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, natural and picturesque.
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.
THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA