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Rh school land in South Dakota or North Dakota should ever be sold for less than the sum of ten dollars. A new constitutional convention met at Sioux Falls on July 4 of that year, with power only to amend and resubmit the constitution of 1885. The constitution was submitted to the people at an election on the first day of October. They approved it, and on the second day of November, 1889, President Harrison issued his proclamation, admitting South Dakota as a state in the Union. North Dakota was admitted as another state by the same proclamation.

Statehood was welcomed by the people with real rejoicing. As a territory the people had no part in the election of a President, nor in the legislation by Congress, and all of the conditions of territorial life tended to make a people dependent rather than self-reliant. The chief concern of the people of Dakota, however, during the ten years' fight for statehood, had been for the division of the territory into two states. In this they were moved by motives of the highest patriotism. The leaders of that period believed that it would be a crime for them to sit idly by and permit the great territory to become one state, with but two members of the United States Senate, thus entailing to posterity forever a sort of political vassalage to the small states of the eastern seaboard. Besides this there was at that period an inherent difference between the people of South Dakota and those of the North. South Dakota was chiefly occupied by homesteaders, who brought with them the conservative notions of small farmers, about public and private economy, morality, and education. On the other hand North Dakota was in the