The Territory of Dakota was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from March 2, 1861, until November 2, 1889, when the final extent of the reduced territory was split and admitted to the Union as the states of North and South Dakota.
History
The Dakota Territory consisted of the northernmost part of the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as well as the southernmost part of Rupert's Land, which was acquired in 1818 when the boundary was changed to the 49th parallel. The name refers to the Dakota branch of the Sioux tribes which occupied the area at the time. Most of Dakota Territory was formerly part of the Minnesota and Nebraska territories.
When Minnesota became a state in 1858, the leftover area between the Missouri River and Minnesota's western boundary fell unorganized. When the Yankton Treaty was signed later that year, ceding much of what had been Sioux Indian land to the U.S. Government, early settlers formed a provisional government and unsuccessfully lobbied for United States territory status. Wilmot Wood Brookings was the provisional governor. The cities of Wilmot and Brookings as well as Brookings County are named for him. President Lincoln appointed Dakota Territory's first governor, William Jayne, who was Lincoln's old friend and neighbor from Springfield, Illinois.
A small patch of land known as "Lost Dakota" existed as a remote exclave of Dakota Territory until it became part of Gallatin County, Montana Territory, in 1873.
All land north of the Keya Paha River (which includes most of Boyd County, Nebraska, and a smaller portion of neighboring Keya Paha County) was originally part of Dakota Territory, but was transferred to Nebraska in 1882.
American Civil War
Dakota Territory was not directly involved in the American Civil War but did raise some troops to defend the settlements following the Dakota War of 1862 which triggered hostilities with the Sioux tribes of Dakota Territory. The Department of the Northwest sent expeditions into Dakota Territory in 1863, 1864 and 1865. It also established forts in Dakota Territory to protect the frontier settlements of the Territory, Iowa and Minnesota and the traffic along the Missouri River.
Before statehood
thumb|[[Historical coats of arms of the U.S. states|Historical coat of arms of the Dakota Territory, illustrated in 1876]]
Following the Civil War, hostilities continued with the Sioux until the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. By 1868, creation of new territories reduced Dakota Territory to the present boundaries of the Dakotas. Territorial counties were defined in 1872, including Bottineau County, Cass County and others.
During the existence of the organized territory, the population first increased very slowly and then very rapidly with the "Dakota Boom" from 1870 to 1880. Because the Sioux were considered very hostile and a threat to early settlers, the white population grew slowly. Gradually, the settlers' population grew and the Sioux were not considered as severe a threat.
The population increase can largely be attributed to the growth of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Settlers who came to the Dakota Territory were from other western territories as well as many from northern and western Europe. These included large numbers of Norwegians, Germans, Swedes, and Canadians.
Commerce was originally organized around the fur trade. Furs were carried by steamboat along the rivers to the settlements. Gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874 and attracted more settlers, setting off the last Sioux War. The population surge increased the demand for meat spurring expanded cattle ranching on the territory's vast open ranges. With the advent of the railroad agriculture intensified: wheat became the territory's main cash crop. Economic hardship hit the territory in the 1880s due to lower wheat prices and a drought.
There are two conflicting narratives on why the Dakota Territory was divided and given statehood. One narrative suggests that it was due to regionalist tensions while the other suggests that it was a political play by Gilded Age Republicans.
Regionalist narrative
Regionalist tensions between the northern and the southern parts of the territory were present since the beginning. The southern part was always more populated, in the 1880 Census, the southern part had a population of 98,268, two and a half times the northern part's 36,909. The southern part also considered the north to be somewhat disreputable, "too much controlled by the wild folks, cattle ranchers, fur traders” and too frequently the site of conflict with the indigenous population. The railroad also connected the northern and southern parts to different hubs – the northern part, via Fargo and Bismarck became closer tied to the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area, while the southern part became closer tied to Sioux City and from there to Omaha.
Politically, territorial legislators were appointed by the federal government, and tended to remain in the region only while they served their terms. The larger population of the southern region began to resent them, while the northerners tended to emphasize that it was cheaper to be a territory, with the federal government funding a wide range of state functions.
The territorial governor Nehemiah G. Ordway moved the territorial capital from Yankton to Bismarck in 1883. The capital grab, which moved the capital away from the majority of the population fueled more resentment from the south.
Political play narrative
In 1889, Republican Benjamin Harrison became president of the United States and favoured statehood for Dakota. In order to become a state, a territory was required to have a population of at least 60,000. In 1889, southern Dakota had a population of over 340,000, and northern Dakota had a population of over 150,000 so Congress is said to have decided that it was finally time to grant statehood. But in reality, the Republican Party, which wanted more power in the U.S. Senate, put on pressure to divide Dakota into two states. With two senators from each state, the Republicans would gain four more senate seats in Congress. After defeating Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1888 election, they celebrated by splitting the Republican-dominated Dakota into two territories and admitting both of them as states. Today, there are still two Dakotas because Gilded Age Republicans wanted four senators instead of just two. In their eagerness to admit both Dakotas, congressmen also ignored that much of the land in the anticipated state of South Dakota belonged to the Sioux.
Perhaps, the capital change from Yankton to Bismarck can also be explained by the fact that Yankton was located in southern South Dakota on the territory's border with Nebraska while Bismarck, whose community had recently grown due to the arrival of the Transcontinental railway, had a relatively better central location near the Black Hills of South Dakota where recent gold discovery was a great impetus for growth and led it to becoming a freight-shipping centre on the "Custer Route" from the Black Hills.
Yankton's status as an important port was literally crushed on March 27, 1881, when an ice dam on the Missouri River burst, sending flood waters and giant blocks of ice flowing towards the town. The resulting flood waters continued to accumulate behind the debris, and by March 29, the town's riverfront and downtown were covered in water, ice and rock, destroying or stranding several riverboats that were moored there. As a result of this flood, and the expansion of railroads as a preferred method of shipping goods, Yankton's river boat traffic was reduced, and the city's role as a prominent stopping point on the way west dwindled over the next several years.
It was also not especially unusual for the party that controls Congress to admit states for political reasons. In 1864, Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation admitting Nevada, a barely populated desert state with a few thousand residents, into the union as a state. The few people who did live there were overwhelmingly Republican. A dozen years later, President Ulysses Grant, also a Republican, signed legislation admitting Republican-dominated Colorado as a state even though according to the then latest census, Colorado had fewer than 40,000 residents. Republicans also successfully blocked New Mexico from becoming a state until 1912 while Cleveland’s Democrats had hoped to admit New Mexico as it would have favored them. President Harrison had the papers shuffled to obscure which one was signed first and the order went unrecorded. The bill also enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted into the Union in nine months. This plan cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood and split Republican Dakota Territory into two new Republican states. Rather than two new Republican states and two new Democratic states that Congress had considered the previous year, the omnibus bill created three new Republican states and one new Democratic state that Republicans thought they would capture.