Carol Wilson

2/2/2010: On a warm sunny day in the spring of 1884, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the banks of the Little Missouri River in Medora watching a determined young cowboy struggle to break a wild horse. The bucking bronco kicked violently down the bank to the river, trying to dismount its rider. But just as the horse reached the water's edge, its front hooves sank into the sand. The horse toppled mid-buck, and its rider hurtled face-first into the river. The dogged young rider was John Goodall, a true cowboy of North Dakota's old west.

9/19/2009: In today's modern schools, students and teachers have access to great technologies like SmartBoards and PowerPoint programs. In 1916, school superintendents in North Dakota experimented with multimedia presentations too, using one of the latest and greatest technologies of the time: the stereopticon.

9/18/2009: When the janitor of Drake public school tossed a pile of books into the building's furnace in 1973, he did not do so as a symbolic act or a political statement. The school always burned its waste, and the thirty-two copies of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five were not being used by the students. But what the janitor did not realize was that those few insignificant books would become the fuel for a great controversy.

9/17/2009: In 1946, the people of Selfridge feared that an "undemocratic and un-American" presence had infiltrated their public schools. The suspects were not devious spies, but rather Catholic nuns.

9/16/2009: In 1942, while other schoolchildren were stuck inside a classroom learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, the children of Wing village spent their days in workshops, classrooms, and fields learning the finer points of shoe repair, woodwork, and gardening.

9/15/2009: Before the introduction of the big yellow school bus, school-provided transportation was non-existent for the students of rural, one-room schools. Most children in North Dakota made their way to school the old-fashioned way - by buggy, sled, horseback, or on foot. But one lucky group of children rode to school in style aboard a horse-drawn tin contraption that acted as an early type of school bus.

9/14/2009: When a child hears the word "school" today, he or she might think of brick school buildings, big yellow buses, computers, and textbooks. But the word school meant something very different to the first students of North Dakota. School meant walking two miles to a one-room structure made of wood, stone, or sod to learn about the three Rs without benefit of textbooks, workbooks, or in many cases, pencils and paper.

9/13/2009: On September 10, 1890, the North Dakota School for the Deaf was founded in Devils Lake.

9/4/2009: Ms. Frances Densmore and her sister Margaret stuck out like a sore thumb as they hauled ungainly machinery such as a typewriter, a phonograph, and camera equipment across the natives' land.

9/3/2009: Surviving a plane crash is considered a miracle for any person, but imagine surviving 47 crashes in your lifetime. This was one of North Dakota pilot Dick Grace's greatest claims to fame. You might think that any pilot who crashed 47 times was clumsy, but not Dick Grace. Crashing planes was his job.