Westhope, North Dakota

Westhope sits in Bottineau County just a few miles from the Canadian border, founded in nineteen oh three when a Great Northern Railway branch line reached this stretch of the Drift Prairie. Great Northern officials named it from the promotional slogan "Hope of the West," a phrase typical of the boosterism that drove settlement across the northern tier. Homesteaders flooded in hoping that wheat would make them rich; some did well, many did not.

Westhope became a modest grain-shipping point and has remained so. Its position near the border long made it a crossing point for cross-boundary commerce, a reminder that US Highway Eighty-Three here runs almost parallel to the Canadian line.