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8/29/2008: When we think of international commerce; we often think of America’s great cities like New York or Chicago, not the rolling hills and rugged badlands of North Dakota. However for over thirteen hundred years, long before the great trading cities of our day, the Dakota prairies were home to some of the most extensive trading centers on the American continent.

8/30/2008: In 1881, the Dakota Territorial Legislature approved a bill authorizing the creation of a new county carved out of the southern portion of Pembina County and the northern portion of Grand Forks County.

8/31/2008: Born on an Iowa farm in 1879, Ralph Budd played an important role in North Dakota’s early rail transportation and tourism.

9/1/2008: The grandeur of the plains is more subtle than most landscapes. It appeases the need for simplicity, filled with absences. Quiet, modest, and if one is not accustomed, lonely. However, for a faithful lover of the prairies, it holds not loneliness, but peace. This peace appealed to a group of Franciscan Sisters who made their home in Hankinson, North Dakota, in 1928. On this day in 1926 the location for the Sister’s intended community was selected. The “motherhouse” would be a foundation in the United States where the community of Sisters could receive and train prospective women for future service as educators, seminary leaders, and aids in hospitals and homes across the country.

9/4/2008: In the years leading up to World War Two, North Dakota’s US Senator Gerald P. Nye was one of America’s leading and most controversial isolationists. Opposing intervention in foreign wars, Nye was thrust into the national limelight as chairman of the Senate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry opening on this day, September 4, 1934. Concluding that munitions makers had frightened people into military activity and then were rewarded by enormous profits during the war, Nye’s committee became the driving force behind the 1930’s neutrality laws. But Gerald Nye had not always been a staunch isolationist.

9/5/2008: The month of September marks the real beginning of school; whether students start returning in August or later, when September comes, they are settling down in their classes and delving into their textbooks.

9/8/2008: In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Syttende Mai in 1914 a number of Norwegian-Americans living in North Dakota marked the occasion by presenting a gift to their Norwegian brethren still living in the old country. Inspired by a similar work of art at Gettysburg, the group decided to commission a bust of Abraham Lincoln, collected the needed money and hired the then little-known Norwegian-American artist Paul Fjelde to sculpt it.

9/10/2008: Bouncing across the rutted trails in a four-wheeled rig drawn by a spotted pony, photographer Orlando Scott Goff traveled up and down the Missouri River recording Native American and frontier army scenes. His camera would capture some of the most poignant and important images of the American West.

9/13/2008: Long before there was Datebook, small town newspapers were the source of interesting information for North Dakota events. However, slow news days could create interesting but highly suspicious news,

9/21/2008: The name ‘Ole’ may bring to mind the fictional character who champions many a Norwegian joke. However, one North Dakotan named Ole A. Olson was not fictional, although his celebrated wood-carvings certainly had character.