NDNorth Dakota History

The signature nobody was allowed to see

On 2 November 1889 Benjamin Harrison had the statehood proclamations for the two Dakotas shuffled and their titles covered before he signed them, so that neither new state could claim to have been first. The order was never recorded. Convention lists them alphabetically, which makes North Dakota the thirty-ninth state and South Dakota the fortieth, but nobody actually knows. It was a fitting entrance for a state whose boundaries had been drawn by a railroad survey and whose politics would spend the next century arguing with the men who owned the railroad.

Earth lodge towns on the Missouri

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara did not follow the buffalo. They lived in permanent towns of timber-framed earth lodges on the Missouri terraces near the mouth of the Knife River, growing corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and tobacco in the bottomland and trading the surplus to nomadic peoples for meat and hides. Those villages were the commercial hub of the northern plains for centuries, and traders coming up from the south and down from Hudson Bay both aimed for them. Away from the river were Yanktonai and Sisseton Dakota, Assiniboine, Ojibwe pushing west toward the Turtle Mountains, and, at Pembina in the northeast, a Métis community of mixed Ojibwe, Cree and French descent that ran the buffalo hunt on carts.

The steamboat St. Peter's carried smallpox upriver in 1837 and the Mandan were reduced from roughly sixteen hundred people to little more than a hundred. The three nations later drew together into a single town, Like-a-Fishhook Village, and are federally recognised today as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

Two acquisitions, not one

North Dakota did not arrive in the United States in a single transaction. The Missouri drainage, meaning most of the state, came with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But the Red River valley in the northeast drains north to Hudson Bay, which made it British territory under the Hudson's Bay Company charter, and it became American only through the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, which set the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel and cut off the southern tip of the company's basin. Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804 and 1805 at Fort Mandan beside the Knife River villages, and it was there they engaged the trader Toussaint Charbonneau and his young Shoshone-born wife Sakakawea, who had been taken captive by the Hidatsa as a girl.

Railroad, bonanza farms, and a young rancher

Dakota Territory was organised in 1861, but settlement waited on track. The Northern Pacific reached the Missouri in 1872 and the crossing town, first called Edwinton, was renamed Bismarck the following year in a frank attempt to attract German bond buyers. Fort Abraham Lincoln went up across the river, and it was from there that George Custer rode out with the Seventh Cavalry in May 1876 toward the Little Bighorn. In the Red River valley the railroad's bondholders swapped worthless paper for land and assembled bonanza farms of many thousands of acres, worked by crews of seasonal hands with gang plows and steam threshers, which advertised Dakota wheat to the world. Theodore Roosevelt came out to hunt in 1883, bought two ranches in the Badlands, and gave up cattle after the winter of 1886 and 1887 killed most of the herds on the northern range.

The farmers' revolt that built a state bank

North Dakota grew hard red spring wheat and sold it through grain terminals in Minneapolis and shipped it on railroads run from St. Paul, and farmers were convinced, with reason, that both were grading and weighing their crop dishonestly. In 1915 a former flax farmer and socialist organiser named Arthur C. Townley began signing up members for a Nonpartisan League that would capture the Republican primary rather than start a third party. It worked. The League swept the 1916 and 1918 elections behind Lynn Frazier, and the state built its own machinery: the Bank of North Dakota in 1919, still the only state-owned bank in the country, and the North Dakota Mill and Elevator at Grand Forks in 1922, still the only state-owned flour mill. The backlash was just as fast. Frazier was removed in October 1921 in the first successful recall of an American governor, and the voters sent him to the United States Senate the next year anyway.

Drought, a dam, and missile fields

Drought, dust and grasshoppers emptied farms through the 1930s so thoroughly that the population counted in 1930 stood as the state's high-water mark for the next eighty years. The federal response reshaped the Missouri. Garrison Dam, authorised in 1944 and closed in 1953, put more than a hundred and fifty thousand acres of the Fort Berthold Reservation under Lake Sakakawea, drowning the bottomland where the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara had farmed for centuries and forcing the large majority of the reservation's residents to move to the dry uplands. The photograph of tribal chairman George Gillette weeping at the signing table in 1948 is the best-known image in the state's twentieth century.

The Cold War buried the western counties in Minuteman silos around the air bases at Minot and Grand Forks, and at Nekoma the Army built the only anti-ballistic missile complex the United States ever completed, a concrete pyramid studded with radar faces that was declared operational on 1 October 1975 and shut down within months by a Congress that had already voted to abandon it. In April 1997 a run of blizzards and a fast melt sent the Red River over the dikes at Grand Forks while a fire burned eleven downtown buildings that firefighters could not reach through the flood, and nearly the whole city was evacuated.

The Bakken decade

Oil had been produced near Tioga since 1951, but the shale itself stayed locked until horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were combined on the Bakken and Three Forks formations after the Parshall field discovery in 2006. Within six years North Dakota passed Alaska and California to become the second largest oil-producing state, unemployment fell to the lowest in the country, Williston filled with work camps, and the population finally climbed past its 1930 peak. The boom brought its own arguments, over flared gas, over housing, and in 2016 over the Dakota Access Pipeline crossing beneath the Missouri just upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which drew thousands of protesters to camps near Cannon Ball.

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