Initial Point of the Dakotas

This quiet spot is where the line between North and South Dakota officially begins. In eighteen ninety-one, a United States deputy surveyor named Charles Bates and his crew set out to survey and mark the boundary between the two new states, which had been split apart and admitted to the Union just two years earlier. They started right near here, where the seventh standard parallel meets the Bois de Sioux River, the stream that also forms the edge of Minnesota.

The General Land Office demanded sturdy markers, posts of quartzite, their faces aimed at the cardinal directions. One face read North Dakota, the other South Dakota. This initial post was carved with cryptic surveyor's shorthand marking it as the initial point, the starting knot from which an entire state line was unspooled westward.