A lifetime of questions led us to discover that the grandfather we never knew had led a surprisingly interesting and varied life, having occupied himself as a farmer and a Populist, a town builder and a merchant, a Freethinker and a pioneer of the Great Dakota Boom. He and his contemporaries lived through the panics of 1873, 1893, 1907 and 1921, the root cause for which they correctly determined to be traceable to the manipulations of the monetary...