The Black Cat Mail Carrier of Dakota is a mammoth, environmentally stunning nation, ruled by Salem Skollvaldr with an even hand, and notable for its zero percent divorce rate, strictly enforced bedtime, and compulsory vegetarianism. The hard-nosed, hard-working, devout population of 9.888 billion Dakotans are highly moralistic and fiercely conservative, in the sense that they tend to believe most things should be outlawed. People who have good jobs and work quietly at them are lauded; others are viewed with suspicion.

The relatively small, corrupt, moralistic government juggles the competing demands of Industry, Education, and Healthcare. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 9.6%.

The powerhouse Dakotan economy, worth 674 trillion catnips a year, is quite specialized and dominated by the Gambling industry, with significant contributions from Arms Manufacturing, Door-to-door Insurance Sales, and Basket Weaving. Black market activity is frequent. State-owned companies are common. Average income is 68,218 catnips, but there is a significant disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 209,349 per year while the poor average 17,196, a ratio of 12.2 to 1.

The nation is renowned abroad for its love of blood and guts, cities in Dakota declare independence based on interpretation of the historic meaning of cave paintings, clowns are being rounded up and admitted to mental institutions, and Scoutmasters debate whether luxury log cabins defeat the purpose of camping. Crime is a major problem, perhaps because of the country's complete lack of prisons. Dakota's national animal is the black cat, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its national religion is Judaism.

Dakota is ranked 318,938^th in the world and 2,379^th in the Rejected Realms for Most Scientifically Advanced, scoring -127.81 on the Kurzweil Singularity Index.