Dakota Territory Once Included Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho

The words “wilderness” and “territory” were nearly synonymous when Americans in 1803 looked at the unknown northernmost lands of the Louisiana Purchase.   Dakota Territory in 1861 included much of what is now Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and encompassed other mountainous and grassland tracts more suitable for ranching than farming.

      Individuals and families venturing into such places possessed, for historian Frederick Jackson Turner in The Frontier in American History (1920), the defining characteristics of American identity and character, at least until the frontier’s closing in 1890. We all know the virtues that accompany self-reliance and hardship, while being far from big government, bureaucratic regulation, and control by special interests. 

     The American Revolution answered a similar call, overthrowing an overly ripe political system, then following a westward migration in search of new lives and freedom. The pioneers would have to fight and die for anything held dear.  

      The American Redoubt movement today is a renewal of the Turner thesis, with the northern states of the Mountain Time Zone gradually expanding to include more of the old Dakota Territory.

     The “Western Dakotas Belong in the American Redoubt” I recently argued.  The mountains and badlands of the western Dakotas need not be confused with the flat farmlands of the east.   One Redoubt spokesman has speculated that “North and South Dakota have some promise, but I have my doubts about how defendable they would be if ever came down to fight. Plains and steppes are tanker country. It is no coincidence that the armies of the world usually choose plains for their maneuver areas, for large scale war games.”

     Newly renamed Black Elk Peak is the tallest mountain between the Rockies and the Alps.  Wind and Jewel Caves are the some of the longest in the world—just what is needed for military refuge against bomber attacks and surveillance from the sky, today’s preference in warfare.  

    In contrast, mountains are the best defenses against ground attacks. “Scour the darkest recesses of the Black Hills, long one of the last, best places to hide,” says one Rapid City  reporter, “and you’d be hard-pressed to find a man more evasive, secretive and adept at subterfuge” than James Huff, a Tom Clancy-like US Navy captain who spoke at nearby Ellsworth Air Force Base.

     States have been subdivided over the years.  West Virginia branched off from Virginia, for example, and Maine from Massachusetts.  The payoff is more political clout, with two extra US senators and at least one extra congressional seat.  The western Dakotas could form one or two more states this way, if the current state governments and US congress would agree to upsetting the establishment applecart, which isn’t likely. 

      In 2016 the northern counties of Colorado saw how difficult this could be.  As the American Revolutionaries knew, no entrenched political order will give up power without a fight.

     The Absaroka statehood movement involving parts of South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana during the 1930s fizzled out when World War II began.  They too would probably have had little success with purely parliamentary maneuvers, and federal lands wouldn’t have been relinquished without bloodshed. 

       Those migrating to the American Redoubt know that they’ll have to fight to protect their families against enemies foreign or domestic. Radio Free Redoubt offers how-to advice and political updates that some might find insightful.