Geography and Industry

North Dakota is equal parts desolate (the western part of the state) and fertile (the eastern part of the state). The Missouri and Red rivers both flow through the state, and farming (wheat, flax, and corn) is good along their valleys. But the western part of the state is high desert, where very little grows. This region was so hard to travel through that early explorers nicknamed it the “badlands.” The name stuck.

Nowadays people don't try to avoid the badlands. They go out of their way to see these rugged rock formations. Tourism has become an important industry in North Dakota.

North Dakota is almost entirely an agricultural state, and it is one of the most rural states left in the nation. There is little industry to speak of besides mining, farming, and ranching in North Dakota. Oil was discovered in the 1950s, and is North Dakota's leading mineral export. Not long after, natural gas fields were uncovered as well. There are also salt, sand, gravel, and lime mining operations in the state.

Weather-wise, North Dakota is a tough place to live. The climate is harsh: hot, humid summers, sometimes plagued by tornadoes or drought, and frigid winters, consistently among the coldest in the continental United States. Because of its location in the far northern part of the country, directly south of Canada's great plains, there is nothing to keep polar weather from sweeping down along the Canadian Shield and directly into North Dakota.

History

Before European fur traders visited the region, semi-nomadic tribes such as the Arikara (Ree), Hidatsa (Gros Ventres), and Mandan farmed North Dakota's fertile river valleys for part of the year, then hunted buffalo during the other part. When the horse was introduced to the northern plains starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Ojibwa, Cree, and Assiniboin abandoned farming, and moved out on the plains to follow the great buffalo herds year-round.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1804– 05 with the Mandan tribe before making their way to the Pacific coast. Within twenty years, the Mandans had been literally wiped out by European diseases such as smallpox, cholera, whooping cough, mumps, and measles.

We know these diseases as childhood diseases, and today, hardly anyone dies from them. But the Native Americans did not have any immunity to these diseases, and so died by the thousands from them. This had happened to other tribes farther east as Europeans explored and settled North America, but out on the plains it seemed to happen even faster.

In 1818 the United States acquired part of the Red River Valley from British Canada, in exchange for some land drained by the Missouri River farther north. This land became part of the Dakota Territory when it was organized in 1851. The territory included land that eventually became the states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Also in 1851, the first permanent American settlement was established in North Dakota, at a place called Pembina.

During the next few decades, the Native Americans living on the plains fought a series of wars with the U.S. Army, trying to stop the tide of white settlement. The Sioux and the Cheyenne fought especially hard. North Dakota was finally being settled because the new transcontinental railroad made travel and shipping of goods through and across the area much easier.

Things got really bad in the 1870s, with Sioux and Cheyenne warriors raiding all across the northern plains. By 1877, Native American resistance had ended.

The very next year, the first cattle ranch was established in North Dakota. Among those easterners who eventually came west to try their luck raising cattle was a young New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt.

North Dakota became a state in late 1889, just minutes ahead of South Dakota, its neighbor to (not surprisingly) the south. Both states list the same day (November 2, 1889) as the day they became states.

WORDS TO KNOW

Rural

A rural area is the opposite of an urban area, which means that a rural area is a relatively unpopulated place — still wild, with no cities and few roads or houses. Cultivated farmland is also considered a rural area, since it guarantees that there is no room for a city.

Rock 'n' Rollk

Break the letter codes to get the silly riddle and its silly answer!

HINT: You will need to write the alphabet on a piece of paper, and write the numbers from 1 to 26 underneath. A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.!