’s keen business acumen was apparent from an early age.

In 1878, Hill organized a syndicate to buy a Minnesota railroad that had gone bankrupt three times. With a driving determination and meticulous oversight, Hill turned what was once described as “two streaks of rust and a right of way,” into a railroad empire. Over the span of 15 years, he blanketed the Midwest’s Red River Valley with lines, then pointed his rails west, crossing the Rockies and Cascades to reach Seattle.

Hill’s great achievement continues to this day as the BNSF Railway.

ALONG THE way, Hill had personal relationships with seven presidents, including befriending a young Ulysses S. Grant, who spent a night on his sofa as a weary traveler long before gaining military fame during the Civil War.

Hill’s impact on the Northwest can be seen throughout the region with the towns of Hillsboro, North Dakota along with Hill County, Montana, Hillyard, Washington and Jim Hill Mountain near Stevens Pass in the Cascade Range bearing his name.

“He was a long-term thinker that was less concerned with short term gains and more concerned with how he could develop the northern frontier and help people move into agriculture to benefit the country. His genius and persistence made quite an impact,” Sadis said. “He was a contemporary of a lot of titans of industry, but I would say he did far more than those individuals in terms of the reach that he had and the lives he impacted. He put so many cities on the map and jump started so many industries.”

THE MORE he learned about Hill, Sadis felt more and more that his was a story that needed to be told.

“This story is so complex. If this were just the story of someone building a railroad from point A to point B, that would be one thing. There were all of these elements around the building of the line that became quite a story.”

Despite his continued hard work on the project, Sadis said funding was hard to come by.

“Hardly anyone knows who he was and among those who do know about him, there are presumptions that he was the type of person I originally thought he was. Every time I would write a grant, I would get rejections saying this is just another story of a white man exploiting the resources around him,” Sadis said. “Getting past people not knowing of him or only considering him a robber baron made things quite difficult.”

What began as a one-hour script in 2001 morphed into a two-hour script with nine interviews conducted in 2008.

In 2017, Sadis and Kegley formed Great Northern Filmworks to complete the project, which ended with a four-part, four-hour long documentary.

Available to stream through Vimeo for $14.98 or as a two-DVD set through Great Northern Filmworks website for $44.99, the documentary is an interesting look at the life of an often forgotten American business giant.

“Hill was an individual that figured out how to understand the direction of the country and take advantage of that. He is almost like a Forest Gump type character in the sense that he was at so many turning points in the evolution of industry in this country,” Sadis said. “The man led a fascinating life.”