What is the North Dakota they know? A State of unbounded plains and hills and Badlands--elbowroom. Superb sunsets. High winds and tumbleweed. Farms and plows and sweeping fields. Gophers flashing across the road. Little towns crowded on Saturday night, and busy cities shipping out the products of North Dakota and supplying the needs of the producers. Sudden blinding, isolating blizzards, and soft, fragrant spring days with tiny sprouts of grain peering greenly through the topsoil. Pasque flower and cactus, flame lily, and fields of yellow mustard. The sad, slow wail of a coyote on the still prairie. People--Norwegians, Germans, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Icelanders, but all Americans. Square dances in barn lofts, and college "proms" with corsages and grand marches. Teachers building fires with numbed hands in stoves of icy one-room schools. Men in unaccustomed "best clothes" sitting in majestic legislative halls of a skyscraper statehouse. Political fires, sometimes smouldering, sometimes flaring, always burning. Endless facets are apparent in the temper and tenor of life, thought, and action of the people of this State, still a new people, pioneers-- "_Brave spirits stirred with strange unrest, They found broad waters and new lands, And carved the empires of the west._" NORTH DAKOTA: ITS NATURAL SETTING North Dakota is a rectangular area of 70,837 square miles, lying in what the United States Geological Survey has designated the center of the North American Continent. It is approximately 1,500 miles from the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Arctic Archipelago of North America. North to south it extends 210 miles, and east to west an average of 335 miles. On the north are the Provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada; on the east, the Red River of the North and the Bois de Sioux form the boundary between this State and Minnesota; on the south is South Dakota and on the west, Montana. THE SURFACE OF THE LAND The land surface resembles three broad steps of prairie, rising a half-mile in altitude from the eastern to the western boundary. The first two steps lie in the Central Lowlands of the Interior Plains, the third in the Great Plains area. The lowest step is the fertile, floor-like Red River Valley, once the bed of glacial Lake Agassiz. Near the Canadian boundary the valley is about 40 miles wide, but it gradually narrows until near the South Dakota line it is only 10 miles in width. With its northward slope of only about one foot to the mile, an even more gradual eastward slope, and few prominent surface features, the land offers no obstacles to a view across miles of level checkerboard fields. Natural woods grow along the Red River and its winding sluggish tributaries, and farmyard groves dot the landscape.