Anyone who has studied North Dakota history knows that Pembina was the first settlement in what is now North Dakota in 1797. But there’s a lot about Pembina that isn’t common historical knowledge.

Most of this history can be found in the Pembina State Museum and it proves that Pembina, and the surrounding area have had a colorful past that actually goes back long before Dakota Territory existed.

One example is there is reference to the Red River ox carts that transported goods from St. Paul to Winnipeg. What isn’t common knowledge is that this cart was invented in Pembina in 1801. A man named Alexander Henry wrote in his diary that his Metis employees at the Pembina trading post developed the cart.

That Metis cart was responsible for trade for a lot of years until steamboats began to transport grain on the Red River. It was also responsible for the expansion of fur trade in the west and for the commercialization of the buffalo hunt.

The Metis, which are part French and part Chippewa, were never officially recognized as a tribe in the United States, but are a tribe in Canada. In the early years, the Metis made up nearly the entire population of Pembina and nearby St. Joseph, which later became known as Walhalla.

According to the Metis Museum in Winnipeg, there were approximately 5,000 Metis living in what is now Pembina County in the 1850s, which includes the communities of Pembina, Cavalier and Walhalla. That population was approximately equal to the Metis population of the rest of Rupert’s Land, or Terre de Rupert as the Metis called it.

Rupert’s Land was a huge British territory that included all of the Hudson’s Bay drainage, including Pembina, so the concentration of Metis in that area was significant.

Several hundred residents of North Dakota continue to embrace the Metis heritage. Nearly all of them live in the northeastern counties including Pembina, Cavalier, Towner, Rolette, Walsh and Bottineau.

There may have been many more, but when the U.S./Canada border was established, many Metis relocated north to what is now St. Boniface, Manitoba, a French enclave immediately to the east of Winnipeg that was established in 1818.
In 1863, while the Civil War was raging in other parts of the country, European settlers in the Pembina area were fearing attacks by the Sioux tribe following the 1862 Minnesota Uprising. Many Native Americans who participated in that attack were living along the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, now commonly referred to as the Forks, which is in the city of Winnipeg, 60 miles north of Pembina.

The settlers sent an urgent appeal for protection to Washington, D.C., and later that same year, a mounted battalion was organized to serve the area, that included a portion of northwest Minnesota.

In fact, the 300 Soldiers in the battalion were all Minnesota volunteers. The battalion, nicknamed Hatch’s Battalion, reached Pembina on Oct. 6, 1863, and by January 1864, had completed construction of a military post.

Less than a year later, and after the capture of 400 Native Americans, the post was abandoned. However, in 1870, the War Department directed a post be built on the Red River near the international boundary. Abandonment procedures for that fort began in 1891 and in 1895, a fire destroyed most of the buildings.

The community of Pembina was officially established in 1843 and the first post office was established in 1851. By 1860, one year before Dakota Territory was established; Pembina was the most populous place in what is now North Dakota.
It had roughly 3,000 more people than the city of Winnipeg did at the same time. Today, Winnipeg’s population is equal to that of all of North Dakota. Today fewer than 600 call Pembina home.

Most of Pembina’s earliest permanent settlers were from Canada, or were involved with Canada/U.S. trade operations. After the Treaty of Ghent established the 49th parallel as the international boundary, Pembina became a gateway of commerce between the two nations in the late 1800s.

Pembina continues to serve as a major port of entry between the U.S. and Canada and at times has been the fifth busiest port of entry along the U.S./Canada border.