Ten years later, in 1893, Mr. Hill began actively to carry out his plan of extending his railroad from Helena to the coast. It is hard to realize the tremendous difficulties which faced him. On the one hand, the Rocky Mountains seemed to block his path; on the other, a financial panic made the obtaining of the money necessary for the project seem almost an impossibility. But he was undismayed; every obstacle was overcome, the road was built, and the empire again extended its boundary, this time to the blue waters of the Pacific. Following the completion of the Great Northern, as the consolidation of his various railroads was now called, to Puget Sound, Mr. Hill began his struggle to obtain the control of other railroads in order to combine them all into one vast coherent system. The Northern Pacific Railroad was the first to be added, and then the Burlington System was secured and incorporated into the vast development of his plan. Fifty years before, the penniless country boy had left the small village of his birth to seek his fortune; and now, after this life of usefulness, he found himself able to pay in cash over $200,000,000 for the Northern Pacific Railway System. Mr. Hill believed that the tilling of the soil was the true basis of success; that on the soil rested the stability of government, and that from it came the wealth of the world. To him, his vast systems of railroads were the means of opening to settlement regions of arable land, and later, when these lands had been cultivated, of connecting them with the rest of the world and affording markets for their produce. To increase population and industry along a railroad was the surest way of making the railroad profitable. He believed that a railroad would be rich or poor along with the farmers who cultivated the fields beside its tracks. In order to help the thousands of farmers along the lines of his railroads to make their farms more profitable, Mr. Hill bought, wherever in the world they could be best obtained, herds of the finest cattle. These he bred on his own farms, and many he gave away to the farmers for their own breeding. In all, he gave away more than eight thousand head of cattle and hogs, and for many years offered prizes for the best cattle raised by the farmers. “We must have better farming,” he said. “We must have more intelligent methods. Experience has shown that there is no way in which they can do this so well as by raising cattle, pigs, and horses, and by dairying.”