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.
