When in 1872 the English Reverend Alexander King, Secretary of the Freedmen's Mission Aid Society, returned to Blackheath (London) from his travels in the American West, he wrote a letter to the editor of the London Observer. Said he: “I believe our great national problem … must be solved by … the British occupation of America. Emigration, on a grand scale, to the trans-Mississippi regions will prove the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon people, and our cheapest and most effectual remedy for some of our most formidable national evils.”

Some historians of Kansas City claim, with an arresting simplicity, that the principal reason for that city's growth and prosperity is to be found in the enterprise of its citizens. And, although enterprise is by no means a self-explanatory notion, it seems a compellingly obvious way to account for the circumstances of the city's formative years. Much of that history can be written around a series of crises of decision, urgent moments when poor judgment, or the faulty execution of policy, might have plunged the city into obscurity or downright decadence. Yet such was the city's good fortune, we are told, that at precisely these times brilliant leadership seems always to have been forthcoming, and enterprising men—usually businessmen—can be discerned standing in the storm center pointing the way to safety and success.

The work of converting the undeveloped forest resources of the Lake States into usable forms absorbed the energies of thousands of individual entrepreneurs. Their combined activity was scarcely able to meet the insatiable demand from the growing number of settlements that dotted the Midwestern prairies and from villages throughout the nation that were growing into towns or mushrooming into major cities. A universal building material was indispensable during a time of rapid economic expansion. Moreover, in the prevailing Age of Wood, white pine lumber, of the finest quality and incredibly low in price, was fortuitously available in abundance.

A Figure common to all frontiers was the businessman who made the transition from pioneer merchant to financier. This paper is an examination of the early career of one such merchant on the remote underdeveloped Oregon frontier during the 1850's and 1860's.

In his valedictory address when retiring as Chairman of the Board of Directors in 1912, James J. Hill said of the Great Northern Railway Company, “The financial outlook of this company is as well assured as that of most governments. … No emergency can surprise it.” 1 The rise of the Great Northern to this almost impregnable position revolved mainly around Hill's far-famed leadership and two major commodities—wheat and iron ore.