Dakota Territory

Dakota Territory was organized in 1861 from the northern plains west of Minnesota and Iowa, and at first it also took in most of present-day Montana and Wyoming. Named for the Dakota people, it covered the homelands of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations, and American settlement was slow until the railroads arrived. The territorial capital sat at Yankton, on the Missouri River in the far southeast.

Two booms changed it. An 1874 Army expedition led by George Armstrong Custer confirmed gold in the Black Hills, land guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, setting off a rush and the Great Sioux War. Then the railroads brought tens of thousands of homesteaders in the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s. The capital moved to Bismarck in 1883, and on November 2, 1889, the territory was divided and admitted as two states, North Dakota and South Dakota. President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the papers so no one could say which was signed first.

• North Dakota
  The Peace Garden State, northern plains and badlands became
• South Dakota
  The Mount Rushmore State, plains, badlands, and Black Hills became
• Bismarck
  Capital of North Dakota, on the Missouri River capital
• Pine Ridge Reservation
  Oglala Lakota homeland and the site of Wounded Knee related
• The Great Plains
  The vast grassland that rises to the Rockies related
• The Missouri River
  The longest river in North America related