The Sheyenne River, North Dakota’s longest at 581 miles, was left behind about 13,000 years ago when the Wisconsinan ice sheet melted, along with a trench reaching up to 300 feet deep and a mile wide. Along a 63-mile National Scenic Byway, twenty-seven interpretive stops present the region’s historic, scenic, archeological, cultural, natural, and recreational features. The Rosebud railcar, originally converted from a transfer car into an 1881 Superintendent’s coach for S.R. Ainslie of the Northern Pacific railroad, retired in 1931 and served as a vacation home on the Dakota prairie for almost 70 years before being purchased, restored, and displayed, still retaining most of its original fixtures and artifacts because of careful stewardship. The Sheyenne Valley offered practical advantages for settlement, including trees for fuel and building, shelter from harsh north winds, seasonal wild fruits, fish, and wild game. Farm families were largely self-sufficient, raising wheat, oats, cows, chickens, and vegetable gardens, while early settlers without machinery broke sod with walking plows and planted, harvested, bundled, and shocked crops by hand. Their homes were built of logs or dug into hillside sod and were seldom larger than 12 by 16 feet. About 200 women also independently homesteaded in Barnes County. The people who settled North Dakota faced many hardships, but through hard work and creativity made major improvements and discoveries, a legacy carried forward by members of the North Dakota Agricultural Hall of Fame. The land here had been part of the Northern Pacific charter railroad, and the section through Valley City became the first charter railroad property sold in the United States after Northern Pacific abandoned it in 1982.