NORTH DAKOTA, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a dark blue field (background) with a coat of arms in the centre that includes an eagle with outspread wings above a scroll with the words North Dakota. In the late 19th century the Dakota Territorial Guard displayed a blue flag with the coat of arms of the United States in the centre. After North Dakota joined the Union in 1889, a similar design was used by the state's National Guard. Colonel John H. Fraine was the battalion commander of the state troops who saw action in the Philippines under this flag in 189899. He spearheaded the drive to have it recognized as the state flag, which it officially became on March 3, 1911. The coat of arms on the state flag was easily confused with the U.S. coat of arms, however. In the mid-20th century the North Dakota National Guard created a distinctive new coat of arms, which it proposed as a replacement for the existing design. Its display on a green field was recognized as a flag for government use on March 15, 1957, although it did not replace the 1911 flag. The green flag was basically restricted to the use of the National Guard and of the governor of the state. Whitney Smith History The United States acquired the lands drained by the Red and Souris river systems (from 1670 parts of Rupert's Land) by the RushBagot Agreement of 1817, and the remainder of what became North Dakota from France by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The recorded history of the state falls into three periods: the period of Indian trade, from about 1738 to 1871; of white settlement, from 1871 to 1915; and of adaptation, since 1915. Explorers and traders Although European goods were traded among the Indian peoples before his arrival, the first known white visitor to North Dakota was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Lord de La Vrendrye, a native of Canada who visited a cluster of earthen-lodge villages near present-day Bismarck in 1738. Traders from Hudson Bay and Montreal began to go to the area on a regular basis in the 1790s. The best-known visitors of the early years were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose expedition made winter camp in 180405 near present-day Stanton. In the 1820s and '30s American traders made the upper Missouri country a hinterland to St. Louis. They brought in guns, kettles, blankets, and axes, as well as liquor and disease. The white man's goods made the Indians dependent on the traders, his liquor demoralized them, and his diseases killed them. In 1837 smallpox, carried up the Missouri by passengers aboard a steamboat, reduced the Mandan population from about 1,800 to 125 in a few months. Indian hostility grew when steamboat traffic increased after the discovery of gold in Montana in 1862 and when the U.S. Army built forts along the rivers. In 1876 Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry set out from Fort Abraham Lincoln, south of present-day Mandan, for their fateful encounter with the Sioux and Cheyenne on the Little Bighorn River in Montana.