People
Long before North Dakota’s statehood, Indigenous people shaped the Northern Plains.
Along the banks of the Missouri River, Mandan and Hidatsa women crafted earth lodges from willow, grass and sod. With hoes made of bison bones, they tended vast fields of corn, squash and beans – the Three Sisters. These nutritious crops could be dried and stored, making them valuable for trade.
This summer, take a road trip through 250 years of history without ever leaving North Dakota.
On July 1, “ND 250 Road Trip: Our American Story” opens in the Touchstone Energy® Cooperatives Governors Gallery at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum in Bismarck. The exhibit traces the state’s history from 1776 to 2026.
Most mornings, before the sun even rises, Ashley Bruner starts her day checking backpacks, making breakfast and mapping out the day before shuffling her four children off to elementary school. From there, she heads to a garage about 250 feet from her house. It’s a space her dad helped convert into a mini meat shop, complete with a walk-in freezer stocked with beef.
Routine, Bruner will tell you, is the last word to describe life on the ranch.
“No two days are the same,” she says.
Each spring, Thomas Hanna walked alongside his father and grandfather, surrounded by the sweet scent of clover and the hum of hundreds of hives. There, he learned the rhythms of beekeeping, watching, listening and gaining hands-on experience all through high school. By 2009, he became a full-time beekeeper. Today, Thomas and his family continue their grandfather’s legacy at Hanna Honey Farm.
When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, Quinn Renfandt saw how serious food shortages could be to a landlocked state like North Dakota. It created a sense of urgency he hadn’t felt before.
“I was fascinated – and honestly disturbed – by the fact that we have food deserts here in North Dakota,” he says.
A food desert is an underserved area with limited access to affordable, healthy, fresh food.
While farmers across the nation faced an economic collapse during the 1980s farm crisis, Brian Maddock studied.
As a legacy farmer, his family heritage runs deep. Maddock Ranch, located near the town of its namesake, traces back to Brian’s grandfather, who homesteaded in the area in 1889; the same year North Dakota gained statehood.
But it wasn’t until Brian attended a course on holistic resource management (HRM), that he put his faith into treating the ranch as one interconnected ecosystem. It worked.
Though President Theodore Roosevelt called New York home, he was an intermittent North Dakotan. And he ate like one, too.
“The president lives very plainly. He prefers plain, wholesome food to the most elaborate menu,” the former White House chef Henry Benoit told The Lafayette Sunday Times in 1903.
One of his favorite dishes? A sirloin steak, potatoes and gravy. As a sportsman, he was also fond of all types of game, especially quail and venison. And, he had an affinity for his mother’s cooking. Relatable, right?
Bill Lowman says there are two kinds of cowboy poets.
There are those who love the life, but don’t have an opportunity to live it.
“We call (them) the wannabes. They’ll write the perfect cowboy poem every time to prove that they belong,” Lowman says.
The other ones live the cowboy life. Their routines are all too common.
