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North Dakota The History
Early Inhabitants
The first people in what is now North Dakota were hunters and gatherers who appeared about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. They had stone weapons and hunted many different animals, but disappeared about 5000 bc. About 2,000 years ago native peoples from the areas of present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin moved to the grasslands in what is now eastern North Dakota. In about ad 1100 the ancestors of the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples migrated to the area of North Dakota. By the end of the 17th century the Mandan, with their allies, the Hidatsa and Arikara, lived a largely sedentary life in earthen lodges clustered in fortified villages. They raised corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, melons, and tobacco and supplemented that diet by hunting and gathering. They conducted wide-ranging trading expeditions that covered the area between the Rocky Mountains, what is now northern Michigan, and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Cheyenne, whom the Ojibwa had driven out of Minnesota in the late 17th century, settled first on the Sheyenne River in what is now North Dakota, living in earth lodges, and farming. The Ojibwa destroyed this settlement about 1770, and the Cheyenne moved into the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, became dependent on the bison, and adopted a nomadic lifestyle. By the early 19th century in the area of present-day North Dakota, the Yanktonai and Teton Sioux peoples lived in the southeast and southwest, respectively; the Ojibwa lived in the northeast, and the Assiniboine, related to the Yantonai Sioux, lived in the northwest.
European Exploration
In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, traveled down the Mississippi River and claimed all the land drained by the river for France, including most of present-day North Dakota. The first person of European descent known to have entered North Dakota was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, who traveled there in 1738. La Vérendrye had been authorized by the king of France to explore new areas for the fur trade and to search for the Northwest Passage, a route that was believed to connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through what is now Canada. Such a route would allow ships to sail directly to Asia. La Vérendrye did not find the passage, but he did visit many Mandan villages and noted the complexity of their civilization, their farms, and their fortifications. Two sons of La Vérendrye also crossed the areas of present-day North Dakota and South Dakota in 1742.
More than 50 years elapsed before more European explorers visited the area. In 1797 David Thompson of the North West Company mapped and explored the Assiniboine and Souris rivers, the Turtle Mountains, and much of what is now central North Dakota. The same year Charles Chaboillez of the North West Company built the first fur-trading post in North Dakota at the confluence of the Pembina River and the Red River of the North.
The Louisiana Purchase
In 1763 France was defeated by Great Britain in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the last in a series of battles between Great Britain and France for domination in North America, and lost nearly all its North American possessions. However in 1762 France had secretly ceded all its lands west of the Mississippi (called the Louisiana Territory) to Spain, France’s ally in the war. France regained the land in 1800 under an agreement with Spain, and in 1803 the United States bought a huge region, including what is now the western half of North Dakota, from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, United States President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the newly acquired territory west of the Mississippi River (see Lewis and Clark Expedition). In 1804 they reached what is now North Dakota and spent the winter of 1804 and 1805 at Mandan and Hidatsa villages. While with the Mandan, Lewis and Clark met the French trader Toussaint Charbonneau, whom they hired as an interpreter and guide for the rest of their trip west. Charbonneau’s Shoshone wife, Sacagawea (or Sacajawea) and their young son were also allowed to go with the expedition when it set out in April 1805. Sacagawea proved invaluable. When the expedition encountered a tribe of Shoshone led by her brother, Sacagawea obtained food, horses, and guides, which allowed the explorers to continue. The following spring Lewis and Clark returned along the same route, and in September 1806 they left Sacagawea and Charbonneau at the Mandan village near present-day Stanton.
White Settlement
By 1801 the Hudson’s Bay and XY companies had established fur-trading posts in the area. That same year the North West Company’s Alexander Henry abandoned Chaboillez’s post and built a new one, later called Fort Henry, on the opposite bank of the Red River. Henry established posts in other parts of what is now North Dakota and wrote enthusiastically of his visits to the Mandan. Fur-trading companies continued to build trading posts throughout the area until the late 1830s when the fur trade began to decline.
In time a community of Native Americans and Métis (people of mixed Native American and European ancestry) grew up around the fur-trading posts. Métis staffed the trains of carts carrying furs and merchandise between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Permanent white settlement had started in 1812, when a group of Scottish and Irish settlers under the sponsorship of Thomas Douglas, 5th earl of Selkirk, left Winnipeg in what is now Canada to start a colony at Pembina. These settlers began farming and built log houses and a stockade, which they named Fort Daer. In 1818 they founded the state’s first church and first school. Britain and the United States agreed on the 49th parallel as the boundary between the territory of the two nations in 1818, and when a U.S. survey in 1823 showed that the Fort Daer settlers were no longer in British territory, the colony moved across the border to Canada.
During the last years of the fur trade many prominent people visited the area of present-day North Dakota, including the naturalist John James Audubon; Paul Wilhelm, the prince of Wurttemberg; and Maximillian, the prince of Wied. The famous artist George Catlin also visited in 1832, riding aboard the Yellowstone, the first steamboat to sail up the Missouri River to Fort Union. During his eight-year stay, Catlin wrote, painted, or sketched much of what he experienced on the upper Missouri River. Especially valuable are his descriptions of many of the ceremonies of the Mandan prior to their decimation by smallpox in 1837. The remaining Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa moved near Fort Berthold, where their descendants live today.
The Dakota Territory
Until the late 1840s white settlement in the area of present-day North Dakota was largely limited to the areas along the Missouri. That began to change after the admission of Iowa to the Union in 1846, the discovery of gold in California in 1848, and the organization of the Minnesota Territory in 1849, each of which implied that what is now North Dakota would eventually become a territory as well. That possibility encouraged white settlers to move into the area. In the 1850s two land companies were formed, the Dakota Land Company in Minnesota and the Western Town Company in Iowa, each wanting to secure desirable land in the anticipated Dakota territory. By spring of 1857 both companies had built separate communities at the site of present-day Sioux Falls, South Dakota. By early 1861 hundreds of settlers had migrated to the region, establishing communities in what is now South Dakota at Vermillion, Yankton, and Bon Homme, and occupying farms in the surrounding lands. On March 2, 1861, President James Buchanan signed the act establishing Dakota Territory, which included all of present-day North and South Dakota, as well as large portions of Wyoming and Montana. The first legislature of the Dakota Territory met in what is now Yankton, South Dakota, in 1862. In 1868 the creation of the Wyoming Territory established the western boundary of the Dakotas. The southern boundary was fixed in 1882.
Conflict with Native Americans
To protect those living along the Missouri River and the migrants and settlers traveling through the area of present-day North Dakota on their way to the Pacific Coast, the federal government built many short-lived military posts in the latter half of the 19th century. The first of these, Fort Abercrombie, was built on the Red River in 1857. In 1862 Sioux peoples from Minnesota besieged Fort Abercrombie for several weeks. In 1863 U.S. General Henry H. Sibley and his troops headed west and drove the Sioux across the Missouri River. General Alfred H. Sully followed Sibley and fought several bloody battles with other Sioux bands that had probably not taken part in the earlier Minnesota war.
The U.S. government, despite building more forts to protect travelers, could not decisively defeat the various Sioux peoples. The government turned to negotiation instead, holding peace discussions with Sioux leaders in the mid-1860s. In 1868 many of them signed a treaty under which the United States agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail, which led through Sioux lands to the mining camps of Montana, and in exchange the Sioux accepted a reservation west of the Missouri River. Not all Sioux signed the treaty, and many refused to live on the reservation.
In 1853 U.S. General Isaac Ingalls Stevens had led a party across what became North Dakota, surveying possible routes for a transcontinental railroad, and in 1864 the U.S. Congress had provided land grants to help build what became the Northern Pacific Railroad from Minnesota to what is now Washington state. The railroad arrived in northern Dakota Territory in 1871, crossed the Red River in June 1872, and reached Bismarck a year later. The Sioux deeply resented the construction of the railroad, however, and railroad workers had to be escorted by U.S. troops. In 1874 an expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota, and white miners flooded into the area in violation of the 1868 treaty, which prohibited whites trespassing on Sioux lands.
The Sioux, fearing the loss of their land, went to war. Much of the fighting between the U.S. government and the Sioux, led by the Hunkpapa Sioux Sitting Bull and the Oglala Sioux Crazy Horse, took place outside the area of present-day North Dakota, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which Sioux and Cheyenne killed Custer and about 260 U.S. soldiers near the Little Bighorn River in what is now Montana. Within the year, however, the Sioux had suffered a series of defeats, and most returned to the reservations. Sitting Bull and his band went to Canada and remained there until 1881, when they returned to surrender at Fort Buford, in northern Dakota Territory, marking the end of the military threat posed by Native Americans to white control over the area. In the late 1880s followers of the Native American messiah Wovoka introduced the ghost dance, which was supposed to help the Native Americans regain their lands and live in peace. The ghost dance gave the Sioux hope and added to their restlessness. In North Dakota the army believed Sitting Bull might instigate a rebellion, and on December 15, 1890, he was arrested at the Standing Rock Reservation south of Bismarck. As he was being led away from his cabin over the objections of his men, a gunfight erupted during which Sitting Bull and 12 others were killed. In the next two decades the U.S. government reduced the size of the Native American reservations dramatically, opening up large amounts of land to white settlement.
Farming
In 1851 a group of settlers sponsored by Charles Cavileer had begun the first permanent farming community at Pembina. The colony grew slowly; as late as 1870 there were no more than 2,500 whites permanently living in the area of present-day North Dakota. The Civil War (1861-1865) and warfare with Native Americans had kept most settlers out, although the Homestead Act of 1862 had offered 65 hectares (160 acres) to settlers who remained on the land for five years, and railroads sold land very cheaply. In 1868 Joseph Rolette, who had been a fur trader at Pembina for 25 years, made the first land claim under the Homestead Act. During the 1870s a few more claims were filed in the Red River valley.
Rapid agricultural development in the eastern area of North Dakota began after the arrival of the railroads in the 1870s and 1880s, which provided access to the markets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota and Chicago in Illinois. As the Red River valley became a supplier of wheat for emerging milling businesses in Minnesota, farmers poured into the northern part of Dakota Territory along with merchants and others who provided services to farmers. The farm and farm-service population gradually spread westward from the Red River valley to the Missouri River valley. The railroad companies, in an effort to attract settlers and their business, conducted nationwide advertising campaigns that portrayed the northern Dakota Territory as a bountiful land.
In the 1870s entrepreneurs began creating farms of thousands of acres, called bonanza farms, in North Dakota. Managers hired hundreds of workers to plant and harvest the wheat in these very profitable operations. The first bonanza farm was created in 1875 in the Red River valley from land purchased from the Northern Pacific Railroad. Oliver Dalrymple managed its 16,200 hectares (40,000 acres); others had farms as large as 25,500 hectares (63,000 acres).
In the 1870s and 1880s most farmers prospered. Settlers, responding to railroad advertisements and letters from relatives, immigrated from the eastern United States and from northern Europe, especially from Norway. In the 1880s and 1890s large numbers of ethnic Germans from Russia, Ukrainians, Czechs, and others from central and eastern Europe arrived in western Dakota Territory to start their own wheat farms, although much of this land received far too little rain for successful farming. By 1900, after North Dakota had become a state, the population had increased to 320,000 and in the next ten years another 250,000 people arrived.
Cattle Ranches
The cattle raising industry also grew rapidly after the railroad arrived. The possibility of quick profits attracted both U.S. and European investors, especially in the western region of what is now North Dakota, where grasslands could rapidly fatten cattle for the Chicago market. Dakota Territory ranchers included future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and the Frenchman Antoine de Vallombrosa, the marquis de Mores. Both arrived in northern Dakota Territory in 1883 at the age of 25. Roosevelt had come to hunt in the Badlands and established the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches, and at one time probably had about 5,000 head of cattle. Roosevelt got along well with the other ranchers, and eventually served as chairman of the Stockgrowers’ Association. The marquis settled on the Little Missouri River and founded the town of Medora. He bought thousands of head of cattle and more than 10,000 sheep, hired more than 100 cowboys, opened a meatpacking plant, and built a chateau for his wife and himself, a guest house, and a hotel. Ranchers were generally successful until a drought in 1886, the hard winter that followed, and a decline in cattle prices changed the industry. Ranches became smaller and were fenced, cowboys disappeared, and beef cattle replaced the roaming range cattle.
Statehood
During the late territorial period and after statehood, the most influential man in North Dakota was Alexander McKenzie, Northern Pacific Railroad representative and skillful political operative who dominated state politics without ever holding a state office. Later referred to as Alexander the Great, McKenzie had arrived in northern Dakota Territory with a wagon train in 1867 when he was 17 and settled in Bismarck in 1873. He became an influential lobbyist for the railroad and eventually the leader of the North Dakota Republican Party. In 1883 McKenzie arranged with Dakota Territorial Governor Nehemiah Ordway to move the territorial capital from Yankton, in the south, to Bismarck, in the north, an action that intensified the belief that southern and northern Dakota Territory had little in common. In 1887 a general election set the boundary between northern and southern Dakota Territory; on February 22, 1889, the U.S. Congress passed the enabling act permitting both Dakotas, Montana, and Washington to become states; and on November 2, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison signed the documents that made North Dakota and South Dakota the 39th and 40th states of the Union. McKenzie and the well funded Republican Party dominated early state politics; all the first state officials were Republicans, including the governor, John Miller, and legislation favored the interests of the railroad companies.
Farm Protest
Many farmers, however, believed that railroads charged excessive rates for shipping North Dakota goods out of the state and favored eastern manufacturers shipping goods into it. Railroads also owned many of the grain elevators that graded farmers’ grain and set the price to be paid for it. In addition, large wheat buyers in Minnesota conspired with the railroads to keep the price for wheat low. With the North Dakota legislature largely controlled by railroad interests, in the early 1880s farmers began creating their own cooperative associations, and in 1885 founded the Dakota Farmers’ Alliance to advance the social, educational, financial, and political interests of Dakota Territory farmers. The Alliance collected money from farmers to buy coal, twine, and other products as a cooperative venture. Although it had little money, the Alliance signed a contract with a plow manufacturer and even created an insurance company to save farmers money on insurance.
Efforts to pass laws to regulate the railroad failed consistently until 1906 when Democrat John Burke was elected governor. In 1911 Democrats and Republican progressives, who believed in using state power to meet the needs of individuals, gained control of the legislature. Although they did not seriously threaten railroad companies, they did pass laws providing compensation for injured workers, reforming election practices, and regulating the railroad practice of providing free passes.
The beginning of World War I in 1914 helped North Dakota farmers by increasing demand for wheat, but serious problems in agriculture reemerged in the 1920s. Low crop prices and high costs of production prevented many farmers from sharing in the general increase in prosperity in the 1920s, and in the 1930s economic depression, drought, dust storms, and grasshopper infestations made it even more difficult for farmers to repay their debts. Thousands of small farmers could not survive and left the state in the early 1920s; many businesses collapsed, and entire towns vanished. The exodus accelerated in the 1930s, despite state and federal programs providing easier credit and stabilizing crop prices. Those who remained on the land began to run larger farms, invested in more mechanization, and adopted more scientific farming methods.
Early 20th-Century Politics
Politicians tried once again to respond to the needs of farmers. In 1915 Arthur C. Townley, a former flax farmer and a skilled organizer for the Socialist Party in North Dakota, started a new political organization, the Nonpartisan League (NPL). Townley believed that a nonpartisan group could pass the agricultural reforms that farmers wanted. Townley quickly attracted a number of bright and ambitious colleagues such as Lynn Frazier, William Lemke, and William Langer, as well as the support of a large number of farmers. In 1916 the NPL won a number of overwhelming victories; Frazier became governor, receiving almost 80 percent of the vote. The NPL enacted a law establishing a nine-hour workday for women, created a state highway commission, and dramatically increased state funding for rural education. Two of the most enduring features of the early NPL, however, were the creation in 1919 of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which helped farmers borrow money for improvements, and a state-owned and operated grain mill and elevator.
William Langer was elected governor in 1932. Within a few months a federal court convicted Langer of conspiracy to obstruct an act of Congress after he tried to solicit political contributions from federal employees. After a series of appeals, the conviction was reversed, and in 1936 Langer was reelected without NPL support, the first governor in the United States to be elected as an independent. Langer was the most influential figure of the 1930s; he provided strong leadership during the difficult drought years of the Great Depression, the economic hard times of the 1930s. He gained considerable support for an embargo on grain shipments from the state that helped raise grain prices, and in 1937 he authorized the creation of a state water conservation commission to develop and conserve water resources. In 1939 Langer was succeeded by the Democrat John Moses, who investigated financial irregularities in state-owned enterprises and cut government spending.
Recent Developments
World War II (1939-1945) helped the state recover from the Depression. Because many North Dakotans were German-Americans, opposition to U.S. involvement in the war was strong in North Dakota. The war, however, brought federal work programs that created jobs and increased the demand for farm products that encouraged innovative agricultural techniques such as the use of new pesticides and fertilizers that increased productivity. In the late 1940s prices for farm goods dropped, agricultural unemployment increased, and as people began leaving rural areas, farms became fewer and larger. Farm consolidation in North Dakota continued into the 1990s. Between 1987 and 1992, the number of farms decreased by about 12 percent, but the acreage of the remaining farms increased by about 11 percent. In 1890 the rural population was about 95 percent of the total population; in 1990 North Dakota’s rural population fell below 50 percent of the state’s total population for the first time, to about 47 percent.
Since the 1980s North Dakota has diversified its economy. Although agriculture remains the most important industry, agriculture-related producer cooperatives now also manufacture finished products such as pasta and ethanol. Energy industries have also developed: North Dakota now produces a substantial amount of crude oil; several coal-fired electrical generating plants sell electricity to neighboring states; and North Dakota has the only significant plant in the United States that converts coal to natural gas. A wide variety of small manufacturing businesses have appeared, and tourism has become a major industry.
Native Americans in North Dakota have also been economically and politically important. In 1990 more than 25,300 Native Americans were living in North Dakota, and they remain an integral part of North Dakota society. In 1992, 58 Native Americans held public offices and Native Americans contributed more than $1.3 billion to the state’s economy.
In April 1997 North Dakota was hit by the flooding of the Red River, which forms the North Dakota-Minnesota border and empties into Lake Winnipeg in Canada. The river crested at more than 16 m (54 ft), about 8m (about 26 ft) above flood level, and damaged many areas, including the cities of Fargo and Grand Forks. Almost all of the residents of Grand Forks had to be evacuated, and the flood caused electrical fires in the downtown section of the city that destroyed 11 buildings. President Bill Clinton visited the area and declared a state of emergency.
Politics
Republicans controlled North Dakota politics from 1944 until 1960, when Democrat Quentin Burdick was elected U.S. senator and his popularity helped fellow Democrat William L. Guy win the governorship. In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Dakota since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had won it in 1936, and following Johnson’s lead, the Democrats swept the lower house of the legislature. In 1968 the state voted for the Republican presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, and elected a Republican legislature, but Democrats retained the governorship through the 1970s. In 1980 Allen I. Olson, a Republican, was elected governor, but in 1984 he was defeated by Democrat George Sinner, who was reelected in 1988. Sinner chose not to run in 1992 and was succeeded in office by Republican Edward T. Schafer. Schafer was reelected in 1996. In 2000 Republican John Hoeven was elected governor. Hoeven was reelected in 2004. |
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