The Atlantic: Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/searching-for-the-good-life-in-the-bakken-oil-fields/380677/?google_editors_picks=true


A seven-year oil boom in North Dakota has drawn thousands of investors, laborers, and fortune-seekers. But from behind the counter of a local truck stop, it’s unclear just how much anyone is winning.

Maya Rao

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

I rode into the Bakken in a dusty car with Minnesota plates and “Highway to Hell” blasting on the radio, looking for a job where they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

The oil boom had drawn thousands of capitalists, laborers, and fortune-seekers—more than a few outlaws, too—who had arrived with much the same purpose over the last seven years. As oil production hit 1 million barrels a day this past spring, the state began a marketing push to woo even more workers with the slogan “Find the Good Life in North Dakota.”

So there I was: chasing the good life down Highway 85, past the offices for tractor and truck and drilling companies, across the bridge over the Missouri River into McKenzie County, population 9,314. Green and brown buttes sloped over the prairie, and fathers and their sons fished at a sliver of water shaped like a steer’s horns.


An enormous white bust of Abraham Lincoln stood by the road, near an RV park and billboard for a gravel site. I would soon learn that Abe, with the long crack across his neck, was just about the only government figure keeping eyes on this stretch.

FULL story at link.