North Dakota

Nobody knows whether North Dakota or South Dakota became a state first. On November 2, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison signed both into the Union on the same day.

He had his secretary shuffle the papers face-down before he signed them, so no one could tell which came first. "They were born together," Harrison reportedly said. "I will make them twins."

North Dakota gets listed as the 39th state only because N comes before S in the alphabet.

Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples built thriving villages of earthlodges along the Missouri River for centuries before Europeans arrived. They farmed corn, squash, and sunflowers, and traded with tribes across the Great Plains. By the early 1800s, their villages held more people than St. Louis.

Lewis and Clark spent five months at Fort Mandan during the winter of 1804-1805, longer than anywhere else on their journey. It was here they met a young woman named Sakakawea, who lived among the Hidatsa.

She joined the expedition as an interpreter and guide and helped lead them to the Pacific Ocean and back.

A smallpox epidemic in 1837 devastated the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, wiping out entire villages. Later, the U.S. government forced tribes onto reservations and flooded more than 150,000 acres of their best farmland to build Garrison Dam in the 1950s.

In the 1880s, a young New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt came to the Badlands to heal after his wife and mother died on the same day. He spent years ranching, hunting, and chasing down boat thieves across the frozen prairie.

He later said, "I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

You can hike through the painted canyons of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where wild bison, elk, and horses roam the Badlands. Visit the Knife River Indian Villages near Stanton, where Sakakawea first met Lewis and Clark, and walk through a full-size replica of a Hidatsa earthlodge.

At Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park near Mandan, explore the reconstructed On-A-Slant Village, where the Mandan lived for 200 years along the Missouri River.