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The West North Central (Plains) Region
West North Central is a division, not a region. The United States Census Bureau splits the country into four regions and then into nine divisions, and this is division four, the western half of the Midwest region. Its seven states run from the Canadian border to Oklahoma and from the Mississippi to the eastern edge of the Rockies. The Bureau of Economic Analysis draws a region it calls the Plains from exactly the same seven states, which is rare agreement between two federal schemes.
The seven West North Central states
| State | Capital | Largest city | Statehood |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minnesota | Saint Paul | Minneapolis | 1858 |
| Iowa | Des Moines | Des Moines | 1846 |
| Missouri | Jefferson City | Kansas City | 1821 |
| North Dakota | Bismarck | Fargo | 1889 |
| South Dakota | Pierre | Sioux Falls | 1889 |
| Nebraska | Lincoln | Omaha | 1867 |
| Kansas | Topeka | Wichita | 1861 |
The other five Midwestern states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, form the East North Central division. Nothing here belongs to the Northeast, the South or the West.
Population, land and economic weight
The 2020 Census counted 21,616,921 people across the seven states, about 6.5 percent of the country, on 507,621 square miles of land, 14.4 percent of it. That works out to 42.6 people per square mile. The Middle Atlantic division, by comparison, packs 428 people into the same square mile. Missouri is the largest state here at 6,154,913 and North Dakota the smallest at 779,094. Minneapolis and Saint Paul together anchor the division's largest metropolitan area, while the Kansas City metro straddles the Missouri and Kansas state line. The seven hold 43 electoral votes between them, three fewer than Texas and New York combined.
Land, water and the line at the 100th meridian
Rainfall is the organizing fact. The eastern side of the division takes more than 30 inches a year and grows row crops; west of roughly the 100th meridian annual rainfall drops under 20 inches and the land turns to range, wheat and irrigation. The Missouri River touches six of the seven states, missing only Minnesota, and drains most of the division toward St. Louis. Minnesota is the odd one out in every direction: its water leaves for the Gulf of Mexico down the Mississippi, north to Hudson Bay by the Red River of the North, and east to the Atlantic through Lake Superior.
The Black Hills break the plain in western South Dakota, and Black Elk Peak there reaches 7,242 feet, the highest ground in the United States east of the Rockies. Glacial lakes and moraine cover Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas; the Sand Hills of Nebraska are grass stabilized dunes sitting over the Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates much of the region.
How the Plains states were settled
All seven states were carved wholly or partly from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and Lewis and Clark left St. Louis the following year to push up the Missouri. Settlement came in three pushes. Missouri entered first, in 1821, admitted as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the middle ground to settlement and to the violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1861. The Homestead Act of 1862, whose first claims were filed near Beatrice, Nebraska, then pulled German, Czech, Norwegian and Swedish families into the Dakotas.
Dakota Territory was split rather than admitted whole. President Benjamin Harrison signed the two statehood proclamations on 2 November 1889 after shuffling the papers so no one could record which came first, which is why the Dakotas are listed alphabetically as the 39th and 40th states.
What the region is known for
Iowa leads the nation in corn and hog production, Kansas in winter wheat, North Dakota in spring wheat, durum and canola. Nebraska ranks at the top for cattle on feed. Minnesota's Mesabi Range fed iron ore through Duluth to the mills of the lower lakes, and the Bakken shale made North Dakota one of the country's three largest oil producing states. Wichita builds aircraft, Omaha holds Union Pacific and Berkshire Hathaway, Rochester holds the Mayo Clinic, and South Dakota carries Mount Rushmore and the Badlands. Pierre, with fewer than 15,000 residents, is one of the two smallest state capitals in the country.
Where the boundaries are argued
Missouri is the contested one. It is census Midwest, but it was a slave state, its southern half is Ozark country, and plenty of its residents call it Southern. Kansas and Nebraska are census Midwest and everyday Great Plains, a phrase that describes the land better than the file does. Minnesota and Iowa get pulled east into an informal Upper Midwest that includes Wisconsin and crosses the division line. Oklahoma, which shares the same Plains geology and sits directly below Kansas, is not in this division at all: the census puts it in the South.