Minot: Where the Prairie Meets the Cold
Near Minot, North Dakota
Minot sits near the geographic center of North America, about forty miles south of the Canadian border, in a shallow valley carved by the Souris River. It is the fourth-largest city in North Dakota with a population of around forty-eight thousand. The city earned its other nickname, the Cold Capital, from winters that can plunge to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit and colder, making it one of the coldest cities in the continental United States.
Founded by the Great Northern Railway in eighteen eighty-six and built on the labor of Scandinavian and German-Russian immigrants, Minot today runs on three industries: agriculture, Minot Air Force Base, and the oil fields of the Bakken Formation to the west. The Bakken shale boom of the two thousand tens brought a second overnight transformation not unlike the railroad boom of eighteen eighty-six, a reminder that the Magic City identity runs deeper than a nickname.
