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11/26/2013: We stand on the precipice of the holiday season, with Thanksgiving approaching rapidly – a time we often reflect on what the past has brought to us. Such was the case in 1954 for Mrs. Robert Welch of Menoken, who shared her own special memories with the students of Saint Mary's High School.

11/27/2013: On July 4th, 1889, seventy-five delegates from northern Dakota Territory met in Bismarck for the North Dakota Constitutional Convention. The Enabling Act, passed in February of that year, allowed for the creation of a state constitution that would go into effect when North Dakota became a state in the coming months. Most of the seventy-five delegates were farmers or lawyers from the eastern part of the state, but their differing opinions created tension and disagreements.

12/2/2013: Pete Pelissier, known as the “Buffalo Bill of the Missouri Slopes,” created a Wild West Show in the 1890s that performed around North Dakota. The show also traveled along the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad, appearing as far east as Boston, Massachusetts.

12/11/2013: When John Miller became North Dakota’s first Governor in the fall of 1889, he had little idea how demanding his new position would be. In addition to setting up a new state government, Miller was about to face a severe economic crises. Miller, a wealthy bonanza farmer with over 17,000 acres of land, had little experience with poverty.

12/19/2013: World War I was the most devastating war in human history at the time it was fought from 1914 to 1918. The Armistice that ended the conflict on November 1, 1918, came as a great relief to the nations at war.

12/20/2013: By the late 1880s, Thomas Nast was already an American legend. Called “the father of the American caricature,” he had popularized satirical cartoons in the nation’s newspapers, working for the New York Illustrated News and Harper’s Weekly. His cartoons had propagated the use of such symbols as an elephant to represent the Republican Party, and in 1862, he created the popular image of a benevolent Santa Claus still used today.

12/25/2013: A cowboy’s cowboy, Jack Chase died on December 26, 2001. He was a four-time state champion steer wrestler during the 1960s and traveled the rodeo circuit as often as his work allowed from the late 1940s until 1980, when he retired from active competition. Jack was a top rodeo cowboy and a person who did a great deal during his lifetime to promote and keep the cowboy way of life and our western heritage alive.

3/25/2014: Andrew Johnston was born near Taylor in Dakota Territory on this date in 1885.

3/27/2014: Although he considered Pembina his home, Joseph Conmy Jr. traveled the world, walked beside Presidents, was decorated in three different wars, and was the commander in charge on Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. His story is so far-reaching it merits its own book. But today, we focus on his second Silver Star award for gallantry.

4/1/2014: In the harsh winter of 1880, the Northern Pacific Railroad experienced its longest and most strenuous blockade of snow on its tracks. The winter was “exceedingly blizzardy,” as one storm after another piled deep snow on Dakota Territory, causing the railway to be blocked much of the time from Christmas of 1879 into March of 1880.