🌾North Dakota

The Peace Garden State · The Roughrider State

North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the Union on the same day — November 2, 1889 — with President Benjamin Harrison shuffling the papers so nobody knows which came first. North Dakota is a state of rolling prairie, oil fields in the Bakken Formation, and small towns scattered across some of the emptiest country in the lower 48.

Dakota Territory

The Dakotas were originally part of the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804–05 at Fort Mandan on the Missouri River, where they met their guide Sacagawea. Dakota Territory was organized in 1861; statehood came in 1889 when the northern and southern halves were admitted simultaneously. The state's "Roughrider" nickname honors Theodore Roosevelt, who ranched in the Badlands in the 1880s and later cited his time there as shaping his character.

The Bakken Boom

Oil was discovered in North Dakota in 1951, but commercial production was limited until new horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies unlocked the Bakken Formation in the late 2000s. North Dakota briefly became the second-largest oil producer among U.S. states (behind only Texas) and turned the small city of Williston into a boomtown. Population and economy rose and fell with crude prices.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

The badlands of western North Dakota preserve Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where the future president ranched in the 1880s after the devastating day his wife and mother died on the same date in 1884. Roosevelt wrote that "I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota." The park is a stretch of eroded buttes, coulees, and prairie populated by bison, wild horses, and prairie dogs.

Small State Quirks

North Dakota has the smallest population of any state after Wyoming and Vermont, and the International Peace Garden on its border with Manitoba — 2,300 acres straddling the international boundary — is the source of the "Peace Garden State" nickname on the state's license plates. The state also boasts the geographic center of North America, traditionally placed near Rugby.

North Dakota Facts

• North Dakota is the only state with a government-owned bank and a government-owned flour mill.
• Lawrence Welk, whose TV variety show ran from 1951 to 1982, was born in Strasburg.
• The state's population is about 64% of what Fargo-Moorhead Metro alone contains.
• The world's largest buffalo monument — a 60-ton concrete statue — stands in Jamestown.
• North Dakota has more registered churches per capita than any state.

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