The American railroad industry, the backdrop of Atlas Shrugged, was reviled by the Left as one of the worst abusers of the free enterprise system. One of the arguments in favor of government regulation was the idea that the railroads were built mainly through government financing. Although that claim was greatly exaggerated, those railroads built with government help all ended up in bankruptcy courts. But there was one railroad, the Great Northern, that was built without a penny of federal help and never went bankrupt. This lecture tells the story of how James Jerome Hill built up the Great Northern slowly but relentlessly until it could sustain the long extension from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast. It explains how Hill built a railroad across a desolate, inhospitable region and turned it into the American Northwest of a million and half people, a feat that earned him the title of "Empire Builder."