A Yearly Register of the Prairie & the Working Land
Astride the border with Canada in the wooded Turtle Mountains, the International Peace Garden blooms as a living monument to the long friendship of two neighboring nations.
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Earlier-maturing varieties have pushed the soybean frontier deep into North Dakota, and the crop now rivals wheat for acres across the eastern half of the state.
Once-quiet brick warehouses along Fargo's Broadway now house software firms, coworking lofts and cafés, as the city's downtown reinvents itself as the plains' technology quarter.
The oil beneath the western counties has made North Dakota one of the country's great petroleum producers, and Williston sits at the roaring center of the play.
No storm defines the northern plains like the blizzard, when wind and snow combine to erase the world and make even a walk to the barn a mortal gamble.
Long before the homesteaders, the Mandan and Hidatsa built thriving earthlodge towns along the Missouri, farming the bottoms and trading across the plains from the great villages at the Knife River.
From furrow to granary
In a state where most crops drink only what the clouds provide, the recurring specter of drought keeps every grower's eye on the rain gauge — and turns some toward the water of the Missouri.
Prized for its oil and its omega-rich seed, flax has staged a quiet comeback across the plains, its brief blue bloom once again dotting the northern fields.
As a generation of plains farmers reaches its later years, families across the state wrestle with the hardest harvest of all — handing the farm to the next hands, or letting it go.
The fire beneath the plains
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.
Under the wide sky
When the November rifle season opens, families gather at deer camps across the plains for a tradition that is as much about the fellowship as the hunt for the whitetail and the mule deer.
In the brief weeks of spring runoff, paddlers slip onto the Little Missouri and drift the length of the badlands, past buttes and bighorn and bison, in the quietest way to see the wild country.
Far from the glow of cities, the western plains hold some of the darkest night skies in the country, where the Milky Way throws shadows and the aurora dances on winter nights.
What the years remember
After decades as a territory, the northern half of Dakota entered the Union as a state in 1889, its admission so entwined with its southern twin that the order was deliberately obscured.
At Pembina in the north, the Métis people forged a distinct culture of the buffalo hunt and the trade trail, their squealing wooden carts once a familiar sight across the plains.
Far from a relic, the powwow endures as a vibrant celebration of song, dance and community among the plains nations, drawing dancers and drums from across the continent.
Grace on the frontier
Amid a broader revival of old crafts, the classic straight-razor wet shave has made a comeback in the barbershops of the plains, a small ritual of luxury and heritage.
The mineral-heavy water of much of the plains poses its own challenge to hair and skin, and the region's stylists have learned to work around it.
Trading on the plains' greatest asset — space and stillness — a new kind of rural wellness retreat invites guests to unwind far from the noise of the city.
The ledger of the plains
The hardware store, the implement dealer, the funeral home — family businesses handed down through generations remain the backbone of commerce in the plains town.
From the badlands to the lakes to the heritage sites, a growing tourism trade brings visitors and their dollars to a region long overlooked by the traveler.
As Fargo, Bismarck and the oil towns grow, the cost and scarcity of housing have become a pressing worry, complicating every employer's search for workers.
As the seasons turn
The success of a whole year can turn on the weather of a few autumn weeks, when the plains grower prays for the dry, breezy days that let the combines run.
Deep in the heart of winter, the plains often enjoy a brief and welcome softening, a spell of milder days that the old-timers have long marked on the calendar.
On still, cold mornings the plains wake transformed, every twig and grass blade and fence wire furred in white hoarfrost, the countryside briefly made of crystal.