Most state flags were designed to be state flags. North Dakota's was designed to be carried by a regiment, and it never pretended otherwise. The flag is a copy of the standard the First North Dakota Infantry took to the Philippines, a blue banner bearing the eagle of the United States coat of arms, and when the legislature adopted it in 1911 the only meaningful change was swapping the regiment's name for the state's. The result is a flag with almost no North Dakota in it, and a state that has kept it anyway, for reasons that have less to do with design than with the men who marched under it.
A regiment's colors
When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, North Dakota had been a state for less than nine years. The First North Dakota Infantry mustered in that spring, and like other U.S. infantry regiments of the era it carried regimental colors modeled on the arms of the United States: a bald eagle on blue, striped federal shield on its breast, olive branch and arrows in its talons, E Pluribus Unum streaming from its beak, stars and a sunburst overhead, and the unit's designation on a scroll below.
The regiment's war turned out to be in the Philippines rather than Cuba. It arrived at Manila in 1898 and fought in the Philippine-American War that followed the collapse of Spanish rule, seeing hard campaigning before mustering out in 1899. The men came home to a state young enough that their regimental standard was the closest thing it had to a battle-tested emblem.
House Bill 152
North Dakota entered the twentieth century with no state flag at all. The fix came from a soldier. John H. Fraine had commanded North Dakotan troops and risen to colonel in the National Guard; by 1911 he was also a legislator. On January 21, 1911, he introduced House Bill 152, which proposed adopting the First North Dakota's regimental design as the flag of the state, with one edit: where the standard had carried the regiment's designation, the scroll would read "North Dakota" in gilt letters. The bill passed, and the flag became official on March 3, 1911.
The statute describes the design in detail: the eagle with wings spread, the left foot grasping a sheaf of seven arrows and the right an olive branch showing three red berries, the shield of thirteen stripes, the ribbon in the beak, thirteen stars above in two arcs of seven and six beneath a golden sunburst, or "fan," as the law calls it. The official dimensions, 26 inches on the hoist by 33 on the fly, are simply the measurements of the military original. A 1943 amendment standardized the shade of blue and the yellow fringe for ceremonial use, but the design has never changed.
A flag with a borrowing problem
Critics noticed early that the flag has a peculiar flaw: nothing on it says North Dakota except the words "North Dakota." The eagle, shield, arrows, olive branch, motto, and stars are all federal symbols, inherited from the arms of the United States by way of Army regulations. At a distance the flag is easy to mistake for the U.S. coat of arms on a bedsheet, and flag scholars have graded it accordingly in design surveys, where flags built on borrowed federal imagery fare poorly.
The state has heard the argument and, once, almost acted on it. In 1951 the legislature created a Flag Commission to consider a redesign, and the commission came back with a proposal that was actually about North Dakota: wheat and prairie sunset imagery in place of the borrowed eagle. The 1953 session killed it. Veterans' organizations objected to retiring a flag that carried the memory of the state's first war service, and legislators sided with them. The episode set the pattern that has held since: periodic grumbling about the design, no serious movement to replace it.
What the flag actually commemorates
The honest reading of North Dakota's flag is not as a portrait of the state but as a war memorial in cloth. Its symbols are federal because the men it honors fought under federal arms, and the legislature that adopted it in 1911 was not choosing a logo; it was fixing a specific object, a regiment's silk standard, into law. That also explains the flag's stubbornness. Redesign campaigns that frame the flag as bad graphic design keep colliding with the fact that, to the institution defending it, it was never graphic design in the first place.
So the flag persists: a piece of the Army's nineteenth-century visual culture, preserved by a prairie state, flying over the capitol in Bismarck. The sunburst still breaks over the thirteen stars, the eagle still holds its seven arrows, and the scroll still carries the one word of the design that belongs entirely to the state.
References
[1] "Flag of North Dakota," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_North_Dakota
[2] North Dakota Century Code, Chapter 54-02 (state flag provisions).
[3] State Historical Society of North Dakota, materials on the First North Dakota Infantry and the state flag. https://www.history.nd.gov
[4] "Flag of North Dakota," Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-North-Dakota