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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.
Amtrak runs one train per day in each direction between Fargo and
Williston in the northwest, via Grand Forks. Greyhound is the major
interstate bus operator: three or four buses per day make the ten-hour
trip from Minneapolis/St Paul to Bismarck via Grand Forks and Fargo,
before heading west along I-94 into Montana.
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