Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

"We Were Beet Workers, And That Was All" Beet Field Laborers In The North Platte Valley, 1902-1930, Dustin Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly

John and Alex Loos, two brothers who spent their childhood summers working in the beet fields of western Nebraska in the 1910s, suggested that a migrant beet field laborer could become, by the end of one season, "a trusted member of the community."¹ It took years of hard work and saving, but field workers could become farmers. Families could own land and work for their own benefit rather than for the subsistence wages of the migratory laborer. Although locals often viewed them with suspicion as outsiders, German Russian migrants were increasingly encouraged to stay to help build the burgeoning …