2/15/2011:
Football was the game that brought about college sports rivalries in the 1890s, and it was then that the intense competition between NDSU and UND began.
The University of North Dakota played its first college football games in 1892 and had the only football team in the state until 1894, when the Fargo Agricultural College (better-known today as NDSU) established its first team.
Team names arose naturally as sportswriters wrote about the two rivals. UND teams became known as the Flickertails, otherwise called Richardson ground squirrels, the familiar tan-colored, wide-eyed rodents that thrive, even today, right on some of the campus lawns. UND wished to be the flagship college of North Dakota and to be the premiere gridiron representatives of “The Flickertail State.”
NDSU, the land grant college in North Dakota authorized to operate a School of Agriculture, found its athletes being called the “Farmers.” After the turn of the century, sportswriters also referred to NDSU’s teams as the “Aggies.”
In 1922, all of this changed when NDSU formed a sports booster club on this date. They called it the “North Dakota Club.” This club, led by NDSU athletic director Stanley Borleske, announced that its teams would no longer be known as the “Aggies” or the “Farmers,” but would have a new name – the “Bison.”
Why call the NDSU teams the Bison? The Athletic Club clearly stated that they wanted to have their “teams play under the name of the staunchest and most persistent fighters” who roamed the Great Plains. The bison formed an integral part of North Dakota’s natural history and the buffalo had been mentioned in the school songs and legends even though the “Bison’s thundering tread” had long since “been hushed upon the boundless prairies” of Dakota Territory.
Even more importantly, a bull bison was more powerful than a puny flickertail ground squirrel. NDSU’s athletes intended to prove conclusively to U.N.D just how big a flickertail would look under the hoof of a Bison in 1922 and ever after.
Is it any wonder, that a mere eight years later, in 1930, the powers-that-be at UND upgraded their own mascot from the lowly status of a ground squirrel to that of the mighty “Sioux,” the intrepid hunters of the Bison?
The saga of the Aggies, Flickertails, Bison, and Fighting Sioux continues as UND looks for a new logo, mascot and banner to replace the “Sioux” label. What will UND choose? Please stay tuned to Prairie Public for the conclusion of this story.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, History Department, MSU Moorhead.
Sources:
“A.C. Athletics To Be Known As Bissons,” Weekly Spectrum [NDSU Student Newspaper, February 17, 1922, p. 3. The N.D. Club meeting had been held on February 15, 1922, according to 1924 Bison Yearbook, N.D.A.C., n. p., in the collections of the N.D. Institute for Regional Studies, Fargo, ND.
UND team identified as “Flickertails” in “North Dakota 'U' Wins Title, Minneapolis Morning Tribune,November 7, 1912, p. 15.
“Bisons Defeat Flickertails By One Tally In Hard Struggle,” Fargo Forum, February 25, 1922, p. 13.
“Flickertails Are Sioux Warriors Now,” Dakota Student [UND Student Newspaper], October 3, 1930, p. 2.
“Coach Borleske Head of Athletics,” The Weekly Spectrum, October 8, 1919, p. 1.
“Aggies Defeat Preachers,” The Weekly Spectrum, February 24, 1920, p. 1.
“Flickertail State” in North Dakota Centennial Blue Book, p. 11, http://digitalhorizonsonline.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=ndbb&ELSOPTR-6361&REC=2, accessed on January 18, 2011.
Farmers as nickname in Grand Forks Herald, October 25, 1903; November 4, 1906; October 30, 1897.
Football beginnings in Robert Samuel Anderson, A Social History of Grand Forks, North Dakota, M.A. thesis, U.N.D., 1951, p. 33; and Louis G. Geiger, University of the Northern Plains: A History of the University of North Dakota, 1883-1958 (Grand Forks: University of North Dakota, 1958), p. 125, 242.