The Great Northern Railroad

[Murphy Siding]

(Well would you look at that! One whole paragraph, and I'm already confused![:)]). Without making me go up to the third floor of my house to look this up, which pass did the GN use to get over the mountains? Marias or Stevens pass. I thought NP went through a bankruptcy early on, allowing Hill "interests'' to aquire control of the NP. How did Hill feed off the NP land grants? How did GN do it without land grants?

[Anonymous]

It's simple: John Stevens stumbles across Marias Pass, and suddenly James Hill is a genius. Without Marias Pass, the GN would have been BY FAR the worst of the Northern transcons in terms of profile and alignment, worse than the Northern Pacific, worse than the Milwaukee, worse than the Union Pacific. Hill got lucky that one time, and that plus his feeding off the NP land grants over the years was enough to carry the GN over what was undoubtedly THE WORST crossing of the Cascades via Stevens Pass.

(Well, would you look at that! The whole history of the GN summed up in one consise paragraph. Betcha ya'll can't do that!)

[Murphy Siding]

In reading things about the Great Northern, some things always seem to be presented as fact : James J. Hill is always portrayed as sort of a benevolent robber baron. The GN is always potrayed as the strong,independant ,profitable railroad that didn't need land grants to get to the Pacific. The BN merger was sort of a *technicality*, for tax purposes, as GN,NP,CBQ & SPS were under common ownership and management for some 70 years. Is this more the less way it was? or are we missing some details? Any good Great Northern historians out there?