In August 1913, a freak snowstorm together with the fluctuations of a speculative grain market ruined him financially, causing an abrupt change in vocation.

His message resonated with the grievances of small farmers against the exploitative big interests: the Minneapolis grain merchants, the railroads, and the eastern banks.

[2] In 1916, the Nonpartisan League candidate, Lynn Frazier, won the North Dakota gubernatorial election, and in 1919 the state legislature enacted the entire NPL program, consisting of state-owned banks, mills, grain elevators and hail insurance agencies.

One of the only other inhabitants of the Jackson County jail was a boy who was serving 30 days due to his inability to pay the fine for stealing an old automobile tire.

In 1958, he lost to Republican incumbent William Langer, whose first state office was attorney general on Townley's original Non-Partisan League slate in 1916, and who served two terms as governor of North Dakota in the 1930s before leaving the NPL.

[5] Townley was an insurance salesman, trying to raise money to pay his legal bills, when he was killed in a car-truck accident near Minot, North Dakota on November 7, 1959.