By all accounts, Franz Rickaby, the young instructor of English and theater at the University of North Dakota, was lovingly devoted to his wife, Lillian, and she to him. They were fully engaged together with the students in Grand Forks, teaching, directing plays, even leading singing of the university fight song, which Rickaby wrote.
But when the students departed campus for Christmas break in 1919, Rickaby hit the road in open country, preceded by posters and press releases from the university. On 29 December the Grand Forks Herald reported that Rickaby was in Ardoch “on the first round of a ten days speaking trip through the state,” but assured readers he would be back in time to meet classes on 9 January.
The paper recounted the already legendary story of how Rickaby in August had “walked” — really, hitchhiked — his way from Charlevoix, Michigan, to resume his duties in Grand Forks, where he had begun teaching in 1917. On 10 January 1920 it reported how, after “making a hit” with the people in Ardoch, Rolla, Omemee, Souris, Rugby, Leeds, Brinsmade, Flora, Bremen, Wellsburg, and Surrey — lecturing under the title, “My Fiddle and I,” Rickaby indeed was back in the classroom.
Let me point out that this was no summer stroll, this was hard travel across the northern tier of the Flickertail State in mid-winter. Rickaby traveled by rail as far as he could, but then he depended on the kindness of strangers, and connections would have involved transport in open cars, wagons, and possibly sleighs. Even though Rickaby had a serious heart condition stemming the rheumatic fever that had afflicted him when he was in school at Knox College of Illinois, and his doctors had told him he had only a few years to live at best.
Rickaby’s granddaughter, Gretchen Dykstra, who knew her grandfather through her grandmother and by the personal papers she preserved, recounts the circumstances and motivations of Rickaby’s journey with his fiddle. He was, she says, one of those “songcatchers,” ballad hunters of the early twentieth century, who “saw their work in both literary and moral terms.” Responding to the admonishment from the godfather of American balladry at the time, George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard, to “set down the dates and the names, preserve the words and the music,” Rickaby had a large mission and only a small amount of time.
It was during this fiddling and collecting tour of North Dakota, or another similar one organized by the university, that Rickaby enjoyed the hospitality of a Walsh County farm woman, a Canadian immigrant named Sarah Neilson. She sang ballads for him. I imagine it was at a kitchen table that she sang,
O bury me not in the deep deep sea
The words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth who lay
On his cabin couch at the close of day
Because Rickaby had read, and been inspired by, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, by the Texas ballad hunter John Lomax, he surely realized, as he jotted down the stanzas sung by Mrs. Neilson, that he was listening to the progenitor to the western folksong, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” more formally known as “The Dying Cowboy.”
And here, stirred by the sparse documentation of the scene, my imagination takes me inside the head of the songcatcher, being warmed by the kitchen stove and by the ballads, mindful of his own mortality. For in five years Rickaby would die in California, having retreated there on advice of physicians who told him he must cease roaming the northern prairies. Dying cowboys of balladry always tell their stories. I have more to tell you about the songcatcher from Grand Forks.
