North Dakota.
The Peace
Garden State.

The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations had built permanent earth-lodge villages along the Missouri River for centuries before Lewis and Clark arrived in the autumn of 1804 and wintered at Fort Mandan, just upriver from present-day Washburn. It was here that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hired Toussaint Charbonneau and his wife Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman who had been captured and sold as a child, to guide them across the Rockies. The expedition left in the spring of 1805. Sacagawea returned to this stretch of the Missouri six years later, where she died young in 1812.

The fur trade empire of the American Fur Company centered on Fort Union, built in 1828 at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. The Northern Pacific Railroad reached Fargo in 1872 and opened the Red River Valley to settlement. The “bonanza farms” of the 1880s — vast commercial grain operations funded by eastern capital — briefly made North Dakota the agricultural sensation of the continent. Norwegian, German, and German-Russian immigrants flooded in, broke the prairie, and planted wheat. By 1890, North Dakota was a state, entered the union on the same day as South Dakota, and nobody knows which was signed first.

In 1883, a twenty-four-year-old New York assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the badlands to hunt bison. He stayed, bought two ranches, and spent three years as a working cattleman in the Little Missouri country. When a brutal winter wiped out most of his cattle in 1886-87, he returned to politics — carrying with him a bone-deep understanding of the land and its fragility that would produce the National Park system, the national forests, and the most consequential conservation presidency in American history. The badlands he ranched are now Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915 by a flax farmer named Arthur Townley, was one of the most radical political movements in American history to actually win power. The League took control of North Dakota’s government and established the Bank of North Dakota in 1919 — the only state-owned bank in the United States, which still operates today, provides low-interest loans to farmers, and has never needed a federal bailout. The same era produced the North Dakota Mill and Elevator, the only state-owned flour mill in the country. The League’s instinct — that farmers needed to own the institutions that processed and financed their crops — has proven remarkably durable.

Oil was discovered near Tioga in 1951, but the Bakken shale formation beneath western North Dakota only became economically viable after horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing made it possible to extract tight oil in the 2000s. The boom that followed transformed Williston and McKenzie County from quiet ranch communities into boomtowns with $15-an-hour McDonald’s wages, man camps outside every small city, and a state budget surplus that funded a sovereign wealth fund. The boom peaked in 2014, crashed with oil prices, and recovered partially. The Standing Rock Sioux’s 2016 protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline drew international attention to the same landscape the oil industry was rapidly industrializing.