Jayme L. Job

8/2/2012: Captain James Fisk’s last and largest western expedition reached Fort Union on this date in 1866. A week behind schedule, the party of five hundred was happy to have reached the Montana border without any major catastrophes. Fisk’s fourth expedition also proved his most successful. The previous three, sanctioned by the U.S. Army, had been marred with difficulty. The 1864 party had been attacked by Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa Sioux and had to be ‘rescued’ and escorted back to Fort Rice by General Sully.

8/1/2012: Major Samuel Woods reached Pembina on this date in 1849, traveling through the newly-formed Minnesota Territory to establish a military presence on the Red River of the North. Also known as the Pope Expedition, after the group’s surveyor John Pope, Woods was also tasked with meeting with local tribes to learn whether “their lands in the Red River Valley may be purchased and opened for white settlement.” These secondary orders came from the Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Ewing.

7/30/2012: William Jayne, the first Governor of Dakota Territory, issued a proclamation dividing the territory into three judicial districts on this date in 1861. Jayne, Abraham Lincoln’s personal physician from Springfield, Illinois, was only thirty-five years old when President Lincoln appointed him to be Territorial Governor of Dakota. The tremendous task of creating a territorial government within the newly organized territory fell to the young physician.

7/28/2012: A large storm traveled through west-central North Dakota on this date in 1996, producing a tornado near Turtle Lake and causing extensive hail damage.

7/27/2012: The first inmates of the new Bismarck penitentiary arrived from Sioux Falls on this date in 1885. The thirty-five men were transferred from the Dakota Territory Prison, which had become overcrowded in the four years since it was built in 1881.

7/26/2012: General Alfred Sully and a large contingent of troops departed from the Heart River of western North Dakota on this date in 1864, leaving behind a few hundred emigrants and several hundred soldiers as protection. Sully’s troops headed north to confront a village of Sioux that scouts had reported in the Killdeer Mountains. The place the emigrants were left is known today as the Heart River Corral, a North Dakota State Historical Site fourteen miles southeast of Richardton.

7/25/2012: William Clark, along with a small contingent of men, reached the three forks of the Upper Missouri on this date in 1805. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had been traveling for over three months in search of the forks, guided by the Mandan and Hidatsa directions given to them near Fort Mandan.

7/23/2012: A Divisionist Convention was held at Fargo on this date in 1887 to debate the merits of dividing Dakota Territory into two separate entities. An identical convention was held ten days earlier in Huron to the south. Both conventions hoped to garner support for the division of the territory, meriting the admittance of not one Dakota state into the United States, but two.

7/22/2012: A band of 200 Sioux attacked Fort Pembina on this date in 1808. Their main targets were not the traders and their families, but rather the enemy Chippewa camped nearby. The Chippewa had been trading earlier in the day and had fallen asleep in their tents after consuming much rum.

7/21/2012: Financier Chester Fritz announced a 1 million dollar gift to the University of North Dakota on this date in 1965.