A visit to the Bad Nation Indian Colony

SOUTH DAKOTA, FRIDAY, AUG 18, 1939

Last Saturday morning we accepted an invitation extended us by Boss Farmer Lindbloom, and went out to visit the Bad Nation colony, located on Big White river, about 22 miles northeast of Wood. This is a comparatively new project, and is just getting under way this year, although a little work was done on the project last year. It is most ideally located on perhaps 200 acres of nice level river bottom land. A fine set of buildings has been erected for the accommodation of the colony and more are yet to be built.

A fine new school building has been erected there with all modern conveniences. The building is 30x80 feet in size, and in it are also quarters for the superintendent of the school, James D. Wallace and wife, who have just recently moved in. The building is modern in every sense of the word and has electric light, and when fully completed will have running water, as both hot tub and shower baths have been installed. The floors are of hardwood, and it is certainly a modern plant, and the living quarters are equipped with a bottled gas range. There is also a two –car garage; then there are these nice cottages on the location for the accommodation of Indian families. The material is on the ground for the erection of a canning plant, and this building will soon be taking form.

The colony has about 20 acres under cultivation this year with a good part of the garden under irrigation, Water is supplied by a centrifugal pump that throws a six-inch stream from the river at the rate of about 1205 gallons per minute. When we were there Saturday we saw beets, rutabaga, turnips, potatoes, sweet corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, squashes, pumpkins and cucumbers, all looking mighty promising, not withstanding that they had a hard battle with grasshoppers  and beetles – they are going to gather a good crop. Last Saturday they were busy canning beets and drying sweet corn. They dry sweet corn by the old fashioned sun-drying method, but good dried sweet corn does make mighty good eating in the winter time. They are also salting down barrels of cucumber pickles for winter use.

This is one of the newer colonies that are being established all over this country by the Indian department for their charges, and we were much impressed with the ideal location of this colony for future development and beautification.

We could visualize a real show place there within a few years by proper handling, when all the available bottom land in the plot could be put under irrigation and intensive cultivation. With perhaps a fine field of alfalfa to provide feed for the milking cows, with eight or ten acres in orchard, and the balance of the land in garden truck to be harvested and processed right on the ground it would be a source of winter food supply for the red man that would certainly be a boon, and perhaps the red man, under proper tutelage, could yet point the way to his white brother how to build happy homes in this country and let the soil produce all of the luxuries that grace the table of the most opulent citizens.

Mr. Lindbloom has about four such colonies under his supervision, and he informed us that they are making strides and should be a means of making the Indians more self-supporting and self-reliant in the future. We are going to make it a point to watch this development, which has the possibilities of making examples that might well be followed by the white man, not as a colony but through individual effort, with perhaps cooperative processing plants to take care of any surplus production.

 When we purchased the land and moved down to South Dakota in 2004, not one of the building remained standing.  There does remain some foundations scattered around the land. Image is not one that was included in the artice, I took a picture and photoshoped it to what the 1939 photo's looked like to give you an idea of the times.