North Dakota

C

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.

D

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.

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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.

E

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.

F

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.

G

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.

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