NDNorth Dakota State Symbols

North Dakota's official symbols

North Dakota is the Peace Garden State, a nickname earned by the International Peace Garden, a park straddling the border with Manitoba that was dedicated in 1932 to friendship between the United States and Canada. The name went on licence plates in the 1950s and was made the official nickname in 1957. The rest of the state's symbols are drawn almost entirely from the northern prairie: a meadowlark, a wild rose, wheatgrass and a horse that ran feral in the Badlands.

What is on the North Dakota state flag

The flag is a dark blue field carrying a bald eagle with its wings spread. The eagle holds an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of arrows in the other, and wears a shield of stars and stripes on its breast. In its beak is a ribbon reading E Pluribus Unum. Above the eagle a fan of thirteen stars sits beneath a golden sunburst, and a red scroll below reads NORTH DAKOTA.

The design is unusual because it did not start as a flag at all. It reproduces the regimental colour carried by the First North Dakota Infantry, the unit that served in the Philippines during the Spanish American War. The legislature adopted the banner as the state flag in 1911, keeping the national eagle device rather than commissioning something local. That is why North Dakota's flag carries neither the state seal nor the state motto, and why nothing on it is specific to the prairie apart from the name on the scroll.

The state seal and the motto

The seal, adopted at statehood in 1889 and inherited from the 1863 Dakota Territory design, is a crowded prairie scene. A tree stands in an open field, its trunk ringed by three bundles of wheat. To the right lie a plough, an anvil and a sledge; to the left a bow crossed with three arrows, with a mounted Native American hunting a buffalo toward the setting sun. An arch of forty-two stars curves overhead, and a ribbon carries the motto.

That motto, Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable, is the closing line of Daniel Webster's 1830 Senate reply to Robert Hayne, a speech defending the federal union against the doctrine of nullification. It is one of the longest state mottoes in the country and one of the very few taken from an American political speech rather than from Latin.

Symbols that surprise people

• An honorary equine. North Dakota named the Nokota horse its honorary state equine in 1993. The herd descends from horses that were fenced inside Theodore Roosevelt National Park when it was created and survived there for decades.
• Petrified driftwood as the state fossil. Teredo petrified wood, adopted in 1967, is ancient wood riddled with the tunnels of teredo shipworms, evidence that a warm sea once reached what is now Burleigh County.
• An official dance. The square dance became the state folk dance in 1995.
• A second and third nickname. Before Peace Garden State stuck, North Dakota was widely called the Flickertail State, after the Richardson's ground squirrel that flicks its tail across the prairie, and the Roughrider State after Theodore Roosevelt's ranching years in the Badlands.
• An unsettled order of admission. North Dakota and South Dakota were signed into the Union on the same day in 1889 with the papers shuffled so that nobody would know which was thirty-ninth and which fortieth.

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