North Dakota is held in the popular imagination as a flat, treeless place, devoid of people or of anything interesting. This popular conception makes the Turtle Mountains all the more startling to behold. The Turtle Mountains are a plateau of roughly 100 square miles on the border between North Dakota in the United States and Manitoba in Canada, rising hundreds of feet above the plains nearby. In stark contrast to the prarie found in the rest of the state, the Turtle Mountains are covered with mixed hardwood forest, resembling the Superior Uplands to the East much more than the Great Plains below.
Native American and First Nations people have inhabited the Turtle Mountains for millenia, most prominently the Plains Ojibwe and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes. Several folk etymologies exist for the name of the area. One states that the plateau looks like a turtle when viewed from the South. A (probably apocryphal, of recent origin) indigenous myth states that a great turtle wished to emerge from its burrow in the earth below the area, but had only exposed its shell when the winter came and freezed it to death.
The plateau likely formed due to glacial deposition. As the glaciers covering the area expanded during the last glacial maximum, they deposited sand, silt and coal over the area. When the glaciers retreated, the motion of ice eroded the land benath, creating the numerous lakes and rolling hills that cover the area today. Due to its raised elevation, the area receives significantly more rainfall than the surrounding plains, allowing the plateau to support numerous forests and wetlands, creating a haven for wildlife.
With the largest town of Bottineau only having around 2,000 people, the Turtle Mountains are sparsely populated today, with much of the area on the Canadian side preserved as Turtle Mountain Provincial Park. Coal mining used to be a notable economic activity, though it has all but ceased today. Farming and tourism remain the main industries in the area, with the International Peace Garden attracting tourists to the area.
The Turtle Mountains stand out to me as a fascinating example of the effects of physical geography on human culture. Regardless of international borders or of survey system attempts to turn the landscape into an ordered grid, Turtle Mountain remains a united entity in the cultural conception of its inhabitants because its unique geography necessitates a different approach than does the prairie below.