|
Despite his transient
residency, Teddy Roosevelt left North Dakota with a
memorable legacy: It's known as the Rough Rider state,
in his honor. Its state capital, Bismark, must truly be
the gateway to the west, rising from the Dakota hills to
overlook miles and miles of prairie land-not to mention
the North Dakota "badlands," which conjure up everything
from felonious crime sprees to the ghosts of the Seventh
Cavalry as they traveled west toward Montana on their
ill-fated journey to disaster at Little Big Horn.
The state's population of 638,800 is less than
one-tenth the size of New York City. And Fargo, its
largest urban center-population 74,111-certainly won't
give you any feelings of claustrophobia. In fact, this
mainly agricultural state may hold the key to what
you've been looking for all along: space, solitude, and
that wide-open feeling of expanse and well-being. If
you're looking to get away from the obvious and want to
avoid long museum and theater lines-if you don't give a
hoot about the latest haute cuisine and you can live
without hoards of obnoxious tourists, then this could be
your heaven on earth.
|
