Because of its strategic location on the Missouri River and the Great Northern Railway, Mondak quickly became a thriving village.

[3] Locally raised grain and cattle were shipped to Minneapolis on the Great Northern, but the town's most profitable business remained alcohol sales.

On April 4, 1913, a black construction worker, J. C. Collins, shot and killed Sheridan County Sheriff Thomas Courtney and a deputized citizen, Richard Bermeister, when they tried to arrest him at the company's office.

[5][6] Hours after Collins was jailed in Mondak, a mob of local residents stormed the building and lynched him, hanging him from a telephone pole and then making "a futile attempt to burn his body.

The area entered a drought cycle in 1916; and the Snowden Bridge, completed in 1913, reduced ferry traffic across the Missouri.