NDNorth Dakota Famous People

The president who was not born here and said the place made him

Theodore Roosevelt got off a train in the Dakota Badlands in September 1883 to shoot a bison and bought into the Maltese Cross Ranch before he went home. He came back the next year, after his wife and his mother died in the same house on the same February day, and built the Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri, where he worked cattle, chased boat thieves downriver and served as a deputy sheriff. The winter of 1886 and 1887 killed most of his herd and ended the venture. He said afterward that he would never have become president without his years in North Dakota, and the national park in the Badlands carries his name.

No president has been born in the state, and none was raised there. The North Dakotan who rose highest in government is Warren Christopher, born at Scranton in 1925, deputy attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, the negotiator who brought the Tehran hostages home in January 1981, and secretary of state from 1993 to 1997.

A bandleader from a sod house and a singer from Jamestown

Lawrence Welk was born in 1903 in a sod house at Strasburg, in a settlement of Germans who had come from the Russian steppe, and he spoke German at home well into adulthood. He talked his father into a mail order accordion, promised to work the farm until he turned twenty one to pay it off, did exactly that, and left. His television show then ran for twenty seven years.

Peggy Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom at Jamestown in 1920; a manager at the Fargo radio station WDAY decided Norma Egstrom was no name for a singer and gave her the one she kept. Bobby Vee was a fifteen year old in Fargo named Robert Velline in February 1959 when the promoter of the Moorhead concert that Buddy Holly never reached asked for local acts, and Vee and his brother's band, which had no name yet, volunteered. Angie Dickinson was born Angeline Brown at Kulm in 1931. Josh Duhamel was born at Minot in 1972. Chuck Klosterman grew up on a farm at Wyndmere and wrote his first book about being a heavy metal fan there.

Fort Mandan, Fort Buford and the writers of the northern plains

Sacagawea, whom North Dakota spells Sakakawea, was a Lemhi Shoshone teenager living among the Hidatsa when Lewis and Clark wintered at Fort Mandan in 1804 and 1805 and hired her husband as an interpreter. She is the figure the state placed in National Statuary Hall. Sitting Bull was born and killed in what is now South Dakota, but he brought his people back across the border and surrendered at Fort Buford, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, in July 1881, and after his death in 1890 he was buried at Fort Yates on the North Dakota side of Standing Rock, until a party from Mobridge came for the remains in 1953.

Louise Erdrich was born in Minnesota in 1954 and raised at Wahpeton, where both her parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. She is enrolled at Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, won the National Book Award in 2012 for The Round House, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for The Night Watchman, a novel built on her grandfather Patrick Gourneau's fight against the federal push to terminate the tribe in the 1950s. Eric Sevareid was born at Velva in 1912, canoed from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay with a friend at seventeen, and reported the fall of Paris and the Blitz for Edward R. Murrow's CBS bureau.

Fargo's home run king and a coach from Williston

Roger Maris was born in Minnesota in 1934 but the family settled in Fargo, where he ran back four kickoffs for touchdowns in a single game at Shanley High School. In 1961 he hit 61 home runs for the Yankees and passed Babe Ruth's record. Phil Jackson was born in Montana in 1945 and grew up in Williston, the son of two Pentecostal ministers, played for Bill Fitch at the University of North Dakota, won two championships as a New York Knick and eleven more as a coach in Chicago and Los Angeles. Darin Erstad was born at Jamestown in 1974, punted for Nebraska's undefeated 1994 team, then spent fourteen seasons in the major leagues and won a World Series with the Angels in 2002. Carson Wentz grew up in Bismarck, played at North Dakota State, and went second in the 2016 NFL draft.

An Arctic pilot and a bank the state still owns

Carl Ben Eielson was born at Hatton in 1897, flew the first contract airmail routes in Alaska in 1924, and in April 1928 flew Hubert Wilkins from Point Barrow across the top of the world to Spitsbergen, the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean by air. He died in a crash in Siberia the next year while flying furs off an icebound ship, and the air force base at Fairbanks carries his name.

North Dakota politics produced institutions rather than celebrities. The Nonpartisan League, started in 1915 by a bankrupt flax farmer named A. C. Townley, took the governorship in 1916 and pushed through the Bank of North Dakota in 1919 and a state owned mill and elevator at Grand Forks that opened in 1922. Both still operate, and no other state has an equivalent of either. William Langer, twice governor, was convicted of a felony in 1934 and forced from office, won the job back two years later, and sat in the US Senate from 1941 until he died in 1959.

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