Edwinton to Bismarck: The Railroad Town That Became a Capital

On May fourteenth, eighteen seventy-two, Northern Pacific Railroad surveyors staked out a townsite at the Missouri River crossing and named it Edwinton, in honor of Edwin Ferry Johnson, the civil engineer who had planned the route. The following year the name was changed. Railroad promoters wanted German investment, and they rechristened the place Bismarck, after the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. It was a purely commercial gesture, but it stuck.

At its birth, Bismarck was the only town west of Fargo in all of the Dakota Territory. The Northern Pacific's main line reached the Missouri River in eighteen seventy-three, and overnight the town became the railroad's end-of-track. That made it a staging point for military expeditions heading west, a commercial hub for freight moving north and south along the river, and a magnet for the full cast of frontier life: surveyors, merchants, soldiers, gamblers, and homesteaders.

The railroad also brought the territory's most consequential political operator. Alexander McKenzie arrived in eighteen seventy-three as a Northern Pacific construction foreman and was appointed Burleigh County sheriff the following year, despite being unable to read or write. He learned both on the job. Over the next decade McKenzie became the Northern Pacific's political agent in Dakota Territory, so powerful that newspapers called him Alexander the Great. In eighteen eighty-three, through a combination of bribes and political maneuvering, McKenzie engineered the transfer of the territorial capital from Yankton, in the far southeast corner of the territory, to Bismarck, on the Northern Pacific's main line. It took thirteen legislative ballots. On the first ballot, Bismarck received one vote: McKenzie's own. He won eventually.

Bismarck became the capital of North Dakota when statehood arrived in eighteen eighty-nine, a position it holds today.