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10/23/2015: In his extensive history of North Dakota, Elwyn Robinson describes how Norwegian immigrants made their mark. They carved out homesteads and settled the land. As the railroads came through and towns sprouted on the prairie, these new immigrants adopted the language of their new home. Many Anglicized their names. Laverans Fjelstad became Lewis Fisk. But at the same time, these newcomers clung to their homeland, often subscribing to Norwegian newspapers. They cooked lefse and lutefisk. They were Americans, but they never forgot that they came from Norwegian stock.

10/27/2015: An unusual harvest took place in Enderlin, North Dakota in 1938. It wasn’t a harvest of wheat, soybeans, or corn, it was a harvest of trees. That may bring logging to mind, but the Enderlin harvest was not for lumber. On this date in 1938, the United States Forest Service announced that in seventeen days, nearly two million trees had been dug up and transferred to various districts throughout the state for shelterbelt plantings in the spring.

11/2/2015: It has been a long time since a United States naval vessel carried the name of North Dakota. The dreadnought battleship North Dakota was decommissioned in 1923. Now, once again, the USS North Dakota sails the seas.

11/9/2015: A symbol of North Dakota became official on this date in 1943 as the legislative assembly adopted the state flag. The flag is virtually identical to the one carried by the First North Dakota Regiment in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and Philippine Insurrection in 1899.

11/10/2015: Today marks anniversaries in the lives of two North Dakota men who were complete opposites. One was the winner of the Medal of Honor, and the other was a cold-blooded killer.

11/11/2015: On this date in 1933, the first of the great dust storms of the 1930s hit North Dakota. Homesteaders had been systematically plowing up the native grasslands to plant wheat -- in fact, it was a condition of homesteading to break the land for planting -- and by the 1930s, not much root structure was left to hold back wind erosion. When a series of hot summers and droughts dried up farmers’ crops, conditions were perfect for high winds to strip away the topsoil, and disaster struck.

11/12/2015: It was in the late-summer of 1883 that fifteen-year-old Johanna Kildahl arrived in the Mauvais Coulee Valley, near Lake Alice, about twenty miles north of Devils Lake. She traveled from Minnesota with her brother, Andrew, to meet the rest of her family who had homesteaded on the land in the spring of the year.

11/27/2015: The term “bootlegging” came into use in the West during the 1880s. It was the name used for the practice of concealing flasks of liquor in boots when going to trade illegally with the Indians. Two early references to bootlegging come from Kansas in 1889. Both the Attorney General of Kansas and the Probate Judge of Anderson County, Kansas referred to bootlegging. While the term was widely used throughout the West, it didn’t come into common usage in the rest of the country until prohibition was enacted in 1920. During Prohibition, bootleggers smuggled illegal liquor across the Canadian and Mexican borders. They were more likely to hide the liquor in concealed compartments in their cars rather than in their boots, since they transported large quantities. But the old name of “bootlegging” remained popular.

7/6/2015: Airplanes, invented by the Wright Brothers in 1903, were considered novelties as World War I began in 1914, but they rapidly became deadly combat weapons.

7/7/2015: It was about this time in 1905 that H. F. Osborn revealed the discovery of the “Dynamosaurus” or “dynamic lizard.” Now known as the Tyrannosaurus, or T. rex, this nasty carnivore literally surfaced for the first time just across the border in Montana.