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Wahpeton ( ) is a city in Richland County, North Dakota, United States. It is the county seat of Richland County〔(【引用サイトリンク】accessdate=2011-06-07 )〕 and the U.S. Census Bureau estimated 2013 population was 7,853. Wahpeton was founded in 1869 and is the principal city of the Wahpeton Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Richland County, North Dakota and Wilkin County, Minnesota. Wahpeton's twin city is Breckenridge, Minnesota. The Bois de Sioux River and the Otter Tail River join at Wahpeton and Breckenridge to form the Red River of the North. The North Dakota State College of Science is located in Wahpeton. The local newspaper is the ''Wahpeton Daily News''. ==History== The first European explorer in the area was Jonathan Carver in 1767. He explored and mapped the Northwest at the request of Major Robert Rogers, commander of Fort Michilimackinac, the British fort at Mackinaw City, Michigan, which protected the passage between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Carver's mission was to find the Northwest passage, the imagined waterway to the Orient which Rogers was convinced existed. While Carver failed in his search, the passing years saw many fur traders and explorers pass through the area. More than one hundred years after the Carver expedition, a United States Government surveying party passed through the Wahpeton area. J. W. Blanding, a member of the expedition, was so impressed by the fertile river valley that he returned to his Wisconsin home determined to move his family and belongings to the Dakota Territory. Blanding so influenced other Wisconsin settlers that many of them arrived and homesteaded in the Wahpeton area before Blanding could return. The first settler was Morgan T. Rich. His plow turned the first furrow of rich black bottomland in 1869. When other settlers arrived, they formed a tiny community and named it Richville, commemorating both its founder and the fertile quality of the soil. In 1871, a post office was opened. At the same time, the town's name was changed to Chahinkapa, a Lakota Sioux word meaning "the end of the woods". Two years later, the county was organized and called Chahinkapa County. Later that year the county was renamed Richland County and the town of Chahinkapa renamed Wahpeton, an adaptation of the Dakota name of the local population of Dakota Indians, the Wakhpetonwan. The name meant "leaf dwellers", and was adopted when they lived in the vicinity of Lake Mille Lacs before they were displaced by the Ojibwa. Growth of the village of Wahpeton was quite slow during the first few years, but growth was spurred in 1872 when the St. Paul and Pacific Railway (now the Great Northern) extended a line into Breckenridge, Minnesota, a tiny community just across the Bois de Sioux River from Wahpeton. This created a booming business in flatboat building in both communities. Flat boats could carry freight directly from the railroad down river to northern North Dakota and all the way to Winnipeg, Canada, via the Red River of the North. The railroad line opened up the area to many more settlers. Germans, Bohemians, Scandinavians, and Native Americans moved to Richland County to file homesteads. In 1874, Jacob Morvin and Joseph Sittarich opened the first retail store in the county. By 1876 the traffic between Wahpeton and Breckenridge had grown to where the local ferry could not handle it and a bridge was built across the Bois de Sioux River connecting the two towns. Another flurry of growth occurred in 1880 when the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad crossed the river and pushed its tracks on toward the north-west. By 1883 the population of Wahpeton was estimated to be as high as 1,400 people. In 1888, the Northern Light Electric Company (NLEC) was organized, making Wahpeton among the first cities in North Dakota to be electrified. In 1909, NLEC became the first customer of the newly founded Otter Tail Power Company. In 1913, the owner of NLEC, C. B. Kidder, sold his company to Otter Tail Power and became its first general manager. In 1927, Otter Tail Power built what was then its largest power plant at Wahpeton and it was named Kidder Station. The plant was removed in 1977; the site is now a park. In 1889, the Red River Valley University was established in Wahpeton; it later became the North Dakota State College of Science. In 1904, the United States Government established the Wahpeton Indian School (now called Circle of Nations School) for the education of Native American children from northern Minnesota, North Dakota and northern South Dakota. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wahpeton, North Dakota」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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