With anxious eyes Hill watched the rising and waning fortunes of these various railroad enterprises. His investigation led him to believe that the St. Paul & Pacific offered the greatest possibilities. For seventeen long years he worked hard, dreamed his dreams, and added to his capital. Then came the opportunity. The St. Paul & Pacific had become a wrecked property. In it he saw the possibilities for which he had worked and saved. With a clear realization of the tremendous step that he was taking, he cast his entire fortune into the balance, and with the assistance of several associates took over the property, and with it its enormous debt of over $33,000,000. James J. Hill at last held control of a railroad. He had bought a property that was bankrupt and was described as “two streaks of rust reaching out into the desert”; but in this bold beginning was the germ of the great railroad system which, under the name of the Great Northern, was to bring him fame and fortune in the years to come. In the six years that followed, Mr. Hill extended his railroad to the Red River and connected with the government line from Winnipeg. By this extension the rich lands of Minnesota were opened to immigrants, and the great wheat-lands of the Northwest were connected with the markets of the United States. The risk that he had taken was justified; but to his wife and to the friends who knew him it seemed less great, for they knew the character of the man, and to know him was to feel complete confidence in any action which he determined to take. “All his life it was his custom to know all the facts about anything in which he was interested, a good deal earlier and a little better than anybody else. For twenty years he had lived in the country where the situation had been preparing. For four or five years he had been consumed with anxiety to get possession of this property. He alone fully understood its present value; he alone conceived its future with any degree of justness.” But now his dreams of a greater empire began to be realized. The St. Paul & Pacific, under his able management, was earning money and building up a surplus. In 1883 Mr. Hill extended it to Helena, Montana. And now his belief in the development of the Northwest was more strongly confirmed with each new step. His vision already pictured a railroad stretching across the prairies and over the tremendous barrier of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and the great harbors of Puget Sound. This was no impractical dream, but an idea founded on fact and experience; it was a great constructive enterprise.