Laws passed at the _____ Session of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory Dakota: title varies, 1862–, 1st sess.–, Grand Forks, etc., var. public printers, 1862-89, all published. (With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the western two-thirds of the area that is now North and South Dakota became U.S. territory. The eastern one-third of the territory became part of the U.S. in consequence of the 1818 treaty with Great Britain that established the U.S. boundary with Canada at the 49th parallel. In 1861 the Congress organized a much larger area {including present-day North Dakota, South Dakota, most of Montana, northern Wyoming, and northeastern Nebraska} as the Dakota Territory {D.T.}. Over the next decade or so, the Nebraska, Montana and Wyoming portions were severed from D.T. as those entities also became stand-alone territories; so that from 1869 to 1889 D.T. encompassed only present-day North and South Dakota. The first session of the D.T. legislature met in Yankton, D.T., in March, 1862. Statehood came for North and South Dakota in 1889, when D.T. was broken in two, with North and South Dakota being admitted as separate states. The first session of the Legislative Assembly of Dakota Territory was held in March, 1862. The last session was in January, 1889) (Documents which are part of the Early State Records collections were digitized from a microfilm copy of titles originally held the Library of Congress).
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