No. 1 Hard

North Dakota has a long, embedded reputation as a forsaken place. It’s one of the most rural states, with farms covering ninety percent of its land. Not that the land is ideal for farming. The eastern Red River Valley is best, but it floods. The central drift prairie is subject to drought. And the western Missouri Plateau is drier yet, the rocky Badlands having been described as “hell with the fires out.” When people imagine inhospitable places, they typically think of craggy mountains and earthquake-prone zones and coastal cities that get struck by hurricanes. But, actually, it’s the flat, mute, unforgiving terrain of North Dakota that’s historically turned people away in droves, their dreams scorched to ash.

That’s not to say the land isn’t beautiful. It is. Skies don’t come any bigger; the terrain is so flat in most places, one can practically see the curve of the earth. There’s a quiet, settled feeling about North Dakota, which rests at the exact geographical center of North America. You can stand in a field of grass, hearing nothing but the chirping of bugs, the wind against the earth, and perhaps the beating of your own heart, knowing that this is not just the middle of nowhere, it’s the middle of everywhere. The expanse that flows outward in every direction has a way of making you feel tiny, unprotected, and most disconcertingly undistracted.

North Dakota may be the best place in America for being alone, but that’s not a quality necessarily appreciated by local politicians and business owners, who have wracked their brains to figure ways of bringing people into the state. Their efforts have focused largely on attracting new industries. Historically, North Dakota has relied heavily on wheat production, specifically a tough spring wheat that requires only a short growing season, nicknamed the “No. 1 Hard.” Although successes like a Microsoft campus in Fargo, a Bobcat plant in Gwinner, and a pasta factory—Noodles by Leonardo—in Devils Lake have helped to diversify the economy, the state has continued to lose people, especially young people, who pack up after graduation for better jobs in places like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. North Dakota was the only state that saw a population decline between 2000 and 2005, and now it ranks forty-eighth in inhabitants, behind Wyoming and Vermont. Current residents number just under 637,000, fewer than lived in the state in 1920. In official terms, many counties meet the nineteenth-century definition of “frontier.” Slope County, which has around seven hundred people living on twelve hundred square miles of land, qualifies as “wilderness.”

Quite obviously, North Dakota has a problem. Even as some of its cities grow and become more cosmopolitan and diverse, namely Fargo and Grand Forks, which huddle against the border of Minnesota, the rest of the state seems to be returning to nature. It’s a conundrum across the country, this decline in rural vitality, but the matter is especially dire in greater North Dakota, which threatens to empty out completely. Various survival plans have been floated. The more mundane involve tax breaks and other financial incentives for those willing to move to, say, the town of Tioga, in the northwestern quarter of the state. Other proposals are more unusual. One suggests turning the better part of the state into a federal grassland, where buffalo and prairie dogs could roam free. Another would make North Dakota a “four-seasons war games zone.” Proponents of that plan talk of the plethora of abandoned houses and barns and silos that the military could use for target practice. These are the people who refer to North Dakota, with very little irony, as “Dakistan.”

The main highway intersection in Rugby, a town about 150 miles east of Tioga, is anchored by a stone obelisk. Built in 1932 by several local men, along with a group of Boy Scouts, this monument marks the “Geographical Center of North America.” Next to it, helpful signs point the way to Acapulco (2,090 miles), Neah Bay, Washington (1,100 miles), and various spots in Maine and Canada. The idea is that if the continent were of uniform density, it would balance like a top on this spot, near the Dairy Queen, the Pizza Hut, and the Cornerstone Cafe. That’s pretty interesting to ponder, indeed, and Rugby attempts to make the most of this singular designation. A nearby tourist hut stocks maps, not just of North Dakota, but of every state in the country. Don, the friendly and tidy man who answers questions at the booth, can describe with gusto matters of Indian history, the geological patterns left by ancient glaciers, and even good fishing spots. But when asked who are the typical visitors to Rugby, he turned a little sheepish. “Mainly people who have been to every other state in the country,” he said. “North Dakota is the last state on their list.”

That’s been the problem all along. North Dakota—once the Dakota Territory, which included South Dakota—was one of the last states in the U.S. to be settled by white people. It stood largely undeveloped until the late 1800s, when it was finally admitted to the Union. Even then, its greatest benefit was as a pathway to other places. Early fur traders sent boats up the Missouri River to Montana for pelts—a daunting journey, as the area was heavily populated by various Indian tribes, especially the Sioux, who were hostile to white people. Sitting Bull, of the Hunkpapa band of Sioux, once reportedly declared to a frontier mail carrier that “his business is to kill whites, and he will kill them as long as he and his band last. He boasts that war is more profitable to him than peace; that it brings him arms, ammunition, clothing, and especially great numbers of horses and mules, while the tribes who have submitted are dying of misery and hunger in the places where the whites have penned them up.” And we all know what happened to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn, just over the border, in Montana.

Military forts were constructed. Indians were killed, by gun or disease. Various deals were struck with various tribes, and finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the area was deemed safe, not just for fur traders, but for ranchers and farmers as well. The main crop was and would continue to be that hard, hearty spring wheat. The railroads came through, connecting one end of the state to the other, and also connecting North Dakota to the rest of the country. Many of the lines crisscrossing the state were funded by milling interests, industrialists looking to transport North Dakota wheat to Minneapolis, where it could be processed and sold at market. For a significant stretch of time, into the early 1900s, North Dakota operated as a hinterland to Minneapolis, and Minneapolis, hundreds of miles from its border, actually controlled the state’s politics.