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1/14/2006: In the summer of 1800, Northwest Fur Company trader Alexander Henry established a post near Pembina. Henry kept a journal and wrote the earliest descriptions of the southern Red River Valley.

1/15/2006: The Huff Hill Ski Area opened for business, on this date in 1993, 16 miles south of Bismarck-Mandan on the western slope of the Missouri River.

1/17/2006: Park Company Realtors of Fargo traces its beginnings to this day—fifty years ago—when real estate agents Phil Jung and Vernon Struck organized Island Park Associates. From the first office location adjacent to Island Park, to its current location on north 10th Street, the company has moved several times, but it has always been headquartered in the downtown area.

1/27/2006: On this day, exactly thirty years ago, President Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced, in his Annual Report to Congress, the termination of a nuclear missile defense system that had recently become operational at Nekoma, ND. The Senate approved the decision the same day. Interestingly, the House of Representatives had first voted to shut down the system the previous October, just one day after it had become fully operational.

1/28/2006: A photograph in the Institute for Regional Studies collection shows a snow covered buffalo bull.

2/1/2006: Public Radio stations have been providing their distinctive non-commercial programming in North Dakota for more than eighty years. Seven years ago today most of those stations were united for the first time in the statewide network we know as Prairie Public.

2/3/2006: On this day in 1959, a small plane crashed on its way to Fargo-Moorhead, instantly claiming the lives of four young men—three of them rising stars in the hot new music genre called Rock and Roll. A little more than a decade later, the day was immortalized as “the day the music died” in Don McClean’s cryptic popular song “American Pie.”

2/4/2006: In February 1999, on the 40th anniversary of the events that speeded the launch of Bobby Vee’s career as a Rock and Roll musician, Governor Ed Shafer announced that Vee was to be the thirtieth recipient of North Dakota’s highest honor—the Rough Rider Award.

2/5/2006: “In February of 1951, more than 400 farmers from Ramsey, Towner, Cavalier, Nelson, and Benson counties met in Devils Lake, North Dakota to discuss forming a rural telephone cooperative. An 11-man organizing committee was elected.”

2/6/2006: In 1912 William T. Thom, Jr. was a sophomore in college, majoring in Geology. On a field trip to the Cannonball River area in western North Dakota, he found some fossilized coral, which led him to believe the area had once been a sea.