Named for a Railroad Man

In the late summer of eighteen seventy-one, a telegram went out from Thomas Canfield, a Northern Pacific Railroad official, announcing that the new settlement on the west bank of the Red River would be named Fargo. Not for the place, not for a geographic feature, not for any Indigenous name, but for a man: William George Fargo, a director of the Northern Pacific and one of the partners of the Wells Fargo Express Company.

Fargo himself was never known to have visited the place that bore his name. He was a businessman in New York, born in eighteen eighteen in Pompey, New York, and had made his fortune first as an express delivery man, founding American Express in eighteen fifty with Henry Wells before the two went on to establish Wells Fargo, and then as an investor in the great railroads pushing west. He died in eighteen eighty-one, a decade after the city on the Red River got his name.

The settlement itself had existed briefly under another name. It was called Centralia first. But when the Northern Pacific tracks reached the Red River crossing in eighteen seventy-one, the railroad's directors had enormous influence over what things got called, because the railroad owned the land, controlled the freight, and effectively decided which settlements lived and which withered. Thomas Canfield's telegram made it official. The United States Post Office confirmed the new name on February fourteenth, eighteen seventy-two.

What the Northern Pacific wanted at this crossing was a supply hub, a transshipment point, a gateway into Dakota Territory for the flood of settlers it hoped to draw. Fargo's location, the first major crossing point of the river as you traveled west from Minnesota, gave it exactly that function. The railroad made the city; the city made the name famous. William Fargo, for his part, is buried in Buffalo, New York.