The Bakken Boom: Oil, Man-Camps, and the New West Texas

In two thousand eight, Williston, North Dakota, had about twelve thousand people, a grain elevator, and a railroad. By two thousand fourteen it had somewhere between thirty and forty thousand, depending on how you counted the men living in temporary work camps on the outskirts of town. Geologists had known since the nineteen fifties that the Bakken shale formation beneath western North Dakota held enormous quantities of oil. What they didn't know was how to get it out economically. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, both of which reached commercial viability in the mid-two thousands, changed that calculation overnight.

The rush that followed was unlike anything the Northern Plains had seen since the homestead era. Workers poured in from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Appalachia, sleeping six to a room in purpose-built housing compounds called man-camps, essentially modular trailer cities dropped on the prairie. The going wage for a roughneck with no experience started above sixty thousand dollars per year. Pizza delivery drivers were reportedly making similar sums with tips. Motels that had charged fifty dollars a night were renting rooms for three hundred.

North Dakota briefly became the second-largest oil-producing state in the country, surpassing Alaska and closing in on Texas. Williston's downtown, which had been hollowing out for decades like most rural Plains towns, suddenly had a housing crisis. The city built new streets and water lines faster than the engineers could design them.

Then came two thousand fifteen, when the price began to collapse, and early the following year it fell below thirty dollars a barrel, and the man-camps began to empty. Some workers left overnight, abandoning vehicles in parking lots. The bust was as fast as the boom. A second, smaller wave of activity followed in two thousand seventeen and after, but the population never returned to its peak. The prairie absorbs these cycles. It has seen them before.