North Dakota Trivia
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50 free North Dakota trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free North Dakota trivia questions with answers. Wide prairies, a state-owned bank and the coldest 41 days ever recorded in the lower 48. This quiz covers North Dakota from every angle: the Mandan villages and La Vérendrye, the shuffled statehood papers of 1889, the Nonpartisan League, the art-deco capitol in Bismarck, Fargo the city and Fargo the film, Theodore Roosevelt's Badlands, Lake Sakakawea and Garrison Dam, the Bakken oil boom, Rugby's centre-of-the-continent obelisk, Salem Sue and the Enchanted Highway, plus the North Dakotans who made it big: Lawrence Welk, Peggy Lee, Bobby Vee, Roger Maris, Phil Jackson, Josh Duhamel, Louise Erdrich and Carson Wentz. Forty-five questions from easy to expert. The easy questions ask which city is the capital and which national park is the only one named for a person; the hard ones want the state's high point, the fiberglass cow's height, the crops North Dakota grows more of than anyone else and how the President kept anyone from knowing whether North or South Dakota came first. It suits residents, road-trippers and anyone whose only reference is the wood chipper. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the state, its cities, landmarks and famous natives, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of North Dakota?
Bismarck
Bismarck became the capital in 1883, when the territorial governor moved the seat from Yankton to the railroad town, and the resentment pushed southern Dakotans to seek a state of their own.
Q 02The 1889 act admitting the Dakotas also admitted which two other states?
Montana and Washington
Montana and Washington were covered by the same Enabling Act, which Grover Cleveland signed in his last weeks in office, leaving his successor Benjamin Harrison to proclaim the new states.
Q 03How did President Benjamin Harrison hide which Dakota he admitted to the Union first?
He shuffled the papers
He shuffled the papers before signing and the order was never recorded, so the two states are simply listed alphabetically, which is why North Dakota counts as the 39th.
Q 04The word 'Dakota' comes from a Sioux word meaning what?
Allies or friends
Allies or friends is what the bands called themselves, after the alliance between them, while 'Sioux' was an outsiders' label, shortened from the French Nadouessioux.
Q 05Which two Canadian provinces border North Dakota to the north?
Saskatchewan and Manitoba
Saskatchewan and Manitoba lie across the 49th parallel, the line agreed with Britain in 1818, a deal that handed the United States the southern end of the Red River Valley.
Q 06A stone obelisk in which North Dakota town claims to mark the geographic centre of North America?
Rugby
Rugby built the marker, but the US Geological Survey places the continent's centre about 15 miles away, near the village of Balta, and says no government agency has ever marked the spot.
Q 07What is North Dakota's highest point, at 3,506 feet?
White Butte
White Butte stands on a family's private ranch south of Amidon, so hikers reach the state's summit by an easement across the land and leave donations in a box at the trailhead.
Q 08Which dam on the Missouri River holds back Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota?
Garrison Dam
Garrison Dam flooded the river bottomlands of the Fort Berthold Reservation, drowning Elbowoods, the main town of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, and forcing families to resettle on higher ground.
Q 09North Dakota's flat, fertile Red River Valley is the bed of which vanished glacial lake?
Lake Agassiz
Lake Agassiz pooled where the retreating ice sheet blocked north-flowing rivers, and the silt and clay that settled on its floor left the valley almost perfectly level.
Q 10What is the largest natural body of water in North Dakota?
Devils Lake
Devils Lake has no natural outlet, so a wet spell that began in the early 1990s raised it more than 25 feet, swallowing hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of farmland.
Q 11Langdon, North Dakota, set a contiguous-US record in early 1936 by staying below 0°F for how many straight days?
41
For 41 days from January 11 the town never climbed above zero, yet that same year North Dakota logged both its all-time low, −60°F in February, and its all-time high, 121°F in July.
Q 12Farmer-populists left North Dakota as the only state to own which pair of businesses?
A bank and a flour mill
A bank and a flour mill were built so wheat farmers could get cheaper loans and bypass the big Minneapolis millers, and both still pay a share of their profits into the state's general fund.
Q 13Oil extraction from which shale formation drove North Dakota's 21st-century boom?
Bakken
Q 21Lewis and Clark built which fort in present-day North Dakota to sit out the winter of 1804–05?
Fort Mandan
Fort Mandan was where the captains hired the fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter, and where his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, joined the expedition.
Q 22Which prop from the 1996 film Fargo is the star exhibit at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center?
The wood chipper
The wood chipper has pride of place there and tourists line up to be photographed with it, even though its notorious scene does not take place in Fargo at all.
Q 23What first brought the young Theodore Roosevelt to the Dakota Badlands in 1883?
A bison hunt
Bakken oil was struck in 1951 on the land of Henry Bakken, a Tioga farmer, but it stayed locked in tight rock for half a century until horizontal drilling and fracking made it pay.
Q 14Which state overtook North Dakota as the second-biggest oil producer in March 2021?
New Mexico
As of June 2025 it ranks third.
Q 15North Dakota grows most of which US crop, pressed for a common cooking oil?
Canola
Canola was bred from rapeseed in the 1970s by researchers across the border in Canada, and North Dakota's farmers now grow most of the American crop.
Q 16Which sweet product is North Dakota the leading US producer of?
Honey
Honey here comes largely from travelling hives: beekeepers who rent their bees to California's almond growers in winter truck them to North Dakota to make honey through the summer.
Q 17North Dakota's State Capitol, finished in 1934, is which kind of building?
An art-deco skyscraper
An art-deco skyscraper rose in the depths of the Depression: labourers paid 30 cents an hour went on strike for more, and the building site was put under martial law in June 1933.
Q 18The Northern Pacific renamed the Dakota rail town of Edwinton for Germany's chancellor in 1873, hoping to win what?
German investors and settlers
German investors and settlers were the prize: railroad officials borrowed the Iron Chancellor's name to coax German capital into their transcontinental line, dropping one that honoured their own chief engineer.
Q 19William Fargo, namesake of North Dakota's largest city, co-founded Wells Fargo and which other financial giant?
American Express
American Express was formed in 1850 by merging three rival express companies, with Henry Wells as president and Fargo, a future mayor of Buffalo, as its secretary.
Q 20Despite its title, the Coen brothers' 1996 film Fargo plays out mostly in which state?
Minnesota
Minnesota is where the opening card puts the events, 'in Minnesota in 1987', a true-story claim the Coens made up; only one early scene, in a bar, happens in Fargo itself.
A bison hunt drew him west, though commercial hunters had left so few animals that finding one took days; before heading home he had bought into a cattle ranch instead.
Q 24Medora, gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, was founded in 1883 by a French nobleman who named it for whom?
His wife
His wife, Medora von Hoffman, was a New York banker's daughter; his scheme to slaughter range cattle there and ship the beef east in refrigerated cars collapsed after three years.
Q 25North Dakota's Enchanted Highway is a 32-mile stretch of road lined with what?
Giant scrap-metal sculptures
Giant scrap-metal sculptures were Gary Greff's bid to save Regent, his shrinking farm town: he welded them along the road to tempt drivers off Interstate 94, 32 miles away.
Q 26Salem Sue, in New Salem, North Dakota, is the world's largest statue of which animal?
Holstein cow
The Holstein cow was put up by the New Salem Lions Club in 1974 to honour the area's dairy farmers, and at 38 feet tall she watches over Interstate 94 from a hilltop.
Q 27Which nickname went onto North Dakota's licence plates in 1956?
Peace Garden State
Peace Garden State honours the International Peace Garden on the Canadian border, and the slogan proved so popular on the plates that lawmakers made it the official nickname a year later.
Q 28North Dakota's KVLY-TV mast was the world's tallest structure until which skyscraper outgrew it in the late 2000s?
Burj Khalifa
Burj Khalifa ended a reign in two parts: the 2,063-foot mast lost the title to a Polish radio tower in 1974, then won it back when that tower collapsed in 1991.
Q 29Norsk Høstfest, a Scandinavian festival, ran from 1978 to 2025 in which North Dakota city?
Minot
Minot hosted the festival until it was wound up after its 2025 edition, and a successor, the Fjord Folk Fest, was founded in the city the following year to carry the traditions on.
Q 30Months of protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 centred on which reservation straddling the two Dakotas?
Standing Rock
Standing Rock became the rallying point because the pipeline was routed under the Missouri just north of the reservation, and the tribe said a leak would foul the water its people drink.