Becoming | Empire Builders

The Great Northern Railway changed Northwest Montana forever. Who else but Americans could have built it?

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

The Empire Builder Documentary: https://greatnorthernfilmworks.com/

The Great Northern Railway changed Northwest Montana forever. Who else but Americans could have built it?

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Eric Carlson art: https://www.instagram.com/esccarlson/ Behind the scenes pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmSxSe2J

The Empire Builder Documentary: https://greatnorthernfilmworks.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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[bell clanging and train sound approaching]

Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[train horn sounds]

Daniel Lombardi: Just about every day I hear the rumble of trains throughout West Glacier. Whether I'm inside or out, the sound of trains punctuate a lot of daily life in Glacier.

Michael Faist: And that line, running along the park's southern boundary, has been in service since the steam engine nearly 130 years ago. And anything with that long of a legacy leaves a mark. Tell me this, Daniel. What do you think the most common name for a business is around here?

Daniel: I feel like Glacier being in the name of a lot of things.

Michael: Yes. There's a lot of businesses named Glacier.

Daniel: Glacier cat groomers, Glacier golf, Glacier gas. There's a bunch.

Michael: So that shouldn't be surprising. But close behind are businesses named Great Northern. There's the Great Northern Veterinary Office, Great Northern Concrete, Great Northern Llama Ranch, close to 40 other businesses that share that name in Flathead County alone. So today our local railroad is serviced by Amtrak and BNSF, or Burlington Northern Santa Fe. But it was their predecessor, the Great Northern Railway, that started it all.

Old Film: [audio sounds crackly and tinny; the narrator’s accent is of the early 1900s] Great Northern skirts the southern boundary, of Glacier Park for 57 miles. [ambient music begins to play in the video] This is Great Northern. Not the railroad or the train, but this car and its contents. A rolling inventory of America's wealth.

[Headwaters season 3 theme begins playing; starting with mandolin]

Michael: My question: who built the Great Northern Railway?

[theme continues; a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments come in, before the music finishes]

Daniel: History is shaped by great men wielding absolute power, men with vast vaults of money and epic dreams. Executives. Kings. Presidents. Generals. It is these men who bend the world and shape history into new chapters. The rest of us are mere pawns. Or at least that's how one theory goes. [a subtle electronic beat begins] You're listening to Headwaters, a podcast about how Glacier National Park connects to everything else. This is Season Three: Becoming. It's about the people, the profit margins, and the promises that defined the West before a national park tried to do the same. This episode starts with one of history's great men, James J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway. He cut a literal line across the country through towns, tribes and the edge of what would become Glacier National Park.

Michael: And in the process became one of the most powerful businessmen of his time, even if it didn't start that way.

Daniel: And you've been looking into that history of the Great Northern, both from the bottom up and the top down.

Michael: Yeah, from a lot of different angles. Working here, you hear about Great Northern all the time. You get to hear a lot about all the things they would go on to do to shape the park. But what I've never understood is how did they get here in the first place? Like who built the Great Northern Railway? And how, after eight years of living here, have I never ridden the train?

Daniel: So where do we start?

Michael: We start at the beginning.

Michael: [to Stephen] Assuming I have never heard of him before, who is J.J. Hill? And why should I know his name?

Stephen Sadis: [on the phone] Who is James J. Hill?

[dramatic violin music begins]

Empire Builder Documentary: [movie narrator voice] He was known as the Empire Builder and the Devil's Curse. Streets, towns and counties were named in his honor, along with a persistent and invasive weed. He was mythologized in novels and was the subject of folk songs and union battle cries.

[music fades out]

Michael: I called Stephen Sadis, a producer and filmmaker who just finished a four-part docu-series called The Empire Builder: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, which you'll be hearing clips of throughout. At just 17 years old, Hill moved from Ontario, where he was born, to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Within 15 years, he went from a job as an entry level bookkeeper to running a warehouse of his own and operating a steamship company. He had made a name for himself.

Empire Builder Documentary: [different narrators voice each quote, with fiddle music beneath] Local newspapers took note. "This remarkable young man has kept accurate statistics for many years of all the freight coming in." "J.J. Hill is prepared to give shippers the lowest rates ever quoted from here to Eastern Points." "He beats all his competitors and in return gets the bulk of the transportation business. When Mr. Hill starts to accomplish a thing, he does it complete."

Michael: If you needed to ship something or have something shipped to you, he could do it faster and cheaper than the other guy. He was like Amazon, if they used ox carts and steamboats.

Stephen: He had a good reputation. He said what he meant and did what he said and people trusted him.

Michael: [to Stephen] Why did he want—why did he get into the railroad business?

Stephen: You know, I think he had visions of a transportation empire. I mean, it's very clear in early Saint Paul history, when the town got its first locomotive, I mean, he was constantly saying to other people what he would do if he would run the line. I mean, it's to the point where people were like, “Yeah, yeah, Jim, we know you'd do a much better job.”

Michael: Hill had an incredible track record for a young entrepreneur. And yet, when he finally bought a small bankrupt railroad and announced his plans to build it all the way to the West, people called him an idiot.

Daniel: I need to know more. Why?

Michael: Well, there were a few reasons. First of all, honestly, he was late to the game. He wanted to build a transcontinental line through Montana and onto the coast. But that line already existed. The Northern Pacific ran through southern Montana, and the Canadian Pacific, just to the north, ran through Alberta.

Stephen: So it was a fourth transcontinental that would thread a line between these other two, and it was unnecessary. It was ridiculous.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice with violin music beneath] The New York Times stated that no sane man could think of paralleling these lines without inviting bankruptcy, and dubbed the notion "Hill's Folly."

Daniel: So it sounds like there just wasn't a need, basically. Right.

Michael: Like, the region already has two railroads. Why would it need a third?

Daniel: Yeah.

Michael: But the other reason people called this idea Hill's Folly was the money. Building 3000 miles of railroad isn't cheap, but for a while there, the U.S. government would pay you if you tried.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice with violin music beneath] Lincoln put his pen to the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the government to offer loans and land grants to railroad owners for every mile of track laid from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.

Michael: This policy worked. It jumpstarted railroad construction, but it also encouraged railroad companies to game the system, building curvy lines in order to gobble up as much land as possible.

Stephen: I mean, really, the real estate business began with the railroads. At one point, the railroads owned like 6% of all the land in the United States, which is, you know, mammoth.

Michael: By the time Hill was getting started, Congress had caught on. They stopped giving out land or loans to railroad companies. And without this assistance, Hill had to find private funding. He had to convince people that this line, which The New York Times was calling a bad idea, was a worthwhile investment.

Daniel: Okay. So what's different here is that all the other railroad companies, they were getting federal aid.

Michael: Right.

Daniel: But Hill, he had to pay his own way for the Great Northern.

Michael: Exactly. And letters from the Times suggest he found raising money to be the hardest part of the job. Networking, schmoozing, owing favors. But it paid off. He sold investors on the idea that his line could be built better and more efficiently than any other.

Stephen: His mantra was the lowest grade, least curvature, and shortest distance, and everything banked on that.

Michael: What was next was finding a route that would make that possible.

Stephen: As Hill's heading west, he's—he's chosen his route. And it happens that he needs to get through Indian territory.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice, with sad violin music beneath] Beginning in 1851, the Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, River Crow, and Assiniboine were restricted to reservation land that spread across much of Montana territory. But over the course of 30 years, the reservation had been reduced nine times by treaty and executive order.

Michael: But tribal land was still in Hill's way. He couldn't build through the Fort Berthold or Blackfeet reservations in present day North Dakota and Montana without a right of way. So in 1886, he started putting pressure on Congress and the president to open the land.

Stephen: Hill was working backchannels in order to get that approval to bring his lines through Indian territory.

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice, with sparse guitars strumming beneath] Hill, for his part, was busy writing letters to congressmen. Mr. McGinnis is interested on behalf of his territory in a bill granting right of way to railroads in northern Montana. Any assistance you can render him will be a personal favor to me and to our friends, for which I will be glad at any time to reciprocate. Yours very truly, James J. Hill.

[pensive music begins to play]

Michael: Ultimately, it worked. They passed a bill that granted Hill a right of way, but it wasn't a permission slip through tribal lands. It required tribes already reeling from famine to give up a massive amount of reservation land, an area almost equivalent to the state of South Carolina. Here's Lea Whitford, a former Montana state senator and Blackfeet tribal member that Stephen interviewed to get the Blackfeet perspective on Hill blazing his railroad through Montana.

Lea Whitford: [speaking slowly, emotionally; flute music plays beneath] The 1888 agreement that came, well that was just right after the starvation winter. You have hundreds of people that are dying. You have leaders that have to make some real hard decisions. And what do we have of value? And so you have land. The Blackfeet are open to it because they have no choice.

Empire Builder Documentary: [dramatic narrator voice] The tribes living on the Blackfeet and Fort Berthold reservations accepted the terms drastically reducing their territory by 19.5 million acres.

Michael: While many are quick to celebrate Hill's efforts to privately finance the railroad, the highest price paid for his progress wasn't a financial one.

[pause]

Michael: In September of the next year, Hill would change the name of his business to the Great Northern Railway. That November, Montana became a state. And the month after that, surveyor John F Stevens, located Marias Pass, the lowest elevation crossing of the continental divide between Canada and New Mexico, and Hill's ticket to the Pacific Coast.

Stephen: That at least ensures Hill that he can get through the Rockies, not without enormous difficulty in construction, but there is a pass that is manageable in its elevation gain. And that sort of is the first piece in the puzzle.

Michael: The section of track that today borders the southern tip of Glacier was the proof Hill needed that his plan would work. By 1891, juggling an incredible amount of materials, manpower and unpredictable terrain, he laid rails over the Rockies, closing the distance on his transcontinental line.

Stephen: You know, you're talking about bringing thousands of railroad ties and tons of rails. It's like those cartoons where Daffy Duck is riding on the locomotive and he's laying down track in front of him. And it's not a whole lot different than that. [train on track noises begin and build] And so you have these 8000 men and 6000 animals, and you have to feed them, and you have to house them, and you have to take care of all sort of maladies that occur and injuries and whatnot. I mean, it's it's—it's like a mobile town that is building this line. It's an amazing achievement.

[train whistle sounds]

Empire Builder Documentary: [narrator voice, guitar music begins to play] On January 6th, 1893, just west of the town of Scenic Washington, the eastern and western sections of the Great Northern Railway were connected. As two superintendents took turns driving home the final spike, revolvers shot into the air [gunshots; cheering] amid the cheers of 200 rail workers. It was a moment that crystallized Hill's longtime dream of a transcontinental railway of his own.

Michael: It is hard to understand today how much Great Northern and railroads like it transformed the country. If you wanted to get from one side of the country to the other in 1800, it took maybe 4 to 6 months, either by arduous wagon trip or by sailing all the way around South America. In 1893, you can make the same trip by rail in less than a week. It's infiltrated our vocabulary in ways that I never really thought about, like "blowing off steam" might seem obvious, that's an expression from steam engines. But sidetracked, backtracked, even switchbacks, which I think of as being a trail thing, that's a train thing. And just the massive power that these lines had to dictate the future of a place. Like when Hill was building into the Flathead Valley, he had the choice to build south towards the first and largest town in the Flathead Valley, which was called Demersville. It had churches, banks, newspapers, over a thousand people. But Hill decided instead to found his own town just to the north, which he named Kalispell. Kalispell is the county seat today, and all that remains of Demersville is a cemetery. Great Northern transformed the landscape as it went and transformed Hill from the son of Irish farmers into one of the richest men alive, earning him the nickname the Empire Builder.

Stephen: You have this transformative technology that is making millionaires every week. I mean, it's not a whole lot different than when the internet emerged. He was enormously wealthy. He was at one time the third and another time the tenth wealthiest man in the country.

Michael: James J. Hill embodied what many people see as the American dream, the promise that you can achieve the impossible if you put in the work. And when we look back at this era of transcontinental railroads, it's often with pride, admiring everything our nation accomplished in spite of all the obstacles. [pensive electronic music begins] Take, for example, a speech in 1969. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe went to speak at a celebration -- the 100th anniversary of the very first transcontinental railroad. Here's what he said.

Voice Actor: [authoritatively, dramatically] Who else but Americans could drill ten tunnels in mountains three feet deep in snow? Who else but Americans could chisel through miles of solid granite? Who else but Americans could have laid ten miles of track in 12 hours?

Michael: He either didn't know or didn't share the answer to his own question.

[music ends, setting off the following line dramatically]

Voice Actor: [with echo beneath] Who else but Americans?

[street noise]

Michael: 30 minutes outside of Glacier sits the town of Whitefish, another town that Great Northern put on the map. And early on, it was home to a lot of great northern employees. I went to Whitefish this summer in search of a historic plaque.

Michael: [in the field; church bells clanging in the background] I think that’s it! Right on the corner.

Michael: Not long after the Great Northern Railway announced its plans for a division point in Whitefish. Whitefish had its first church. I don't know about you, but I love reading plaques like this. I've seen them all over the country—sometimes bronze, sometimes silver, always with some interesting context about the place I'm visiting. And yet I somehow didn't know that my own employer manages this program. A guy named Paul oversees the state of Montana.

Paul Lusignan: [on the phone] My name is Paul Lusignan. I'm a historian with the National Register of Historic Places Program within the National Park Service.

Michael: I could tell you that at the time of this recording, there are 63 different national parks. But I didn't know until this year that a small team of Park Service employees helps preserve over 90,000 small sites like this all over the country. What is the National Register program? If you had to describe it.

Paul: It is largely an honorary program, but it's a list of properties, cultural resources that are worthy of preservation.

Michael: Paul said "honorary" because listing something on the register doesn't freeze it in time. You can still make changes to a building, for example, but it helps ensure that federally funded projects minimize their impact on our shared history.

Paul: They have to review whether it will impact historic buildings or historic resources, the same way they have to take into account endangered species or water conservation.

Michael: The Register is a record of sites like this church that have historical significance and helps them share their story.

Michael: [in the field, reading the plaque; church bells clanging and street noise in the background] The committee chose a Romanesque revival style considered less ostentatious, masonry construction, heavily arched windows.

Michael: Nominations are collected by states and tribes who send them to Paul and his boss, who just might have the coolest sounding job title in the National Park Service: the Keeper of the National Register.

Paul: The Keeper has designated authority to me to list properties in the National Register. And this comes back to the good old days when the National Register was actually a book.

Michael: [laughing] A literal book!

Paul: It was a green book in which you opened the cover you wrote in the name of the property and the date of listing, and then you shut the book and it was listed in the National Register.

Michael: But the whole process begins at the ground level. Anyone can identify something of historical value in their community and nominate it for listing. You could if you wanted to. That's how this church in Whitefish wound up on the register. Congregation members led the charge, and that's how I learned about the railroad history preserved in their stained glass windows.

[greetings, church bells, street noise]

Paul Hayden: Good morning.

Michael: [in the field] Morning.

Paul: You coming in here?

Michael: [in the field] I am.

Michael: I was actually invited in for a visit and was greeted by interim pastor Paul Hayden.

Paul: Paul Hayden. Bob's right here.

Bob Paulus: Hello! You're Mike?

Michael: [in the field] Michael, yep.

Michael: And congregation members Bob Paulus and Jesse Fraser.

Michael: [in the field] Where are we right now?

Jessie Fraser: First Presbyterian Church of Whitefish, Whitefish Montana.

Michael: [in the field] Since this is all audio, would you mind describing the windows?

Bob: Describing ‘em?

Michael: [in the field] What do they look like? How tall are they?

Bob: Oh, I don't know the dimensions.

Michael: [in the field] Oh just eyeball it, doesn't need to be exact.

Bob: They're absolutely wonderful, beautiful… I don't know. [laughing]

Jessie: They're Tiffany style.

Bob: There you go.

Paul: 14 feet wide by six feet across.

Jessie: Oh, wow. I knew you came along for a reason. [everyone laughing]

Paul: From a minister’s standpoint, you'll notice that the pews are looking away from the windows, which I am very grateful for. [all laughing] Yeah you know, you're sitting there in church and being distracted—look, it's hard enough to keep people's attention as it is.

Michael: Each pair of windows was donated by local community members during the building's construction in 1921. And reading the dedications is a regular who's who of early Whitefish. There are prominent bankers and early loggers…

Jessie: They all put money in towards these windows. Special.

[pensive music begins to play]

Michael: But the pair of windows that brought me in read, "with gratitude from the Japanese."

Bob: And the Japanese said $705 for two windows.

Michael: More than $8500 today—a small fortune—donated by Japanese men who worked for Great Northern. Men James J. Hill hired to realize his dream. And men I'd never heard of before.

Voice Actor: [echoing] Who else but Americans.

[music ends]

Lucas Hugie: [on the phone] So they would hire whoever would be willing to work for the company, including Irish immigrants or recent immigrants.

Michael: To get some context, I turned to another national park site, Golden Spike National Historical Park.

Lucas: So we're located in Box Elder County in northern Utah, and it's where the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10th, 1869.

Michael: This is Lucas.

Lucas: Lucas Hugie. I'm the lead park ranger here at Golden Spike National Historical Park.

Michael: And I called him because the first Transcontinental Railroad, finished years before J.J. Hill joined the railroad business, set a precedent that everyone building out west would follow. They figured out who to hire.

Lucas: So you have people coming into the country, and they're not really anchored to any part of the country yet. And so when they find out that there's a chance to work on the railroad, make decent wages, they're willing to sign on for that.

Michael: Irish, German and Italian immigrants were laying the tracks westward from Iowa alongside Civil War veterans and recently emancipated Black Americans. But the Central Pacific, who was building east from Sacramento, they were having a hard time keeping anyone on the payroll.

Lucas: Every time that there was a gold strike somewhere, this workforce would disappear. These guys would, as soon as they got paid, walk off the job and go try their luck in the gold fields.

Michael: The promise of the gold rush drew thousands of people to California, including some of the first Chinese immigrants to the United States. Thousands of Chinese men emigrated to the U.S., but they weren't provided the same opportunity as other miners. Panic and prejudice among white Americans led to the passage of a foreign miners tax.

Lucas: And if you're a foreigner, specifically a foreigner from China, you actually could be taxed up to $20 a month to stake a gold mining claim.

Michael: Nearly $800 a month today. And so men who had crossed the Pacific in search of a better life instead found themselves stuck working someone else's claim for a fraction of the payout. Meanwhile, Central Pacific is desperate to end labor shortage and decide to hire 50 Chinese workers as a trial run.

Lucas: They ended up being fantastic workers because they didn't walk off the job at the end of the day when there was a gold mining strike.

Michael: Chinese men would soon make up most of the workforce on the Central Pacific, and as it turns out, the railroad also appreciated these workers because they could get away with paying them less.

Lucas: So you're looking at around $26 a month for, for these guys. The Union Pacific provided room and board for their workers. Whereas the Central Pacific, they just kind of let the Chinese fend for themselves. They had to pay for their own board or like wherever they're going to be sleeping. And they also had to pay for their own food.

Michael: As many as 20,000 Chinese laborers went on to help build the first transcontinental railroad. And this hiring practice became a template for other railroads building in the West.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating; Chinese string instruments playing in the background] The railroads needed workers and the Chinese needed jobs.

Michael: That voice, who you might recognize as George Takei, is from a documentary called From the Far East to the Old West, produced by the University of Montana.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating; Chinese string instruments playing in the background] Few people realize that Chinese labor made up most of the workforce on key sections of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Michael: In the face of backbreaking labor and deadly work with explosives, Chinese immigrant laborers were reliable and most importantly, in the railroad’s eyes, they were cheap. Which brings us back to Great Northern. Hill had recruited a lot of Scandinavian and German immigrants to help build his main line. But after the initial phase of construction, those employees either began to quit or ask for more money. This is where the other Western railroads turned to Chinese labor. But by the time Hill arrived in the West, the practice of hiring cheap Chinese workers, often in the place of white laborers who demanded higher pay, had driven loud and public anti-Chinese racism.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating, with other voices reading the quotes with crowd noise in the background; Chinese string instruments playing in the background] One especially lengthy and venomous commentary in the Missoula Gazette argued, "Our government erred in never allowing that race a foothold on our soil.” “They have, in Missoula as elsewhere, usurped places which could be filled by respectable men. And the time has come when measures should be taken to rid ourselves of this past, lest it destroy us. Resolved!"

Michael: This sentiment led to the passage of more anti-Chinese legislation and the first significant law restricting immigration to the United States.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating; Chinese string instruments playing in the background] The most far reaching was the 1882 Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration by Chinese laborers and their families.

Michael: Hill, arriving after the passage of the Exclusion Act, had to look elsewhere.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating; string instruments plucking in the background] But those railroads still wanted cheap labor with their supply of Chinese laborers cut off. The railroad barons once again looked across the Pacific to fill their needs, this time to Japan.

Linda Tamura: [on the phone] And actually the Japanese government was encouraging young Japanese men to go overseas to gain jobs.

Michael: That voice is Linda Tamura.

Linda: I'm Linda Tamura. I'm a proud orchard kid from Hood River, Oregon. I'm also a former elementary teacher and professor emerita of education at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Michael: Who I called to ask about Issei.

Michael: [to Linda] You know, for people who've never heard the term before. Could you describe what you say means?

Linda: Sure. They say we're the first generation of Japanese immigrants to the United States in Japanese. Ichi means one and sei means generation. So from ichi-sei we have Issei -- the first generation. My grandparents and their contemporaries.

Michael: [to Linda] How did you first learn about early Issei laborers in the U.S.?

Linda: I didn’t learn about Issei laborers from my grandparents or from other Japanese Americans, or even in high school or even college, because I learned about Western civilizations and Western immigrants. But in the early 1980s, my uncle suggested that I ask questions of my grandmother, Asio Nogi. She was in her eighties. Uncle Mam told me, "your grandma lived a really interesting life—came to the United States to marry your grandfather. She's still got a great memory, and she tells great stories. So why don't you talk to her?" Well, I did. My mom translated because Grandma spoke Japanese and I didn't. And Grandma began to tell me a little bit about her life, her immigration to the United States when she was 19 years old. I learned about Grandpa, their labor.

Michael: What began as a conversation with her grandmother turned into a project to document the experience of other Issei laborers—people at the bottom, not the top, of this railroad history.

Linda: My appetite was whetted, I wanted to learn more.

Michael: Linda described Japanese immigration to the U.S. as a push and a pull. And the pull came from U.S. companies like Great Northern—

Linda: And the push came from Japan.

Michael: You could find ads in Japanese newspapers titled How to Succeed in America.

Linda: They told us that Issei laborers could earn twice as much money in the United States as they might have in Japan. Some of the laborers who had gone to the United States came back and they were wearing suits and pretending that they were fairly wealthy. And even some of the young Issei whom I interviewed told me that that tantalized them.

Michael: Japan had maintained a policy of isolation for centuries, but in the 1880s, Japan's new government began allowing its citizens to seek jobs abroad.

Linda: The goal was that they would go to the United States. They would work for 3 to 5 years, earn enough money to come back and live comfortable lives in Japan. They became known as Birds of Passage. Those who are looking for ways to get rich quick.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating; string instruments playing in the background] By 1910, tens of thousands of Japanese had left their homeland seeking opportunities in the United States.

Michael: Great Northern contracted with the Oriental Trading Company, a Japanese owned business based in Seattle, which organized Issei labor contracts and sent thousands of Issei to Montana.

Linda: My grandfather was one of those. When he was 16 years old, his uncle was working in the United States and called him over to join him. Grandpa came over and his first job was actually working on a railroad crew in Cut Bank, Montana in Glacier County.

Michael: Cut Bank is a small town, even today, on the east side of the Rockies, less than 50 miles from Glacier and more than 5000 from Japan.

Linda: He was a hard worker. Even as an elderly man, he was a hard worker. And my grandmother told me that Grandpa's supervisors on the railroad would reward him with overtime labor.

Michael: In 1901, a day's wage for Issei was $1.10, and a day's work could be 15 hours. Not to mention, their contractor, the Oriental Trading Company, would take a ten cent daily commission.

Linda: The work was difficult and the pay was low. But the reason they accepted that was because it turned out it was double what they might have earned in Japan.

Michael: [to Linda] So that wasn't false advertising on the newspaper's part. It was more than they would've made

Linda: It was, right.

Michael: But while the pay was better than what they might have received in Japan, conditions were still terrible.

Linda: One story that I heard over and over was how malnourished they were. They had to pay a stipend for the meals that they were served. And some of them, because they were trying to save money, really almost starved themselves to increase their savings. And the meals were really paltry. Two meals that I heard about a lot were soups. One was miso soup. And that's made from soybean paste. And another was dango jiru, which was dumpling soup.

Michael: I googled it for reference. One serving of miso soup has 40 calories. A banana has 105.

Linda: With all the hard labor working 10 to 15 hour days, they had very little protein. And so apparently when they were able to find a jackrabbit or a cow that had been killed by the train, that was a banquet.

Michael: [to Linda] Oh, my goodness, I bet.

Linda: And apparently sometimes the men were even known to have arranged for a cow to be present on the tracks when a railroad train went by.

Michael: Employees were required to dispose of any animals they came across that had been hit by the train.

Linda: And so the section hands obediently did so. And then at night they'd go back and they'd dig up the carcass and they'd cook it, and then they had a source of protein. But those were the lengths they took to try to nourish themselves, doing hard labor on the railroad front.

Michael: [to Linda] I can't imagine trying to do that on, you know, just soup -- like miso soup alone.

Linda: Right, yeah. What a life.

Michael: Many Issei who came to the US as Birds of Passage, hoping one day to return home started to realize that might never happen.

Linda: So after my grandfather had been here, I think he was 32. He, along with other Issei men, began to realize their dreams of returning to Japan and—and be wealthy men were not to be realized, and that they would end up working longer in the United States, and they might even become residents.

Michael: And so many Issei who had planned to work in the U.S. for 3 to 5 years started planning to spend a life here and wanted to find someone to share it with.

Linda: They often didn't have enough money to go back to Japan to find wives. And so they employed picture brides.

Linda: [excerpt from interview in documentary] The picture bride or shashin hanyome was the practice where a Japanese man in America exchanged photographs and letters with young women and their families in Japan. And through that exchange of letters and photographs and agreements by the families, they were formally married.

Linda: And my grandmother was a picture bride when she came to the United States in 1916, 16 years after my grandfather had arrived.

Michael: Not all Issei worked on railroads. Many worked on farms or in lumber mills. But no matter the job, they all faced the reality of life in a new place.

Linda: They were young. Often they found that they were living in secluded areas. There were a lot of people who lived nearby, and certainly not a lot who spoke their language. Life was disappointing for them, although they weren't always ready to admit that easily.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating with string music in the background; an actor reads the quote] December 1905 Henry Katsuji Hasitani, who worked for the Northern Pacific near Missoula, wrote in his diary, "all I have done so far is to survive as nothing more than a humble worker, like pigs and cows. Is my youth being wasted? No. I have dreams. I have hopes. Life is nothing if you don't try to better yourself."

Linda: They had high dreams and high hopes, but often they were shattered.

Michael: On top of the hard work, low pay, and isolation, Issei began to face discrimination from white Americans. Just like the Chinese before them.

Linda: Apparently there were Issei who were working for the railroad, living in a house. There were six of them. [Ominous electric guitar music builds] And one night there were shots that rang through their windows and rioters stood outside for an hour and yelled and cursed at them. The Issei men piled up mattresses to try to protect themselves.

Michael: It was a scare tactic, a gunpowder threat to leave town.

[music ends]

Linda: The next day they left and that was the goal. Apparently the rioters were farmers who during their offseason were hired by the railroad as section hands and they were concerned that their livelihoods might be in danger. That was the kind of incident that occurred along the West Coast and very likely in Montana as well, that other workers were concerned about the competition from Issei, who were willing to work long hours, take on jobs that others might not have relished and were willing to work for less pay because they considered the pay adequate. But yes, discrimination was—was an issue for the Issei laborers.

Michael: An opinion piece in the Kalispell Bee, the newspaper in the early 1900s. Argued that these Japanese laborers weren't buying enough local goods, they were a drain on the local economy and used all sorts of racist terms along the way. And then, you know, the next week in the paper, the Oriental Trading Company would reply like, we buy everything locally except for miso soup, which isn't made here. And in looking through all these accounts, at no point did it seem like Great Northern ever stepped in and tried to advocate for its employees. Here's Stephen Sadis again.

Stephen: Yeah, I don't think there was any grander plan for Hill in how to, you know, keep the peace or acclimate an ethnic group into a community. I think he was looking at bottom lines and what's the—the most inexpensive way I can build my line.

Michael: This discrimination wasn't unique to Asian immigrants. Irish, Italian, Greek laborers, Slavic laborers, among others, were met with racial slurs, politically charged vitriol in communities and in local papers. This wasn't an outlier, but a clear and consistent pattern. But U.S. legislation uniquely targeted immigrants from Asian countries.

Linda: There was a concern about the yellow peril, that, Chinese at first, and then Japanese, would be threatening the white race.

Michael: Understanding what had happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese government, facing pressure from the United States, signed the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.

Linda: The Gentlemen's Agreement restricted Japanese immigration only to family members of those who were already in the United States.

Michael: No more Issei could immigrate to the U.S., and the ones who were already here continued to face prejudice.

Far East to Old West Documentary: [George Takei narrating with string music in the background] Asians still couldn't become citizens unless they were born here. And in 1923, anti-Japanese legislators passed a Montana law that said If you couldn't become a citizen, you couldn't own land.

Michael: But while policies and prejudice would continue to make life difficult for Issei, others embraced their Japanese neighbors.

Elizabeth Peck (voice actor): I'll tell you what I do with my time when I'm not cooking meals at 12:00 in the morning and washing socks.

Michael: This is a letter written by Elizabeth Peck, a Whitefish woman who in the 1920s was a member of the Presbyterian Church of Whitefish, and it's being read for us by a voice actor.

Elizabeth: I took, for my part of the work in the church, the Japanese. [soft string music plays in the background] We have 14 families and 50 single men. They work for the railroad, most of them. I teach them to talk English, read and write it. And if I do say it, I've accomplished it. I never hoped to do so well when I started.

Michael: Elizabeth wasn't a wealthy woman or a philanthropist. Here's Jessie Fraser, one of the congregation members who met me at the church.

Jessie: She was very poor. She had two boys. She—her husband died when the kids were very young. So she lived in a tar paper shack thing out someplace.

Elizabeth: I have three classes at the house and then I go twice a week to their homes. That is the ones that have children and can't come to me.

Jessie: And the Japanese would give her gifts to get her food. You know, gifts of food, chicken and eggs and things like that. Because she just—and thank you for doing what she was doing.

Elizabeth: One month I helped one man to buy a house, helped to bury one man that was drowned, and helped two babies into the world.

Michael: And even though these events took place over 100 years ago, this kindness is still visible.

Elizabeth: We built a new church this year, cost $40,000, and I asked for a donation of the Japanese men, said it would be nice if they could give a window. Well, they sent in a check for $705, bought two windows. And when the windows came, one of them said, for Mrs. Elizabeth D. Peck, from the Japanese. What an honor to live up to.

Michael: The Japanese families and men of Whitefish collected $705, over $8,000 today, and donated two pairs of windows to the church. One pair was dedicated to Elizabeth Peck and the other simply says, "with gratitude from the Japanese." Because of Great Northern, Whitefish was home to a thriving Japanese community—a community that included railroad laborers, but also the owners of a candy store, a successful laundromat, and what many accounts described as the best restaurant in town. A community that was asked to put on a firework display for the 4th of July 1909, which one newspaper called the finest pyrotechnic display the county had ever seen. A community that largely isn't here anymore. Those businesses have closed. Those Issei have passed away. And their children, for the most part, have moved on. This history isn't easy to find.

Linda: It's important for us to understand what they contributed, how they contributed, and the sacrifices that they made in order to help themselves. But even more so, to help our country. They were important contributors to the United States of America, even though they weren't treated fairly during their times.

Michael: When I asked Linda why it's so hard to track down these stories, she pointed me to her grandmother.

Linda: It came to me that Grandma didn't want to consider herself important enough to be interviewed by someone. She told me, "I'm just a poor old woman. I've not done anything significant in my life. Now, if you want to interview someone important, go talk to Eleanor Roosevelt. Now, there's a woman who should be interviewed." But she said “there's nothing that I've done in my life that's important. You shouldn't ask me questions.” That would signify what every Issei told me. They wanted to focus on the group. And I would think that might have a lot to do with why you're having difficulty with stories, too.

Michael: Mmhmm.

Linda: And I think there are other reasons, though. They spoke Japanese, they wrote in Japanese. Any documents I found, any photos with inscriptions needed to be translated by those who spoke old Japanese. And there aren't that many—that many anymore now. In many ways, I think they don't want to harbor on the difficulties of the past. Now that they were finally getting along with others, their neighbors, they didn't want to bring up difficulties. [pensive music begins to play] So they really chose not to speak about the past. They wanted to leave it there. They wanted to move on and focus on positive. Unfortunately, yeah, there's a lot that we've lost, but hopefully there will be photos and documents that will help us to uncover more of those stories.

[music ends]

Michael: Linda highlighting how much of this history we've lost—it made me grateful for the National Register of Historic Places, a tool that helps communities preserve and share the history they have left. I ran this by Paul Lusignan, the historian from the Register program.

Michael: [to Paul] and just thinking through this story, I learned about the history of these Japanese railroad laborers through the Register listing for this church in Whitefish. And it got me thinking that, you know, when I come to Glacier, a million acres, this grand place, you kind of implicitly expect to hear the stories of like grand people, too. And that the register seems to me like a way of preserving the stories that might not fit into that expectation to you. How does the Register complement the other parts of the National Park Service in pursuit of our mission?

Paul Lusignan: I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, it allows for kind of different perspectives and looking at the full story. You know, there's only so many times you can mention that Theodore Roosevelt came out here and stayed for a while. It's like, okay, if the Park Service is supposed to be conveying a preservation and conservation ethic, well, what types of things are we conserving, protecting and recognizing? What was it like to be a worker there? Who did they displace when they developed the park? There's nothing wrong with the big ingrained resources. They're great and they deserve to be preserved, but they don't tell the full story. And that's where I think that the Register program helps augment that and can augment that. And that's again, it's not the only tool, but it is a good preservation tool.

Michael: One example is the First Presbyterian Church of Whitefish. As it approached 100 years old, the building was showing its age.

[wistful music begins to build]

Jessie: It literally was falling down. And you could see I mean, we’re outside—you look up there and you could literally see the bricks separating from the wall, you know, like it's going to come down.

Michael: One suggestion was to sell the valuable downtown real estate and move the congregation to a new and improved building. But they decided instead to repair—in large part because of the building's history. Little things that don't show up on your property value, but they do show up on your National Register listing.

Jessie: Because it's a historical church.

Michael: And so one of the few pieces left of this Montana Issei community is protected. Not only are the windows still there, but people like Jessie will welcome you in and share their story.

[music ends]

[an electronic beat begins, with an excerpt from the early 1900s promo video we heard at the beginning of the episode. The lyrics say "The railroad is many things. The Empire Builder."]

Michael: To end this story, I wanted to do something that I've never done before.

Gaby Eseverri: [in the field] Are you excited?

Michael: [in the field] I'm excited, I've never ridden the train before. Unless you count the one at my zoo growing up. But that was like a small fake train.

Michael: I was joined by Gaby.

Gaby: There it is!

[train whistle, and bell clanging as it arrives]

Michael: After spending the entire summer digging into the history of this railway, I thought it would be fitting to actually ride it.

Gaby: There aren’t too many people here.

Railroad worker: Last name guys?

Michael: Faist and Eseverri.

Railroad worker: I got you. You guys are good to go. Great.

Gaby: All righty. Thank you so much.

Railroad worker: You bet.

Michael: [in the field] I’m not the tallest person in the world, but I can stretch my legs out completely before it hits the other seat.

Gaby: Yeah. It’s comfortable.

Michael: In this episode, I set out to answer the question, who built the Great Northern Railway, and looked at the story from the top down and bottom up. If I'm being honest, you could probably guess which version of this you're likely to hear if you come to the park. James J. Hill is on the greatest hits of ranger-led program topics: a larger than life figure and a remarkable success story. I never knew about this other piece of this history.

[haunting violin music begins to play]

Michael: [in the field] Like 15% of the people I would say in this car are sleeping, which is why I’m talking quietly

Gaby: [both laughing] We’re trying not to be too annoying

Michael: The National Park Service is famous for big parks like Glacier—grand landscapes full of powerful people. But those parks are outnumbered by the over 90,000 sites that tell the rest of America's story. [an electronic beat joins the violin music] Places identified by a community, not by an act of Congress. Smaller stories that might not need a full staff of park rangers, but that are no less worthy of preserving. And that's comforting to me.

Gaby: Okay. We made it to the lounge car.

Michael: [in the field] We did.

Gaby: Yeah. This is cool, there’s more windows here.

Michael: [in the field] It's got skylights, wraparound windows. People are working on their laptops, reading books, eating a breakfast burger. I thought that was a bold choice. [both laugh]

Michael: In the end, I think it's taught me that however small I might feel in a place like this, however insignificant my life may seem when stacked against these great men of history, we all lead lives worthy of remembering.

Gaby: Are we train people now?

Michael: [in the field] I think I'm a train person now

Michael: The people who bend history to their will—and those of us along for the ride.

[music continues, then fades lower under the credits]

Daniel: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This season of headquarters was made by Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Michael Faist and Gary Eseverri. Frank Waln wrote and performed our music, and Eric Carlson created this season's cover art. Season Three absolutely would not exist without Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Sierra Mandelko, Brent Rowley, Darren Lewis, and the whole team at the Park Archives. We relied on a lot of great resources from the Montana Historical Society too. Special thanks this episode to Steven Sadis, Lucas Hugie, Paul Lusignan and Linda Tamura, and thanks as well to everyone with the First Presbyterian Church of Whitefish, but especially Bob, Paul, and Jessie. Great Northern Filmworks for permission to share excerpts from their series Empire Builder: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway. Filmmaker Pat Murdo and the University of Montana's Mansfield Center for permission to share clips from their documentary, From the Far East to the Old West. And lastly, of course, thank you to everyone at Amtrak for helping Michael fulfill a years-long dream of getting to ride a train.

Lacy: Next time on Headwaters.

Michael: We follow in the footsteps of some of the first Black Americans in these mountains. To find out how they got here. And uncover what happened to their history.

Carolyn: It matters who tells the story. This is the question of representation but it’s also a question of history.

Ahern Report: There were several places on the trail where a misstep meant certain death.

Shelton: Will this place remember me, will it remember my shadow cast on the earth, will it remember the sound of my horse, will that be remembered?

Michael: That's next time on Headwaters.

[music ends]

Michael: So Headwaters is made possible by the Glacier Conservancy, right Andrew? But you also fund a lot of other projects going on in the park. Do you have any examples?

Andrew: Yeah, a really cool one is the Ranger led education programing that's going to be happening has been happening.

Michael: Yeah, well, I know what that is because I've worked in that position. What is what are the Ranger led activities?

Andrew: Yeah so students can come in, visit Glacier National Park and go on a field trip with a ranger, which is a really special experience for them. But we also are going to be offering classroom visits. So Rangers will come to local schools and teach them about the park, as well as expanding our distance learning. So students all around the country from every state can get to experience a little glimpse of Glacier National Park, which I think is pretty cool opportunity for them.

Michael: No, definitely. You get one day Rangers leading students up to Avalanche Lake. Later in the winter, you're giving snowshoe programs or you're talking to students in Puerto Rico with the green screen. It's you know, it's a really cool program. So if you want to learn more about that project and others that the Conservancy funds, where can they go to find that information?

Andrew: Check out our website. It's easy to remember: glacier.org