Here are the stories of the earliest pioneers of North Dakota told by those who experienced the decades of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Recorded in the middle 1930s by interviewers working in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, those who came to the first towns in northern Dakota Territory and North Dakota tell "the way it was" when they came to the frontier. Gleaned from over 5,000 stories which are stored at the State Historical Society of North Dakota, The Townspeople, Book Six, the final book in a series of memories of the frontier experience, collects sixteen of the personal histories of those who came and lived in the first towns, most often created by the railroad companies as a center of commerce for those who came to break the sod and farm the land, that endless sea of grass that challenged their strength and spirit. This book and the other five in the series are illustrated with photographs from North Dakota collections.