North Dakota

Half of a territory deliberately split in two to double its Senate representation. Dakota Territory was divided and both halves admitted on the same day in November 1889, an arrangement engineered by Republicans in Congress who wanted four senators from a reliably Republican region rather than two - and President Harrison shuffled the papers so that nobody could say which state was admitted first, which is why the order is officially unknown. The north was the wheat half. Bonanza farms of tens of thousands of acres, run with machinery and seasonal labour, made it an early example of industrial agriculture, and grain traders in Minneapolis set the prices. Farmer anger at those traders and at out-of-state banks produced the Nonpartisan League, which took over the state government in 1918 and created a state-owned bank and a state-owned grain mill, both still operating and unique in the country. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara lost most of their bottomland to the Garrison Dam in 1953. Oil from the Bakken shale transformed the western counties from 2008. Bismarck is the capital and Fargo the largest city. The state has the smallest share of public land in the west. The state is named for the Dakota people, as is its southern twin. Theodore Roosevelt ranched in the badlands there in the 1880s. The International Peace Garden straddles the Canadian border. North Dakota is among the least visited states. Winters at Grand Forks are among the coldest in the contiguous country. The state produces more honey and more spring wheat than any other.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history