Name-a-Day Calendar, May 25: North Dakota State Bison
Page 200 of 365
Chosen in: 1922
Chosen by: The Lettermen’s Club (or perhaps “The N.D. Club”)
The North Dakota Agricultural College was founded in 1890 and began playing football just four years later. Their first teams were nicknamed the Aggies (or sometimes the Fighting Aggies).
In the February 17, 1922, issue of The Weekly Spectrum student newspaper, an article with no byline reported that the Lettermen’s Club (referred to as the “new N.D. club” in the article) had unceremoniously voted to change the school’s athletic nickname to “Bison” (hilariously misspelled as “Bissons” in the article headline). The article continued:
“The name will no doubt sound queer to us for a while, but when we once become used to its usage we can be proud to have our teams play under the name of the staunchest and most persistent fighters of the plains in the early days.”
The nickname change took effect on March 1, 1922. Since then, some North Dakota State teams have unofficially been called the Thundering Herd, but “Bison” has always been the official moniker.
Plains bison were once innumerable in North Dakota, but were over-hunted nearly to the point of extinction by the late 1880s. They have since rebounded to a population of over 30,000, but they’re now most commonly found in sparsely populated regions of North America, almost always west of North Dakota.
North Dakota State is represented by a costumed bison mascot named Thundar. They’ve never had a live mascot, but a live calf named Corso did appear when the school hosted ESPN College GameDay in 2013.
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