Steel Rails on the Prairie: How the Northern Pacific Built Dickinson
Near Dickinson, North Dakota
In the summer of eighteen eighty, the Northern Pacific Railroad sent its grading crews west across the Dakota Territory, laying down the iron spine of a new civilization at roughly a mile a day. Where those crews camped and where water and supply depots were needed, towns rose almost overnight. Dickinson was one of them.
The site was originally called Pleasant Valley Siding, a purely functional name for a purely functional stop. When it was officially platted in eighteen eighty-one, boosters renamed it for Wells Southworth Dickinson, a director of the Lake Superior and Puget Sound Company, one of the land speculation firms that partnered with the Northern Pacific to sell off the railroad's vast congressional land grants. Millions of acres of Dakota grassland had been deeded to the railroad as a subsidy for building the transcontinental line, and companies like Dickinson's existed to convert those acres into cash by luring settlers.
The sales pitch worked. Within two years of the first rails reaching the site, Dickinson had a post office, a bank, several hotels, and a newspaper. The railroad depot became the commercial anchor of the young town, the place where cattle and wheat moved east and where immigrants and supplies moved west. Stark County, organized around the same time, took its name from George Stark, another Northern Pacific official, which tells you everything about who was driving the agenda on the northern plains in eighteen eighty-one.
The line Dickinson sat on was part of the Northern Pacific's main transcontinental route, chartered by Congress in eighteen sixty-four, and completed all the way to Puget Sound in eighteen eighty-three. Rails had reached the Missouri River in eighteen seventy-three, but the panic of that same year, which bankrupted the railroad's financier Jay Cooke, stalled construction for years. By the time the rails finally reached Dickinson, the company was desperate to generate revenue, and every new town it platted was another bet on the agricultural future of the high plains.
