The site of the city was originally a small military post established in 1872 with the mandate of protecting work gangs from the Northern Pacific Railway. It was called Edwinton after Edwin F. Johnson, chief engineer of the Northern Pacific, and spotted at one of the most advantageous crossings of the Missouri River.
The railroad arrived on June 4, 1873 and the town name was switched to honor German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the hopes of attracting German settlement and perhaps some investments of Deutsche Marks. Then gold was discovered in the Black Hills and nobody much cared what the town at the head of navigation was called.
Another boom descended in 1883 when county sheriff and political boss Alexander McKenzie orchestrated - by stealing votes and intimidating voters his opponents claimed - the move of the Dakota Territory capital from Yankton to Bismarck. When the territory was cleaved into two states in 1889 Bismarck became the North Dakota capital and, despite a vote to leave for Jamestown in 1930 after the original capitol building burned, has been the only seat of government the state has known.
The face of Bismarck changed forever on the night of August 10, 1898 when a fire broke out in a Northern Pacific Railroad warehouse. Before the flames could be beaten back kegs of gunpowder exploded, stoking the conflagration. Winds whipped the fire from the railroad to the doorstep of the capitol building, ten blocks to the north. When the losses from the Great Fire of 1898 were added up the bill reached for than one-half million dollars and the days of constructing commercial buildings from wood in Bismarck were over.
Our walking tour of downtown Bismarck will discover how the city rebuilt, a process that dominates the streetscape more than a century later. But first we will begin on the grounds where we can see the very first structure raised in Bismarck...
Many American towns owe their existence to the railroads. The railroad was so important to Fargo that the town was named for William G. Fargo, a director of the Northern Pacific Railroad. At first it wasn’t much of a town, back in 1871 when the first city pioneers staked homestead claims at the point where the Northern Pacific planned to cross the Red River. At that time Midwestern settlers knew the place as Centralia where steamboats would stop on the river.
Fargo’s drive to become North Dakota’s premier city began with the formal arrival of the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railroads. In 1890 the city was selected as the Flickertail State’s federally funded land grant college, the North Dakota Agricultural College which evolved into North Dakota State University in the 1960s. Fargo became the “Gateway to the West” approaching the 20th century.
Progress was slowed on a late spring day in 1893 when fire broke out on Front Street (Main Avenue today) and was quickly carried by winds across much of the town, studded with wooden buildings. More than thirty blocks of downtown Fargo were destroyed but optimism among the 8,000 inhabitants in the heart of the Red River Valley was scarcely diminished. By the next summer the Fargo streetscape was lined with 246 new buildings, mostly constructed of brick and stone.
We will see many of those post-conflagration buildings that still reside in the heart of Fargo on our walking tour. And we will start with one from the progenitor of the city itself...