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.