If I were to tell this story in the style of its subject, I would start out something like this: “Twas in the spring of 2020.”

There's a Christmas ballad I like to sing this time of year that comes from the High Line country of Montana in 1929 — “A Christmas Pageant with a Practical Result,” it’s called, and it was written by a character named Henry Everett (he went by H. E.) Prall. I call him a “character” because I have discovered that prairie balladeers — the writers of storytelling poems and songs during the settlement era and for a generation after — were, well, characters. They were folk artists with a performative impulse.

When the songcatcher from Grand Forks, Franz Rickaby, died in California in 1925, he was much mourned, both for his scholarly work and for his charismatic persona. One obituary characterized him as “a young man of an unusually pleasing personality.” Of all the great songcatchers, I find Rickaby most appealing.

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.

Montana has a historical vocabulary all its own, devising its own labels for people and processes of frontier settlement. I have described before how the word “pioneer” had its own meaning in the Treasure State, referring not to a doughty homesteader, but rather to a miner or cattleman who came before and held homesteaders in contempt.

In 1878 Samuel W. Williston, a veteran of dinosaur-fossil hunting expeditions on the plains, was a would-be scientist between jobs. He wrote an article for a popular magazine, The American Naturalist, entitled, “The Prairie Dog, Owl and Rattlesnake.” He begins, “Very singular and amusing stories have been, and still are, accepted by many of the amicable relationship between the prairie dog, burrowing owl and rattlesnake.”

Mock weddings — folk dramas featuring gender-bending, cross-dressing, and general hilarity — became fixtures at bridal showers on the prairies in early twentieth century. By the 1950s, the girls who had staged these parodies of married life had become, we hope, mature women enjoying late middle age with their partners. The mock wedding then was reinvented as a fixture in wedding anniversary celebrations staged for popular couples, particularly in small towns, where people were accustomed to homegrown entertainment.

One evening in 1910, during an apparently genteel bridal shower in Grand Forks, a rambunctious event precipitated: a mock wedding. Friends of the bride appeared dressed as if for a wedding ceremony. “Miss Vernie Ryan took the part of the blushing bride,” according to the society report of the day, “appropriately attired in wedding robe and bridal veil.” Next to her stood the groom, in “the proverbial conventional black” — Miss Sadie Gravelle.

The relationship between George F. Will, Bismarck’s renaissance man and the son of the seed man Oscar H. Will, and Otis A. Tye, the rough and ready frontiersman who worked a few years for the seed company, was strong. George had his degree from Harvard, he was the heir to his father’s business, and he had a restless mind, always occupied with scholarly interests. Otis was the restless type too, having led the life of a bullwhacker to the Black Hills, a trapper on the tributaries of the Missouri River, and a cowboy on the Montana range.

Early twentieth-century North Dakota boasted a renaissance man named George F. Will — the son of the seedsman Oscar H. Will who got his degree from Harvard, came back to Bismarck to run his father’s business, but had a lot of other interests. He was an anthropologist, an archeologist, a horticulturalist, a historian, a hiker, a traveler, a dendrochronologist, and also — although not much remembered for it — a songcatcher. He collected cowboy songs and other frontier ballads.