Although we now associate Sioux County and Orange City with tulips, wooden shoes, and all things Dutch, Orange City was not the county’s first seat of government. Calliope (pronounced Cal-ee-ope), a hamlet on the banks of the Big Sioux River near present-day Hawarden, was the first county seat. All of that changed when the first band of 70 to 80 Dutch families arrived from Pella in 1870.

Just months after the Dutch settlers rolled onto the area’s vast prairies, the Netherlanders challenged the non-Dutch settlers for numerical dominance. By the end of the year, the Dutch had a slim but outright majority in the county. In the fall, the newly arrived Dutch elected Tjeerd Heemstra as the first Dutchman to win a seat on the Sioux County Board of Supervisors. The next year, Henry Hospers, the new community’s preeminent political leader, won the election for Heemstra’s seat, which Heemstra had left open, and two other men supported by the colony won county offices.

A peaceful transition of power was not in the cards. The Calliope officials expediently installed Hospers into Heemstra’s former seat after the election, but they refused to allow the others to take their roles, which would have tipped the balance of power in the county government in favor of the Dutch.

After several attempts to install the elected members, Hospers and the new officials brought an attorney to present their case at the board meeting scheduled for January 1872. Over the protests of the Dutchmen’s lawyer, the Calliope officials continued to stonewall.

The morning after the meeting, the officials realized their error. A throng of Dutchmen had traveled through the night across the sub-zero, snow-covered prairies to back their newly elected officials. The Sioux County Herald reported that at 10 a.m., Dutchmen who were “arrayed in wood shoes, armed to the teeth, well supplied with spirits... and brimful of wrath and cabbage” overran Calliope, a town of approximately 100 residents. They insisted on installing their newly elected officials.

The sheriff and his deputies wilted, and most of the Calliope officials fled across the ice-covered Big Sioux River. The county recorder, Rufus Stone, resisted. Defiantly, he proclaimed, “No gang of woodenshoe [sic] Dutchmen can run the county as long as I have anything to do about it.” But, in time, he too flitted across the frozen river.

With most of the county officials hiding in the Dakota Territory, the Dutchmen chopped down the doors to the courthouse and commandeered official documents, the county safe, and a generous stash of bacon. Presumably refreshed after devouring the bacon, they loaded the contraband onto their sleds and headed for home, firing shots from the top of the ridge as a warning to those who might be cavalier enough to follow them. Somewhat ironically, according to Charles Dyke’s dramatic accounting, on their way back to Orange City, the safe fell into an ice-covered creek. Due to plummeting temperatures, the Dutch had to leave it there, submerged in the icy water, until they could retrieve it the following day.

Despite Dutch passion and coordination, running county officials out of Calliope and confiscating county documents did not win the day. When the sheriff came to Orange City a few days later, the Dutch returned the county records in exchange for assurances that the new Dutch officials could take their positions on the board. True to form, the Calliope officials delayed yet again.

This time Hospers took matters into his own hands and tried a different tack. He headed to Des Moines to hobnob with his friends in Iowa’s General Assembly. Hospers’ connections with the Iowa General Assembly gave the Dutchmen the edge over their opponents in Calliope. While in Des Moines, Hospers encouraged the swift passage of a law in the Iowa General Assembly that would allow judges to bypass county supervisors and install duly elected county officials, thereby cutting the Calliope crowd out of the process.

Less than two months after the initial skirmish, on March 15, 1872, Hospers’ law passed. As Hospers later reminisced, all the Calliope officials had to say for themselves was, “G—D—, Hospers, you got us this time.” The tenacious Dutch had won.

As soon as the new members of the Sioux County Board of Supervisors took their seats, the Dutch officials voted to hold a referendum to move the county seat to Orange City. In the fall election, the Dutch steamrolled their opponents in a vote of 185 to 65. Writing over a decade later, the editor of The Sioux County Herald reflected, “Any question, political or financial for years thereafter, was decided by the colony. Orange City held the balance of power.”

Within two years of arriving in Northwest Iowa, through persistence, a testy skirmish, and skilled politicking, the Dutch had secured their position at the center, both literally and figuratively, of Sioux County.

Dr. Andrew Klumpp is the editor of Iowa’s scholarly journal "Annals of Iowa" published by the State Historical Society of Iowa, which provided this essay as part of a series for Iowa History Month. For more information, visit iowaculture.gov.

March is Iowa History Month

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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa History Month: Wooden shoes on a warpath