| Summary: | Progressive North Dakota in the 21st Century "The Great Dakota Boom." That's how longtime University of North Dakota history professor Elwyn B. Robinson described the 1880s in his seminal 1966 book appropriately titled, History of North Dakota. This "boom" came as a more industrialized and urbanized nation brought larger markets for fanners. That led to western settlement, aided by improvements in flour milling and the construction of railroads. "New-process milling made Minneapolis the flour-milling center of the United States and created a market," Robinson wrote of that time. "Railroad construction made the Red River Valley the chief supplier of that market. As the hungry mills called for more and more hard spring wheat, James J. Hill threw his railroads across the black northern prairies and thousands of pioneers rushed in to take up the land." Between the years of 1878 and 1890, the population of what was to become North Dakota in 1889 increased by 1,000 percent, from an estimated 16,000 to 191,000, Robinson describes this increase as bringing "farms, towns, newspapers, schools, churches, and settled ways of living to an empty grassland." As that decade ended, North Dakota officially entered the Union on November 2, 1889, as America's 39th state. Agriculture, first dominated by wheat, grew to include a wide variety of other crops, and has sustained North Dakota as its leading industry in the years since. Energy was being harnessed commercially in lignite mines as early as 1873. Transportation, education, health care, culture, technology, and business and manufacturing emerged in North Dakota's early days and continue to influence the state's present and future. The first decade of the 2 J st Century nears completion, and the economic mainstays that have defined the identity, economy, and lifestyle of the state remain as significant today as some of them were as far back as the time of the first "Great Dakota Boom" of the 1880s. They have, however, been reshaped and in some cases redefined with technological innovations that are charting a bold future for North Dakota. This success has drawn attention by economists and business leaders around the country. Those who once scoffed at the state as a frozen, barren tundra, are now taking a second look at the opportunities it offers. Joel Kotkin, an Irvine Senior fellow at the New American Foundation, has studied economic and growth trends in the United States for many years. In the August 31, 2006, issue of The Wall Street Journal, Kotkin wrote about the prosperity North Dakota and other Great Plains states were experiencing in the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century, CHAPTER ONE - PROGRESSIVE NORTH DAKOTA IN THE 2 1 ST CENTURY 3
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