Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Ligia Grischa: A Successful Swiss Colony On The Dakota Territory Frontier, Todd Quinn, Karl Benedict, Jeff Dickey
Ligia Grischa: A Successful Swiss Colony On The Dakota Territory Frontier, Todd Quinn, Karl Benedict, Jeff Dickey
Great Plains Quarterly
In 1877 a small group of Swiss immigrants from the Graubunden canton formed a cooperative with another Swiss group in Stillwater, Minnesota, to begin a colony in eastern South Dakota. These settlers founded the Badus Swiss colony on the open prairie in Lake County, Dakota Territory {later South Dakota}, based on cooperative rules written in Switzerland in 1424. This settlement was one of the last Swiss colonies created in the United States during the great nineteenth-century European migration, and one of the westernmost Swiss settlements in the United States.
There were two major factors that contributed to the Badus Swiss …