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This statue depicts a boy and girl striding hand-in-hand into the future. It represents hope for the Space Age generation. Their future pursuits are supported by images from the past and by books. This symbolizes the value of education. The bronze statue was sculpted by Jeffrey W. Barber of Northfield, Minnesota. Its use of "pioneer" language and children representing hope for the future&nbsp;tie it to the 1947 Pioneer Family&nbsp;statue located nearby on the state capitol lawn. The Pioneers of the Future statue was commissioned by the General Federation of Women's Clubs of North Dakota to commemorate the centennials of North Dakota statehood and of the General Federation of Women's Clubs International. More than 71,000 North Dakota schoolchildren contributed $40,000, or about 80% of the total cost of the statue.1&nbsp;The GFWC of North Dakota also sponsored the 1910 Sakakawea sculpture that stands in front of the North Dakota Heritage Center &amp; State Museum, also located on the state capitol grounds.

North Dakota Capitol Complex statues and monuments

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1910 Sakakawea statue on ND Capitol grounds commissioned by GFWC

Pioneer Family monument on ND Capitol grounds

Dedicated in 1988, the life-size bronze boy and girl represent the Space Age generation stepping forward into the future.

Pioneers of the Future Statue

Visit North Dakota's state capitol and grounds. Tour includes monuments and the state heritage museum.

The Historical Society is tasked with several responsibilities including managing 57 historic sites in the state as well as offering numerous public and public education programs throughout the year.

The North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum is operated by the State Historical Society of North Dakota. It serves as the Society's headquarters and is also the location of the State Geological Survey and State Archives. It is the largest museum building in North Dakota, featuring four galleries that explore the state's rich natural and cultural history. The first gallery, called the Adaptation gallery, showcases the state's ancient geological record, featuring fossils, cast skeletons of a T-Rex and Triceratops, and an interactive timeline that takes visitors on a journey beginning 600 million years ago; the Innovation gallery highlights the state's archaeological record, beginning 13,000 years ago, through the fur trade and up to the 1860s; the Inspiration gallery explores the state's past form the mid-1800s to today, focusing on agriculture, industry and energy, settlement, immigration and migration, and conflicts and war; the last gallery, the Governors gallery, is where temporary and traveling exhibits are presented. The building was expanded in 2014. There is also an amphitheater and an outdoor plaza featuring an ancient petrified tree and large boulders dating to 56-million years ago. 

North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum

This monument honors Sakakawea (also rendered Sacagawea or Sacajawea), the only female and only indigenous member of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806.&nbsp;The Shoshone-Hidatsa woman served as a guide and interpreter. Sakakawea was raised Shoshone but was captured by Hidatsa raiders in what is now known as Montana in about 1800. She was approximately age 11 at the time of her capture. She spent the next 5 or 6 years living among the Hidatsa at Knife River, and may have become formally adopted into Hidatsa culture. By 1804 she was married&nbsp;to French-Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa. Scholars debate the most accurate rendering of the subject's name. Although she was born and raised Shoshone, she appears to have taken a Hidatsa name by the time she encountered Lewis and Clark in 1804. Traditionally she was called Sacajawea by many white Americans. Meriwether Lewis recorded her name as Sah-ca-gar-me-ah in his expedition journal on May 20, 1805, and indicated that it meant Bird Woman. Informed by that entry, Sacagawea is now widely accepted as the most accurate spelling. But North Dakota state agencies and the Three Affiliated Tribes have long used&nbsp;Sakakawea. This spelling is drawn from a U.S. government ethnographic report on the Hidatsa published in 1877. Both are imperfect attempts to render&nbsp;the Hidatsa name Bird Woman. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were sent by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and to initiate peaceful relations with the Native Americans living in that area. Lewis and Clark's "Corps of Discovery"&nbsp;journeyed from St. Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean and back. They traveled primarily&nbsp;by keelboat. They spent the winter of 1804 at Fort Mandan, which they constructed near Knife River in present-day North Dakota. They hired Touissant Charbonneau to join their expedition as an interpreter. Charbonneau, Sakakawea, and their newborn son Jean Baptiste, traveled west with them. Sakakawea became the only female member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Sakakawea's role in the expedition has often been romanticized and perhaps exaggerated. We know from Clark's journals, however, that she served as a linguistic and cultural translator when the Corps passed through the lands of the Shoshone. At times she also helped to guide the expedition and gathered food to supplement the company's meat-heavy diet. She also served an important symbolic role, because her presence and that of her infant son signaled the Corps' peaceful intentions. This 12-foot-tall statue of Sakakawea and her baby, Jean Baptiste, was sculpted by Chicago artist Leonard Crunelle. A descendant of Sakakawea, Mink (also known as Hannah Levings Grant) modeled for the statue. The North Dakota Federation of Women's Clubs and North Dakota schoolchildren raised funds for the monument. Some 5,000 people attended its day-long dedication ceremony on October 14, 1910. Today, it stands at the entrance to the North Dakota Heritage Center &amp; State Museum. A replica of the statue now stands in the United States Capitol. Traditionally, each U.S. state was permitted to place statues of two prominent individuals in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. When Statuary Hall became too crowded, many of the sculptures were relocated to other parts of the capitol complex. The replica of Crunelle's original sculpture was made by Tom Bollinger, a native of Bismarck. It was dedicated in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in 2003, in time for the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

1910 statue of Sakakawea, the Shoshone-Hidatsa woman who helped to guide and translate for the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition. A descendant of Sakakawea modeled for artist Leonard Crunelle's sculpture. A replica of the statue was placed in the United States Capitol Visitor Center in 2003.

Sakakawea Statue (Sacajawea statue)

Prior to statehood, women earned the right to vote in school elections in 1883 and that continued after statehood in 1889. North Dakota was close to enfranchising women in 1893; a bill granting women suffrage passed both chambers of the state legislature, but the speaker of the House refused to sign it. Women hoped that the governor would still sign it into law, but the bill was “lost” on its way to his office. The House then expunged the record of mentions of the bill. Legislation about women’s suffrage continued to be introduced to the legislature, but the women’s suffrage movement in North Dakota was relatively quiet until 1912. With new support for the movement, suffragists finally saw a bill passed by the state legislature in 1913 but law was then defeated in a 1914 general election 40,209 to 49,348 votes. Another attempt in 1915 did not pass through the legislature. In 1917 North Dakota Women were granted limited suffrage: women could vote for presidential electors, county officials, some city officials, and township officers, but not for members of the state or national legislature. North Dakota ratified the 19th Amendment on December 1, 1919.

North Dakota Ratifies the 19th Amendment, December 1, 1919

This statue was sculpted by Avard Fairbanks to commemorate&nbsp;John Burke, a Dakota Territory settler who became a prominent North Dakota political leader. Burke served in all three branches of North Dakota state government and as secretary of the federal treasury. Burke was chosen in 1959 to represent the state in the U.S. capitol's Statuary Hall. John Burke (1859-1937) was born in Sigourney, Iowa. He migrated to Dakota Territory in 1888, where he initially worked as a harvest hand, taught school, and published a newspaper. He soon became a successful lawyer, serving as a judge and state's attorney in Rolette County. Burke was a progressive&nbsp;political reformer and member of the Democratic Party who challenged the power of the railroads and of&nbsp;Alexander&nbsp;McKenzie's political machine. He was known for his personal integrity. This was reflected in his nickname, "Honest John."&nbsp;Burke&nbsp;served in both houses of the newly created North Dakota state legislature: the House of Representatives in 1891, and state Senate from 1893-1895.&nbsp;He later served as governor of North Dakota from 1907-1913. He was appointed&nbsp;treasurer of the United States by President Woodrow Wilson, serving from 1913-1921. He then returned to North Dakota and was elected&nbsp;a state Supreme Court justice, serving as chief justice from 1929-1931 and 1935-1937. In 1959, the state legislature established a commission to select a person to represent North Dakota in Statuary Hall at&nbsp;the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Governor John Davis charged the commission to select a person "who is illustrious for historic renown or for distinguished civic or military service" and for "popular acclaim as a hero of his generation."1&nbsp;State auto club director James Connally actively campaigned for the selection of Native American leader Four Bears. But the commission instead selected white settler-turned-politician John Burke for&nbsp;his personal integrity and long service to the state. This sculpture is a duplicate of the $26,000 bronze statue sculpted by Utah artist Avard Fairbanks for Statuary Hall. John Burke's son Thomas Burke modeled for the statue. Fairbanks also sculpted the Pioneer Family monument on the state capitol lawn. These works so impressed University of North Dakota (UND) president George Starcher that Starcher invited Fairbanks to serve as a&nbsp;Special
Consultant in Fine Arts and Residential Sculptor at UND from 1965 to 1967. The original plan was for Fairbanks' statue to be displayed at the state capitol prior to shipping it to Washington, D.C. for installation in the U.S. capitol.&nbsp;However, the state commission discovered that a second bronze casting could be made from the same mold for roughly the same cost as shipping the original to North Dakota en route to the nation's capital. The first casting was sent to Washington, and the second came to Bismarck.2

Monument honoring "Honest John" Burke, North Dakota state legislator, governor, state supreme court justice, and secretary of the US treasury under President Woodrow Wilson. This is a second casting of the statue of Burke sculpted by Avard Fairbanks to represent North Dakota in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall.

John Burke statue

North Dakota's state capitol was built during the Great Depression to replace an earlier building destroyed by fire and to accommodate a growing state bureaucracy. Abandoning traditional grandiose architectural styles, North Dakotans chose to build a functional office tower.North Dakota's first capitol was constructed in the 1880s, prior to statehood. Like many United States statehouses, the original plan called for a dome, rotunda, and flanking legislative wings. Budgetary limitations led to a scaled-down structure that was later added onto in a rather haphazard fashion. It burned to the ground on December 28, 1930.Lawmakers imposed a $2,000,000 spending limit on the construction of a replacement statehouse. The traditional dome and rotunda statehouse style was designed to be imposing, but produced lots of unusable interior space. Instead of building yet another domed statehouse, North Dakota's Board of State Capitol Commissioners chose to build a modern seventeen-story office building to accommodate the state's growing bureaucracy. A shorter legislative wing stood to one side. A stylistically similar judicial wing was added on the opposite side in 1979-80.The commission chose Chicago architects John A. Holabird and John W. Root to lead the design team. Grand Forks architect Joseph Bell DeRemer (who designed several prominent buildings on the University of North Dakota campus) and William F. Kurke were named as North Dakota architectural associates. Due to budget constraints, the commission stripped Holabird and Root's design of much of its planned Art Deco decoration. The final effect more closely resembles the International style that dominated commercial construction after World War II.In the early 1930s, a long tradition of North Dakota fiscal frugality collided with the realities of the Great Depression. The project's limited budget led to a simplified and highly functional design. Defenders pointed out that neighboring Minnesota's 1905 capitol featured only 29% usable space. In contrast, North Dakota's statehouse was 80% usable. It cost only $0.46/cubic foot.1 Skeptics called it "George Shafer's silo," and later "Langer's silo" after the two governors who served during its construction.2

Completed in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, North Dakota's state capitol departed dramatically from traditional dome-topped classical statehouses. Instead, it is a practical office tower.

North Dakota State Capitol

On September 25, 1929, the North Dakota Federation of
Women’s Clubs (NDFWC) voted to erect a “statue to the Pioneer Mother on the
grounds of the State House at Bismarck.”1 Similar efforts by women’s clubs and other private donors produced statues
depicting iconic Pioneer Mother statues throughout the United States in the
late 1920s and early 1930s. To raise funds for the North Dakota project, the
NDFWC collected biographical sketches of early female settlers in the state. The
Pioneer Mother Project committee collected a number of biographical sketches,
which were deposited at the State Historical Society of North Dakota, but the
statue project was interrupted by the Great Depression.

About a decade later, Canadian millionaire Harry F. McLean
decided to donate a pioneer monument to honor his father and mother.&nbsp; He proposed to erect it near Washburn, North
Dakota, the county seat of McLean County, which was named for his father, John
McLean. Perhaps because of the NDFWC’s earlier interest in a similar monument, Harry
McLean was persuaded to instead place his proposed statue in his hometown of
Bismarck, where his father had served as that city’s first mayor.

The $50,000 statue was dedicated in 1947 as part of
Bismarck’s 75th anniversary celebration. Sculpted by Avard Tennyson
Fairbanks, the bronze Pioneer Family
Group consists of eight-foot-tall figures of father, son, and mother
holding an infant child. The figures represent a pioneer family and the “spirit
of the west.”2&nbsp;The wagon wheel behind them represents
progress. They stand on a four-foot granite base across a large lawn from the
state capitol office building. 

An inscription composed by the artist appears on&nbsp;the rear of the statue:

<blockquote>"No trail too rugged, no obstacle too large, no mountain too
high to stop the sturdy frontiersman, with sureness of purpose, with daring
adventure, and from generation to generation the pioneering spirit moves always
forward and onward to greater goals."</blockquote>

The Bismarck monument depicts a pioneer woman, but it differs
from the Pioneer Mother statue that the NDFWC envisioned in the late 1920s. Working
during World War II, Fairbanks sculpted a nuclear family. The father holds his
son’s hand to depict freedom from fear. Freedom from fear was one of the “four
freedoms” promised by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during that
war.&nbsp;Those “four freedoms” served as
foundational principles for the establishment of the United Nations. Similar
depictions of pioneer families—strong father, angelic mother, bold son, and baby
in the mother’s arms—appeared in public monuments sculpted by Fairbanks and
other artists throughout the Cold War era.

This monument honoring early settlers of the American West was sculpted by Avard Fairbanks. Unveiled on the North Dakota State Capitol grounds in 1947. Donated by Harry F. McLean in honor of his father, John A. McLean, the first mayor of Bismarck, North Dakota. It closely resembles other pioneer family monuments erected in the American West after World War II.

North Dakota Capitol Grounds

Pioneers of the Future Statue

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