'New Twins' for Uncle Sam

The Jamestown area was pretty proud when North Dakota achieved statehood on Nov. 2, 1889.

“Uncle Sam’s New Twins” was the headline for The Jamestown Alert on Nov. 7, 1889, the first weekly edition of the Alert that ran after statehood.

“By official proclamation, North Dakota and South Dakota are at last provided with snug quarters in the household of the United States,” said a sub-headline.

I’m not sure what is meant by the “snug quarters in the household of the United States,” but that is how reporters wrote the news back then.

The article went on to say that the Dakota Territory had been seeking statehood under one form or another for eight years before it was granted by a stroke of the pen in The White House by Benjamin Harrison on a Saturday afternoon.

The proclamation was not publicly announced until Nov. 4, 1889 which was a Monday.

When it was made official, there was a lot of scrambling going on.

An election held in October had ratified the North Dakota Constitution and elected the first set of state officials. Once the president signed the papers making North Dakota a state, those officials could be officially sworn into office.

There were some questions raised about the process of transitioning from residents of a territory to residents of a state.

An article in the Alert reassured homesteaders that it was indeed legal to file the claim papers for a homestead using a territorial address and get the final proof conveying the title of the land to them with a state address.

And there were some detractors around the nation to North Dakota getting a star on the United States flag.

The Chicago Herald and St. Paul Globe both editorialized that the residents of the new state were too poor and destitute to join the union as full-fledged states.

The St. Paul Globe went as far as sending wagons through the streets of the Minnesota capital city to gather clothes for the poor of newly formed North Dakota.

In all, four states were admitted to the Union in 1889. North and South Dakota on Nov. 2, 1889. Harrison shuffled the papers so no one knows which was signed first, although North Dakota is considered the 39th state and South Dakota the 40th.

A week or so later, Harrison signed proclamations admitting Montana and Washington to the union.

Author Keith Norman can be reached at

www.KeithNormanBooks.com