North Pacific "to within a few miles of here," a telegraph line along the valley to Winnipeg, and "no public school kept here." The school must have come with the three churches by the year 1879, when the first mayor, Charles Cavalier, might read the proceedings of the town council in the first number of the Pioneer. And Editor Gatchell, strolling among the cranberry bushes, on viewing the charming landscape where two valleys merged, might wish for the romantic story of Pembina, then closing its hundred years.

In 1868 two mail carriers, on the line from Fort Abercrombie to Pembina, took land near Grand Forks and began the first settlement of farmers in that quarter. If they had wheat to sell, they were glad to see Captain Alexander Griggs on his flatboat from the fort. He was a partner with James J. Hill, the later famous railroad president, in a warehouse at St. Paul. He was on an exploring tour, with an eye to the transportation business. Not far from the Hudson Bay Company's trading houses and mill, he built a log cabin on land which he might hold by squatter's right until surer right came, and returned to the boat builders' yard at Fort Abercrombie, to carry out the plan of a steamboat line. The results were the new Grand Forks with a shipyard, the Red River Transportation Company, connection of steamers with the North Pacific railway, and rapid growth of population in the extensive country of which Grand Forks became a center of travel and trade. The town attracted to it a goodly number of energetic men, whose public spirit came to be well known, and of cultured "women not a few," from far eastward cities. The Plain Dealer, begun by George H. Walsh, in 1875, was the second newspaper in North Dakota, the Tribune, started by Colonel Lounsbury at Bismarck, being in its second year.

In his second report on immigration, Commissioner Foster gave to the world the following: "In August, 1871, the writer drove over the present site of Fargo (Pembina county) in a half-breed cart, drawn by a half-breed pony, which jogged lazily along, now and then stopping to catch a bite of grass, or to allow its driver to shoot a prairie chicken, frightened by the unusual disturbance; only one small log house was in sight, standing on the edge of the timber lining the bank of the Red River, while

far to the west the eye searched the rolling prairie in vain for any sign of civilization (the new Norwegian settlement not being visible to him). In the latter part of September the line of the North Pacific railroad was located through the present town site. when at once Fargo began to struggle into existence." The October election called forth 300 votes. "During the past summer it has twice doubled its population (1872). The railroad had come."

Thus far, the white settlement of Dakota, North and South, had been along the wooded valleys most easily reached by people from "the East," and the South had the more valleys. The prairie uplands must be settled along the railways, and the North had the first one to enter the present state; and it now has the direct benefit of the only two that reach the western line and run through to the Pacific Ocean. The car crossed the Red River at Fargo, early in 1872, and ran to Elk Point. The next spring, the one reached Bismarck and the other Yankton-two towns that were hardly then contesting for the capital. Between those roads was a vast expanse of green prairie, where antelopes had never been startled, nor buffalos stampeded by a locomotive; hence few groups of settlers. North and South were divided by an ocean of grass. The common opinion still was that the wisest land-seekers must keep near the streams and woods, so that the "Sioux City and Pembina Railroad," up the Big Sioux and down the Red River, was then an incorporated hope; and if it had been a reality, it might have brought the North and South populations, then over 15,000, into more intimate acquaintance, and promoted the unity of eastern Dakota in statehood. As their streams ran diversely, so ran their destinies, for the trend of their great railways was from east to west.

As early as January, 1871, the legislature began to petition congress to divide Dakota on the forty-sixth parallel of latitude, and organize two territorial governments. This effort for division on that line (except twice) continued for eighteen years. before it was successful. The fact explains the peculiar distribution of the educational, penal and benevolent institutions of the Territory, almost equally between the South and North. The religious denominations were organized on the assumption of two future states thus divided. The machinery of territorial