About North Dakota

North Dakota takes its name from the Dakota people, one of the three divisions of the Great Sioux Nation, whose name means "allies" or "friends" in the Lakota-Dakota-Nakota language. The Dakota Territory was organized by Congress in 1861 to govern the region. When the territory had grown enough to apply for statehood, debate arose over whether to admit it as one large state or divide it into northern and southern halves. Congress chose to divide it, and North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted simultaneously on November 2, 1889. President Benjamin Harrison reportedly shuffled the admission documents so that no one would know which state was technically admitted first.

North Dakota is the most misunderstood state in America. It is simultaneously the least visited, least populated, and most overlooked, and yet it is the nation's agricultural powerhouse, the site of one of the most radical experiments in public enterprise in American history, the landscape that shaped a president, and, for one extraordinary decade, the fastest-growing energy economy in the country. Its 70,000 square miles of rolling prairie, badlands, and river valley hold more history than their quiet surface suggests.

The state's character was formed by three forces acting simultaneously: the extreme climate of the northern Great Plains, which demands a particular toughness and practicality from those who stay; the Scandinavian and German-Russian immigrant culture that settled the prairies and built cooperative institutions to survive together; and the perpetual economic tension between the small farmers who produce the state's wealth and the distant corporations, grain companies, railroads, banks, that have historically extracted it. That tension produced the Nonpartisan League and its radical innovations, the Bank of North Dakota, and a political culture that remains deeply populist beneath its conservative surface.

The Bakken oil boom of the 2000s and 2010s jolted North Dakota into national visibility and strained its institutions, its infrastructure, and its sense of itself. The boom has leveled off, but the questions it raised, about what kind of place North Dakota wants to be, how to sustain rural communities while cities grow, what the Legacy Fund's billions are for, remain unanswered. They are the questions of a state that has been many things to many people, and has not yet decided what it wants to be next.