He explored and mapped the Northwest at the request of Major Robert Rogers, commander of Fort Michilimackinac.

Carver's mission was to find the Northwest Passage, the imagined waterway to the Orient which Rogers (and many other explorers of the time) believed existed.

More than 100 years after Carver's expedition, a U.S. government surveying party passed through the Wahpeton area.

J. W. Blanding, a member of the expedition, was so impressed by the fertile river valley that he returned to his Wisconsin home determined to move his family and property to the Dakota Territory.

When other settlers arrived, they formed a tiny community and named it Richville, commemorating both its founder and the fertile quality of the soil.

At the same time, the town's name was changed to Chahinkapa, a Lakota Sioux word meaning "the end of the woods".

They adopted this name at an earlier time when they lived in the vicinity of Lake Mille Lacs, before they were displaced by the Ojibwe and pushed to the west.

[8] Growth of the village of Wahpeton was quite slow during the first few years, but it increased rapidly in 1872 with the completion of a railroad line into Breckenridge, Minnesota, a tiny community across the Bois de Sioux River.

The railroad line attracted many more settlers to the area—both migrants from the Eastern United States, Native Americans, and new European immigrants.

Germans, Bohemians, Scandinavians, and Native Americans moved to Richland County to file for homesteads.

In 1874, Jacob Morvin and Joseph Sittarich opened the county's first retail store in Wahpeton.

Another flurry of growth occurred in 1880 when the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad crossed the river and pushed its tracks on toward the northwest.

In 1913, NLEC's owner, C. B. Kidder, sold his company to Otter Tail Power and became its first general manager.

It was an Indian boarding school, designed to assimilate the children to mainstream language, culture and religion.

In most such schools, children were required to use English rather than their native languages (which were many among these groups), dress in Euro-American style, and practice Christianity.

The school has since been transferred to an inter-tribal group, chartered under the federally recognized Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate and funded by the Bureau of Indian Education.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 5.355 square miles (13.87 km2), all land.

[12] The top nine reported ancestries (people were allowed to report up to two ancestries, thus the figures will generally add to more than 100%) were German (43.2%), Norwegian (20.0%), Irish (7.4%), English (4.0%), Polish (2.7%), French (except Basque) (2.3%), Scottish (1.7%), Italian (0.3%), and Subsaharan African (0.1%).

The top six ancestry groups in the city are German (47.4%), Norwegian (28.4%), Irish (7.1%), Swedish (5.8%), French (4.0%), English (4.0%).

Wahpeton is the home of several large manufacturing plants, including Woodcraft Industries, Inc., WCCO Belting, Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative, Cargill, ComDel Innovation, Heartland Precision, Doosan/Bobcat, Masonite and Wil-Rich.

[18] On May 14, 1991, Wahpeton voters approved a 1% city sales and use tax, the proceeds of which were to be dedicated solely to economic development of the City of Wahpeton and Richland County, by means of business and industrial expansion including job creation, job retention, business and industrial diversification, and the creation, fostering and maintenance of business and trade activities and facilities.

[19] The area attracts outdoorsmen and hunters, as it is in the midst of the Central Flyway, thus providing excellent migratory waterfowl hunting.

Near the golf course is Chahinkapa Park, which houses playgrounds, baseball, softball, football fields, and tennis.

The Richland County Historical Society Museum features Native American artifacts and displays of pioneer life.

On Thursday afternoons from June through October, the Twin Towns Gardeners' Market is held near the Sears/Family Dollar building in Wahpeton.