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To bring coal to this Newcastle of wood was regarded as deliberate folly. By this time the Saint Paul and Pacific had gotten a track laid clear through to Breckenridge, so as to connect with Commodore Kittson's steamboats. When Hill first reached Saint Paul, there was no agriculture north of that point. The wheat-belt still lingered around Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin.
It was Kittson's theory that if you could make your wheel high enough it would eliminate friction and run of its own momentum. The wheels were made by boring and pinning plank on plank, criss-cross, and then chalking off with a string from the center. Then you sawed out your wheel, and there you were. The creaking of a train of these ox-carts could be heard five miles.
Paul and Pacific to Breckenridge, and then down the Red River on Kittson's steamboats until it was received at Fort Garry, Winnipeg, by Donald Alexander Smith, then commissioner for the Hudson's Bay Company. Smith, who became afterwards Lord Strathcona and High Commissioner for Canada in England, was a tall, lean, urbane Scotchman with a soft manner and a long red beard.
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