National North Dakota Day Date in the current year: April 19, 2025

North Dakota is a landlocked state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by Minnesota, Montana, and South Dakota, as well as the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It was named after the Dakota, an ethnolinguistic group of the Native American Sioux people; the word means “friend” or “ally” in the Dakota language.

North Dakota’s official nickname is the Peace Garden State after the International Peace Garden, a park on the Canada-U.S. border between North Dakota and Manitoba. It was dedicated in 1932 as a symbol of peace between the two nations.

The first Europeans to arrive in what is now Dakota were French-Canadian fur traders and explorers of the La Vérendrye family in the mid-18th century. Although they claimed the territory for France as part of Louisiana, France made no immediate effort to colonize it.

In 1762, France secretly ceded Louisiana to Spain. French Louisiana at that time extended far beyond the present-day state of Louisiana and included all or most of what are now Louisiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. As a result, North and South Dakota were part of Spanish Louisiana from 1762 to 1802.

When Napoleon came to power, he forced Spain to return Louisiana to France, only to sell it to the United States shortly thereafter. The Louisiana Purchase placed brought all of South Dakota and most of North Dakota under U.S. control. President Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the region, and in 1817, Americans established a fur trading post there.

By this time, the vast Louisiana Territory had been renamed the Missouri Territory to avoid confusion with the newly admitted state of Louisiana. Over time, parts of the Missouri Territory were reorganized: the Arkansas Territory was created in 1819, and Missouri achieved statehood in 1821, leaving the remaining lands as unorganized territory.

The gradual division of the land continued with the creation of the Iowa Territory in 1838, the Minnesota Territory in 1849, the Kansas and Nebraska Territories in 1854, and finally the Colorado and Dakota Territories in 1861. The Dakota Territory originally included all of present-day North Dakota and South Dakota, most of present-day Montana and Wyoming, and a small portion of Nebraska.

As new territories were carved out, the Dakota Territory shrank. Finally, on November 2, 1889, what remained of the Dakota Territory was officially divided into North Dakota and South Dakota, both of which were immediately admitted to the Union as the 39th and 40th states, respectively.

In 2017, National Day Calendar launched the National State Days project to celebrate the history and culture of each U.S. state in the order in which they joined the Union. Although North and South Dakota share a statehood anniversary, they have separate holidays in the National State Days project: North Dakota Day is celebrated on April 19, and South Dakota Day is celebrated a week later on April 26.