Gideon C. Moody

Gideon Curtis Moody ( born October 16, 1832 in Cortland, New York, † March 17, 1904 in Los Angeles ) is an American politician ( Republican). He was one of the first two U.S. senators from the state of South Dakota.

A native of the Cortland County in New York State Gideon Moody attended the common schools and received an academic education. After he had studied law in Syracuse, he moved to Indiana in 1852 and was received there the following year in the Bar Association. From 1854 he worked as a prosecutor in Floyd County.

In 1861 he held as a deputy in the House of Representatives of Indiana his first political mandate; In the same year he joined the Union Army. During the Civil War he rose to the Colonel before he retired from the army in March 1864. He then moved to the Dakota Territory.

There Moody belonged from 1867 to 1869 the House of Representatives of the territory to; another term followed there from 1874 to 1875, where he also served as Speaker. From 1878 to 1883 he was a judge at the Supreme Court of the territory, in the years 1883 and 1885 he then took each part of the Constitutional Convention of South Dakota.

After the addition of the new state into the Union, Moody was chosen for the Republicans in the U.S. Senate; second representative of South Dakota was there Richard F. Pettigrew. Moody's term began November 2, 1889 and ended on March 3, 1891. During the attempted re-election, he failed to James H. Kyle of the Populist Party.