North Dakota’s best-known landscape may be the mysterious badlands, but lush fields of wheat and sunflowers are far more characteristic of this midwestern outpost. Farming is the mainstay of North Dakota, where cultivated land stretches all the way from the fertile black soil of the Red River valley in the east to the rugged buttes of the west. The state is, in fact, the most rural in the nation, with only four cities — Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, and Minot — having populations of more than 20,000.

Until well into the 19th century, the area was inhabited mainly by Indians. In the 1880’s, thousands of immigrants, eager to obtain the land offered by the Homestead Act, arrived in a migration known as the Great Dakota Boom. Norwegians, Germans, and Canadians flocked to the territory and found a level prairie that they soon transformed into a sea of wheat — and became the envy of the nation for their hugely profitable farms.

North Dakota's Big Sky Buffalo Ranch

Knife River Ranch, North Dakota