DAKOTA DATEBOOK: The Badlands
August 3, 2026 – The Badlands in Western North Dakota is a favorite place for many people. Whether to camp or just look out over the bluffs from the visitor’s center, people enjoy the picturesque landscape.
One might wonder how such a beautiful place came to be known as the Badlands. That name came about before the marked hiking trails, onsite bathrooms, and water pumps. For white settlers and soldiers going west, the landscape was dry and difficult for travel. Looking back on records from General Alfred Sully’s expeditions, we can hear firsthand why they hated this land.
Sully led expeditions in the summers of 1863 to 1865 to attack the Sioux tribes. In the late summer of 1864, Sully’s group was running dangerously low on rations and trying to meet three supply steamboats.
On this date, they began traveling west and were at first happy to find plentiful water and grass. However, two days into the expedition they reached the dreaded Badlands, a place Sully called, “Hell with the fires burned out.” They made camp on high ground near present-day Medora. It was a harsh landscape for a large squadron of soldiers, animals, and supplies. A soldier named Marshall wrote a letter to the Pioneer Press saying, “It was a perfect labyrinth to which there seemed no outlet and where no eye could trace out a path for a man to walk much less for the passage of loaded wagons.”
They ultimately had to rely on a young Blackfoot named Brackett. But most Native Americans weren’t friendly to the soldiers. At one point, while Sully’s column crossed the Little Missouri on August 7, Dakota gathered on high ground, shouting taunts.
Unlike the soldiers, the Sioux knew the terrain and could use it to their advantage. No wonder the soldiers called it the Badlands.
Dakota Datebook by Lucid Thomas
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: The Braceros Program
August 4, 2026 – As young men entered military service in large numbers following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States faced the possibility of a labor shortage. North Dakota grappled with the labor shortage like the rest of the country did. The Women’s Land Army recruited city women to work on farms, but it was not wildly successful. North Dakota turned to prisoners of war. Some prisoners were released from the prison camp at Fort Abraham Lincoln to work on farms. That program was curtailed after several prisoners escaped.
In an effort to solve the problem, the United States and Mexico crafted the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement. This agreement allowed Mexican laborers, known as “braceros,” to work on American farms for planting and harvesting and then return to Mexico. Knowing that people of Mexican descent were often treated badly in the United States, Mexico was cautious about entering into the agreement. When Mexico declared war on Germany and its allies in May, 1942, the United States and Mexico became allies, and Mexico felt the program was important to support the war against fascism. The agreement, which became known as the “braceros program,” was signed on this date in 1942. According to the agreement, braceros would be protected from social or economic discrimination. They would be paid thirty cents per hour, and housing facilities had to meet acceptable hygiene standards.
Most of the braceros went to California, with only about three percent coming to North Dakota. Most of those worked on sugar beet farms in the Red River Valley. When the planting was done, they went to other farms to help with haying and the wheat harvest. They returned in September to help with the beet harvest. When that was over, they returned to Mexico.
Braceros had a good reputation in North Dakota. Newspapers reported that farmers found them to be “honest and hard-working.” Few North Dakotans spoke Spanish and few braceros spoke English, so the federal government published brochures in both languages, including a booklet of useful sentences and phrases. Not all was rosy. Food and housing were often below standards, and pay was sometimes low or entirely withheld, but overall, the program was a success. With men returning to the labor market and a changing political climate, Congress let the Braceros Program expire in 1964.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Carole Butcher
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Douglas Nelson, The Confused Robber
August 5, 2026 – On today’s date in 1958, Douglas Armond Nelson staged a hold-up at the Wahpeton National Bank, and those who witnessed the event will never forget how it unfolded – not because of any excitement or gunplay, but rather because poor Douglas didn’t have much experience at bank robbing.
In fact, it took him about ten minutes just to convince the staff to take him seriously, and that was after a confused bank teller asked him the clarifying question: “Are you kidding?”
Douglas Nelson woke up on August 5, 1958, in a car he had stolen from a dealership in Minneapolis the day before. He had been on a demonstration ride when he pulled out a pistol and claimed the 1955 Chevrolet for himself. The dealer reportedly said “you can have the car, but I don’t want to walk back.” So, Douglas brought the salesman back to the dealership and then drove away. That night, he went to a drive-in movie and slept in his new car. But when he woke the next morning, he was broke.
So, he walked into the Wahpeton National Bank at around 12:30 p.m. with a pistol and a large, empty cardboard box. He approached Miss Lorraine Steffens, the teller behind the counter, and pleasantly informed her that this was a holdup.
“He never scowled once,” she said later, so she had a hard time judging his intentions. It was then that she asked him if he was kidding.
“No,” he answered, “I mean it.”
But he kept smiling, as if wishing she would be kind enough to take him seriously. Instead of continuing their conversation, she turned away and pretended to be busy.
“Once in a while I glanced up,” she said, “and he just stood there.”
A few others noticed the small commotion, but even when they saw the gun they thought perhaps he was an employee’s friend, playing a joke. When he demanded money from them too, however, they thought it was worth a call to the sheriff. He finally told them they had “five minutes,” so they walked around and pretended to put money in his box until the sheriff arrived and easily overpowered the young man.
Although his gun went off twice in the struggle, nobody was hurt. It was just a sad chapter in the life of Douglas Nelson, and a strange story for witnesses to tell.
Dakota Datebook written by Leewana Thomas
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Ike Ross and Bowbells’ Shooting Star
August 6, 2026 – Who hasn’t experienced the momentary, magical thrill of seeing a meteor flash across the night sky in the corner of your eye? It vanishes almost instantly yet its vapor trail lingers longer in your imagination.
In Bowbells, a fellow named Isaac “Ike” Ross witnessed a real meteor, close-up, on a summer’s night. What may have started as a romantic, peripheral vision turned into a blazing meteorite that scared the living daylights out of Ike because it nearly hit him squarely.
It was a July night. Ike Ross was sitting alone at the back door of his farm home, located four miles south of Bowbells, when he saw a brilliant ball of fire descending from the heavens. Ike heard the fearful swish of the shooting star as it passed through space on its downward course. He just about jumped out of his chair when the meteorite struck the earth within twenty feet of where he was sitting.
Aghast, Ike watched as the meteorite pierced the old sod-construction building that served as his seed barn. The force of its descent drove it through several feet of the shack’s wall before it embedded itself in the earth to a depth of at least two feet.
There was nothing magical about this trauma. Ike later said he was “skeered night to death.”
After calming himself, Ike went to bed but slept fitfully, full of fright. The next morning, he warily investigated the hole in his sod building. Taking a spade, Ike “set to work to dig the thing out,” and “after considerable hard work,” he unearthed an interstellar stone.
It was burnt perfectly black, with a peculiar sulfuric odor. Ike reckoned it weighed about four pounds. He brought the meteorite into Bowbells right away, and it was the center of attraction all day, clearly no ordinary stone. The blackened rock emitted a strong smell of sulfur. Some townspeople offered to buy it, but Ike “refused to part with the rock.”
It was on this date, back in 1910, that the Grand Forks Herald printed a story of Ike Ross’s close encounter with a blazing meteorite. No one knows what happened afterward to Ike Ross’s “shooting star.” Geology experts in North Dakota later termed it an “unconfirmed” sighting.
Nonetheless, Bowbells’ Ike Ross, who lived from 1853 to 1923, gave a fearful description of what it felt like to have a meteorite smash into the earth nearby.
Dakota Datebook written by Steve Hoffbeck
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Hunter, North Dakota
August 7, 2026 – The Homestead Act of 1862 attracted new settlers to Dakota Territory. Some settled in towns, but most were drawn by the promise of owning 160 acres to start farms and ranches. New towns were small and scattered across the territory. They supported agriculture as centers of trade, services, entertainment, and social life.
North Dakota is a state of small towns. More than a hundred have fewer than 1,000 residents and many have fewer than 500. About eleven percent of the state’s population lives in towns of 1,000 or less.
On this date in 1880, Even Johnson paid the United States government $400 for 160 acres of land, just $2.50 per acre. Johnson sold four acres to William Kindred. That October, Kindred platted a town and named it for John C. Hunter, a local landowner. He officially registered Hunter, North Dakota, in Cass County on May 28, 1881.
The town began to grow quickly. The Gale Duffany General Store opened in 1881, followed by another store, a school, and a bank. In 1885, residents voted to incorporate Hunter. By 1887, the town had grown to about 400 people.
Hunter kept growing. Over the next few years, it added six grain elevators, three churches, two blacksmiths, a hardware store, two more general stores, a men’s store, and an iron works. Two hotels opened, along with a restaurant, two saloons, and two newspapers.
Farmers and ranchers didn’t go to town often and when they did, they planned carefully. As more businesses opened, they could take care of everything in one trip. Hunter had two livery stables, a drugstore, a jewelry store, and two meat markets. Ladies could shop for hats at the millinery while their husbands and sons visited the barbershop. They picked up mail at the post office, bought gear at the harness shop, and stopped by the doctor’s office. The population grew to 500, and the town even boasted a ten-piece brass band and a five-piece orchestra.
Hunter is in Cass County. According to the 2020 census, its population was 332.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Carole Butcher
“Dakota Datebook” is a radio series from Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and with funding from The Study ND. See all the Dakota Datebooks at prairiepublic.org, subscribe to the “Dakota Datebook” podcast, or buy the Dakota Datebook book at shopprairiepublic.org.