Will Kürlich Kerl
Banned
What happens if the Dakota Territory is divided East-West instead of North-South like OTL?
Wasn't one early plan to have the north as a ('White'-settled) state and the south as a collection of Indian reservations like Oklahoma?
Whether or not the idea was ever taken very seriously IOTL, maybe they could do an E-W split on that basis?
The standard operating procedure for creating new states from a big territory was to make one state from the well-settled area and leave the rest as a territory until the population gets bigger. That's what they did with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and even Louisiana many years before. What was different about Dakota?
You need to find some reason to establish a major city in the West; aside from politics their is a reason Dakota was split and split the way it was, Dakota Territory had two primary population centers, one in the South-East and one in the North-East and as a result of this it was split with each forming the population center of a state.
You mean Sioux City and Fargo, right?
This is part of it but there was also a major schizim involving the moving of the capital from Yankton, SD to Bismark, NDAt a guess, Republicans wanted to get more of their people in Congress in the post ACW years. That's what I've always read about the Plains states, anyway.
Sioux City is in Iowa. You are thinking of Sioux Falls, which wasn't a huge city at the time due to raids, the main population centers was the Vermillion/Yankton area where the most fertile farmland was/is.You mean Sioux City and Fargo, right?
I found this out in the book "Railroaded". North and South Dakota had totally different patterns of settlement. North Dakota was settled as a result of large railroads bringing in settlers along their right of ways--the Northern Pcific and the Great Northern. Wheras in South Dakota, the railroad followed the settlement instead of vice versa. So you had the Great Sioux Indian Reservation until quite late (late 1880s when it was broken up and a lot of empty land betwen the Missouri River and the Black Hills in South Dakota.
East and West Daktoa would make no sense until the present--when one might if one got a liberal Congress and a liberal legialatue in Pierre, permission to split South Dakota and give the Lakota their own separate state which they deserve (fat chance of that happening!).
During the time of the formation of the states?
One might as well have built a state around the Black Hills stretching from the Missouri River to the Big Horn Mountains to the Yellowstone. Maybe call it Lakota. Or Yankton. Sisseton for what is now South Dakota to the east of the Missouri. Assaniboine for North Dakota east and north of the Missouri. From the Bighorns, Wyoming starts south of the Yellowstone. Montana starts north of the Yellowstone. Assaniboine starts east of the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri.