All of the tribes of Dakota were now in touch with the white man and the next 5o years, 1820-7o, is largely a story of the fur trade, and of the attempts of various companies to secure themselves against the encroachments of their rivals. Despite the Treaty of Paris in 1818 which established the international boundary at the 49th parallel, the British long maintained their influence among the Indians of lower Red river valley, the Mouse river and Turtle mountain regions. On the Missouri the trade, after 1828, was monopolized by the American Fur company which built Ft. Clark at the mouth of Knife river, Ft. Union near the mouth of the Yellowstone and in 1831 introduced the steamboat on Missouri waters. The Columbia Fur Company also estab lished a number of posts from the Red river to the Missouri but was forced to sell out to the American Fur Company in 1827.
The first genuine settlement of home-seekers in North Dakota in this period was made by a band of settlers from Lord Selkirk's colony of Scottish Highlanders in Manitoba who migrated south of the boundary line and settled at Pembina in 1819. When Maj. Stephen H. Long, leading the first United States exploring ex pedition into the Red River valley in 1823, visited the place, the population numbered 600. Communication was soon established and trade opened between this colony and American settlements at Ft. Snelling and Prairie du Chien on the upper Mississippi river. Cattle and seeds were brought in, and cartloads of furs were yearly sent out. Year by year commerce over this Red river trail increased in importance. Ft. Abercrombie was built in 1858 and became a rendezvous for commercial and military opera tions in the north-west, as well as a rallying point for settlers.
Between 1850 and 1870 there was considerable difficulty with the Dakota Indians, whose lands in Minnesota had been largely appropriated by the whites, and whose buffalo herds on the Dakota prairies were fast being depleted by the hunting activities of traders and half-breeds. The Minnesota outbreak of 1862 was followed by campaigns by Gens. Sibley and Sully in 1863 and which finally drove the hostile Dakotas to the "Bad lands" west of the Missouri river. All eastern North Dakota was now open for occupation and the completion of the first railroad to the eastern border in 1871 inaugurated the settlement period in earnest.
The following decade was a period of intensive development in the Red River valley, and by 1880 settlement was spreading out over the area of the drift plain, especially along the line of the Northern Pacific railway which in 1873 had reached the Missouri river at Bismarck. West of the Missouri the country was made safe for cattle-raising by the Indian campaign of 1876-91 which finally broke the power of the Dakota tribes. The completion of the Great Northern railway across the northern part of the State in 1887 opened that region to eager settlers. The region forming North and South Dakota, which since 1861 had been known merely as Dakota Territory was divided in 1889 into a northern and southern half. A convention met in North Dakota in July and framed a Constitution which was accepted by the people in an election held on Oct. 1. President Harrison de clared the State's admission to the Union on Nov. 2, 1889.
The years 1890-1915 were years of constant growth in popula tion and intensive railroad development' Competing railway lines strove to forestall each other in tapping promising grain territory.
Once there they did their best to bring settlers into the newly opened region by conducting land excursions. Nearly 18,000 im migrants annually for this span of years made new homes in the State. Settlement of the drift plain was practically completed and homesteaders invaded the good land beyond the Missouri river The inrush continued with little abatement until the World War, after which, because of the general depression in agriculture, it practically ceased.
In politics North Dakota is normally Republican but its farmers have shown a tendency to desert the party in times of agricultural depression for third parties which usually promise more direct and radical remedies. In 1912 North Dakota, holding the first presidential primary election in the United States, showed its pref erence for La Follette. Resentment which had been gathering for a number of years against constant and wholesale abuses in grading and marketing grain resulted in 1915 in the formation of the Non partisan League (q.v.), a farmer political organization. This or ganization was so successful that by 1918 it had elected the governor and a majority of both houses of the legislature. An in dustrial commission was created to manage, operate and control all State-owned industries and business projects created by law, and three major enterprises were established, namely: a Bank of North Dakota, a State-owned and State-operated Mill and Elevator, and a Home Builders' Association. Despite efforts of conservatives to prevent, all these except the last named continued in operation. League nominees for state office again carried the Republican primaries and the election of 1932, though on the national issue the Democrats won by a vote of 5 to 2, and again in 1936. In 1934, partly as a result of Gov. Langer's Federal conviction of conspiracy, the Democratic Candidate, T. H. Moodie won the governorship, the Republican L. J. Frasier winning the Senate race.