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1/27/2015: Cattle rustling is a staple of western movies and TV shows. Movie heroes like John Wayne and Roy Rogers routinely had to cope with rustlers. They often engaged in furious chases on horseback and lots of gunfire. But cattle rustling is not fictional. It has a long and troubled history in North Dakota.

3/10/2015: Billings County is located in the western portion of North Dakota. The 2010 population of 783 made it the second-least populated county in the state.

3/12/2015: The 1850s were a time of increasing conflict between the Dakota and settlers who were steadily moving west. The encroachment on traditional hunting grounds left the Dakota frustrated. Relations between the two groups were tense, with sporadic violence. Then came the shocking massacre at Spirit Lake, Iowa.

3/16/2015: In the 1880s, western Dakota was an empty land with miles between ranches. Roads were few, and a trip across the prairie on foot was not always the safest, with spring weather being quite fickle. It was also home to many creatures now seldom seen in the hills and grasslands. The buffalo had disappeared but wolves and mountain lions lurked among the rocks, and an occasional bear sought shelter in the ravines.

3/23/2015: ‘Sousa is coming to town,’ were the magical words heard in Grand Forks back in the year 1899, when the “March King” came to the Metropolitan Theater, most fittingly, in the month of March.

3/25/2015: William H. Brown was very involved with land matters in the development of North Dakota. Among other jobs, Brown established The William H. Brown Land Company, one of the largest such companies west of the Missouri River. He also platted and founded several townsites, including Flasher, Haynes, and, in 1904, Mott.

3/26/2015: Gerrymandering is a practice by which a political party attempts to manipulate voting district boundaries for political advantage. The party in power has control of the process, so the party out of power regularly accuses the other of gerrymandering. The term was coined on this date in 1812.

3/30/2015: On this date in 1909, Joe Wustner of Ryder proved it wasn't impossible to turn water into oil. Actually, oil had been in Wustner's 28-foot water well for more than two years before people started to pay attention. Wustner knew it was there, so he only used the water for livestock, and he burned the oil in his lamp. However, in early 1909, more oil began to leach into the water, and soon even the horses refused it.

3/31/2015: When the Civil War ripped the U.S. in two in 1861, William H. Brown was working in a hardware store in Massachusetts. He immediately enlisted in the 10th Massachusetts Regiment, joining 1,000 other “strong, young business men,” who gave up their usual pay of one-hundred-dollars a month for the paltry $11-per-month of a soldier.

4/16/2015: Thomas Neary, a well-known attorney from Minot, had a marvelous invention to improve rifle gunsights, back in the year 1909. He was going to “revolutionize modern warfare” and make big-game hunting easier with a new idea.