North Dakota USA
Travel Guide & Hotel Reservations
NORTH DAKOTA has no nationally recognizable landmarks, nor is the state's history
particularly lurid or glamorous. It seems like somebody's quiet afterthought, a place to
pass through. Grain silos loom on the horizon; the haystacks resemble loaves of bread. In
the summer, with the sun baking in a defiantly blue sky and the wind raking strong fingers
through tall fields of golden wheat and flax, North Dakota epitomizes all things rural
American. Charming, picturesque - and a bit maddening.
The influx of Europeans into the Dakota Territory, spurred by the Homestead Act of
1862, precipitated a population and agricultural boom that lasted into the twentieth
century. As in South Dakota, the fertile east is more thickly settled than the west, where
vast cattle and sheep ranges predominate, and it was the east that was hardest hit by the
so-called 500-year flood of 1997, when 1.7 million low-lying acres of farmland were
inundated, and the entire state was declared a disaster area. Lately, North Dakotan
lawmakers, ashamed of their state's reputation as an arctic wasteland, have proposed that
the "North" be dropped from the state's title, leaving just "Dakota",
a suggestion most locals vehemently protest.
From Fargo , the state's largest city, I-94 passes through the central capital
of Bismarck , and on to the Bad Lands of the west, once cherished by
President Theodore Roosevelt. Though the national park bearing his name is a key
destination, Roosevelt would surely not be pleased about the continuing disfiguration of
much of western North Dakota by strip mining operations.
Reserve a Hotel Room in North Dakota USA
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