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1/24/2010: Towner County, North Dakota, was organized on this date in 1884, with Cando as its county seat.

1/27/2010: A century ago on this date, the Fargo Forum reported a sensational story out of Minot concerning an apparent case of patricide. Charles Moline had confessed to the murder of his father, Frank Moline, both of Pierce County. Mr. Moline's death, less than a week earlier, was initially believed to be caused by heart failure, but an investigation launched by Sheriff Erickson led to more sinister findings.

2/5/2010: A Fargo woman's visit to Moorhead on this date in 1910 nearly ended in tragedy as the woman attempted to burn down the Fargo city jail, along with herself and four male prisoners. The woman, Jane Hannibohl, had a lengthy police record, and was known for taking advantage of Moorhead's lax liquor laws, despite living under Fargo's prohibitive sumptuary laws.

2/9/2010: With recent mortgage foreclosures in the housing market, we can perhaps more readily relate to the events that transpired in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

2/11/2010: On a cold day in February of 1913, Mr. W.W. Potter of Bowman County watched curiously as an owl swooped down and disappeared into a hole in a pile of rocks on his property. On a whim, he walked up to the hole and stuck the barrel of a gun in the opening. But he found no owl-only a pile of dry grass, which he scooped out with his hand. As Mr. Potter sifted through the debris, an old briar pipe and lead pencil fell on the ground at his feet. Believing that a sheep herder must have left the artifacts while passing through, he casually picked up the pipe and stuck it in his pocket.

2/15/2010: The trials of horse rustlers Kid Trailer and Ky Matthews continued on this date in 1910 in Minot, North Dakota. Four famed lawmen in attendance marked the occasion as the "end of organized rustling in the northwest."

2/16/2010: On this date in 1876, a party of 13 men left Grand Forks, followed the Red River south to Fargo and turned west to follow the Northern Pacific railroad, which wasn't operating that winter. They reached Bismarck on March 2nd, and rested for the next three weeks. When they forged on, their group had swelled to 50, including a woman, seven children and a destitute, sourdough prospector from California named "Rattlesnake Jack."

2/19/2010: They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Such was the case during the 1930s, when our agricultural state, and others, worked to combat the destruction of grasshoppers. The insects came on like a plague, wreaking havoc on almost everything in sight. They ate the crops, the grass, the weeds; the wash, if it was hanging out to dry; they ate food belonging to the wildlife, to the domestic animals; they even ate the paint off the walls.

2/20/2010: The winter of 1935-36 was particularly harsh across the nation. In Fargo, for example, the temperature remained below zero for thirty-seven straight days.

2/21/2010: In 1951, North Dakota was looking for ideas for a license plate slogan. Something fresh, something that would sum up the state. People wrote in to the Bismarck Tribune with their ideas.