She paused and I asked how she found herself here—living in a man camp on a remote North Dakota prairie.
She came to North Dakota in 2010 out of desperation, she said. She had recently gone through a difficult divorce with her husband of 28 years, lost her home to foreclosure along with thousands of other Americans, and declared bankruptcy. She lived in her car for nine months and slept on the couches of her adult children.
“I was on unemployment, applying for jobs, being super frugal with my money, and I am laying on the couch a lot. Then I met a guy who was a driller up here in Williston and he said, ‘Number one, quit applying everywhere and go to Halliburton in North Dakota. You have no experience. It is going to take a boom to hire you.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to North Dakota, that’s 1,000 miles away! I can’t do it.’
“My second application to Williston, I was hired in frack. I was a gold mine for Halliburton because I was over 50 and a woman and I was on unemployment. They got all kinds of tax breaks for me. Most of my bosses are, like, my kids’ age.”
She paused and looked at me. “I want you to know, I’ve been trying really hard not to cuss around you. I wear rubber bands to remind me.”
After two and a half hours, there was a knock at the door. Marchello unlocked it, and a large young man, clean shaven with a crew cut and baggy coveralls, stood in the doorway. I later learned his name was Scott Morgan. He stepped in but didn’t sit down. He said he couldn’t stay long. He had to be back on the well location in a few hours because they were going to “haul off bottom” at 3 a.m. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but he sounded tired and worried.
Marchello and he discussed their new manager and the rumors about guys putting feces on a coworker’s porch and the cops being called. Marchello told him one guy called her a cunt the other day but apologized later. They complained about one of the secretaries who worked in the office, a young woman in her 30s. Many guys on the crew flirted with her. “She’s pretty, but she doesn’t realize that she’s gained weight since high school,” said Marchello. “There’s this ongoing bet to see which button on her shirt will pop first.” She giggled.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Morgan. “How do you get she’s pretty? I haven’t seen my girlfriend in a long time, but I would need copious amounts of booze to do anything with that woman.”
“I guess I’m just saying that because she’s young and she displays her bosom, and she has very long hair,” said Marchello.
“Oh, woopdy damn do. I’d rather have one a little bit older that I don’t have to put all that effort into.”
They seemed to notice me still sitting there. Morgan explained to me that his girlfriend was 25 and attended school in Wyoming. She wanted him to settle down.
Morgan opened the fridge and looked around. “If you don’t have beer in here, I’m going back to location.”
Marchello told him that unless one of the guys put some in there, it wasn’t likely.
He headed out the door muttering that he needed a shower. He turned to me and said: “Nice meeting you. Welcome to fucked-up North Dakota.”
8. PASTOR JAY REINKE
“This is where the big fire was,” Pastor Jay Reinke said as he drove toward the east edge of Williston in his clunky blue ’97 Lumina. “There were two big buildings here that burned down. The road was blocked off for a good week or so after the fire.” He slowed down and I craned my neck to get a better look. We stared at the charred ground and steel skeleton of what was once the Red River Supply, an oil field supply store. The store exploded just after midnight one summer night in 2014. The hot blaze rose 500 feet into the night sky, and the popping and booming sounds of the explosion echoed through town. Oil drilling chemicals—calcium chloride, calcium bromide, and calcium nitrate—burned all through the night, creating a black plume of smoke that settled over the town the next morning. The pastor lived with his wife and three kids just north of the fire. There were no casualties, but the city had to call in a hazardous materials response team to clean up the damage, and nearby residents were told to stay indoors for 24 hours because of concerns about air quality.
We made a sharp left and headed toward one of the first man camps that opened in Williston. Called the Muddy River Lodge, it was owned by the most famous oil field company in town, Halliburton. The building stood three stories tall and looked like 20 giant shipping containers had been fused together. Out front was a red sign with the Halliburton logo. There was a thin layer of frozen snow on the ground, and a security guard sat behind a tall fence. I wondered if it was as hard to leave the complex as it looked like it was to enter it. “This was the first man camp,” Reinke explained. “In the middle they have a gymnasium and a restaurant. A lot of people don’t like man camps, but I think they’re great. When the boom is done, they’re going to get packed up and moved away.”
There seemed to be two groups of residents living in Williston—those who thought the oil boom was a temporary burst of money and workers flowing into town, and those who believed the money and people were there to stay. Some residents never had the chance to find out—they had been priced out of the homes they rented and forced to leave. For the most part, Reinke, who came to Williston 20 years ago, was happy the boom was there, but he didn’t believe it would last forever. His plan was to outlast the boom and not let it exile him, as it had done to hundreds of other longtime Williston residents. People who had grown up on the quiet streets of the town, married in its churches, and sent their children to its schools were either being forced out by landlords who raised their rents from $500 a month to $3,000 or left voluntarily after their home values quadrupled and they sold them to escape.
* * *
North Dakota had seen oil booms before, in the 1950s and 1980s, but if you look at the state’s economic history, those booms were a blip on the chart. If you blinked, you might have missed them. Nothing had ever compared to what was happening now.
Before the current boom, North Dakota had lost residents almost every year since 1930. It was one of the last frontiers to be settled in the United States, and about 80 percent of the first homesteaders who relocated there left within 20 years. The state’s teachers earned some of the lowest salaries in the nation, and jobs had never been easy to come by. It was also one of the least-visited states—whenever I told my friends where I was going, they’d say, “Oh yeah, I drove through North Dakota once.” Then they’d pause. “Wait, I think that was South Dakota.” In Fargo, the visitor center gave out T-shirts that said YOU SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST, as if the state was proud visitors avoided the state as much as possible. One thing the state had was churches—about one church for every 400 people, giving it the distinction of being the state with the most churches per capita in the United States.
The state was also overwhelmingly white—North Dakota was settled by Scandinavian immigrants and was about 90 percent Caucasian, with any racial diversity on the reservations or in cities, such as Fargo and Bismarck.
Jay Reinke had moved to North Dakota in 1993 from Pierre, South Dakota, when he was 37 years old. After serving as an assistant pastor at a Lutheran church in Pierre for four years, he was offered his first full-time pastor position at Concordia Lutheran Church in Williston, a town with a population of around 12,000 people at the time. He moved to town with his wife, Andrea, and their three-month-old daughter, Clara. They purchased a small home downtown for around $32,000. They liked Williston at first. It didn’t have as many public parks as Pierre, but people were friendly and the town seemed stable. Few people moved in or out. He and Andrea enjoyed the quiet, small-town atmosphere. Reinke figured it’d be a great place to build a church community and raise his family. Andrea, who had been a high school teacher on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, became a stay-at-home mom, and they had three more children.
Reinke is tall with a slight hunch and walks quickly. He has ruddy cheeks and blond hair and is a fast, expressive talker. His body movements and hand gestures are grand and attention-grabbi
ng. Everyone knows when Reinke walks into a room. When he’s angry, the wrinkles on his forehead bulge and his eyebrows curve downward. When he’s excited, his eyes open wide, and he throws his hands up and grins like a Cheshire Cat.
As the pastor at Concordia, Jay Reinke became well known in the church community. He began writing a column for the local paper and had a program on a local radio station where he discussed scripture. Publicly, he rarely held back his opinions and was a proponent of many right-wing sentiments. He frequently fought to ban abortion by marching in Washington and used the church’s front lawn to hold demonstrations. He staked over 1,000 crosses in front of the church every year to represent the annual number of abortions in the state. He vehemently opposed gay marriage, spoke out against a bill that would protect the LGBT community from housing and job discrimination, and fought to allow guns in churches. Though his political beliefs weren’t extreme for western North Dakota, other pastors weren’t nearly as vocal or eccentric as Reinke, and his outspokenness was isolating at times. Beyond their church friends and acquaintances, he and Andrea didn’t have many other friends in town.
In 2009, he noticed more traffic in downtown Williston and read about the growing number of oil wells in the surrounding county. He saw more strangers and oil workers around town. Businesses seemed busier than ever. Lines had never been common in Williston, and suddenly people had to wait everywhere—at intersections, at Walmart, at the bank. “We noticed people walking on Main Street pulling suitcases behind them or carrying bags,” he recalled. “You saw people sitting in coffee shops with bags around them and knew they just got to town.” At times the newcomers stood out because they were more diverse than Williston was accustomed to. It was now not uncommon to see Black, Hispanic, Native American, African, Asian, or Arab workers walking the streets or at local restaurants.
As housing filled up, word quickly spread that rents were rising and vacant hotel rooms were difficult to find. Homeowners heard that some landlords had doubled, tripled, or quadrupled their prices and began listing extra rooms in their homes for what the market demanded. They assumed many new arrivals worked for oil companies and made at least three to four times the typical wage in Williston. When $1,000 didn’t deter anyone, landlords tripled the original rent. Soon it was difficult to find an apartment in Williston for less than $3,000. Companies that had empty mobile trailers, called skid shacks, rented them for $2,000 a month.
Most older residents still remembered the 1980s boom, which went bust after only four years, and they didn’t like the sound of another wave of boom and bust tearing through their town. They hoped it would be short-lived and they could return to living in peace. Longtime renters were already being pushed out of their homes. Elderly residents living on fixed incomes had to move away. Gloria Cox, a 74-year-old Williston resident, saw the rent on her mobile home lot go from $350 to $850 a month. “It’s greediness, greediness, greediness,” she said. “So many of us are living on Social Security. The rents are not feasible. We don’t work in the oil field.” Cox was old enough to remember the previous bust. “We had an oil boom before and it left us high and dry,” she said. “The sooner this boom goes bust, the better.”
But others welcomed the influx of money and jobs. The local Chevrolet dealer, Murphy Motors, could hardly keep new trucks on the lot—many were paid for with cash. The average wage in Williston rose to about $80,000 a year, up from $32,000 in 2006. By 2012, more than half of Williston’s residents worked in oil-related jobs. The number of taxpayers reporting a $1 million-plus income in North Dakota went from 261 in 2005 to 1,265 in 2012.
Meanwhile, the “financial refugee” camp at Walmart grew. At night, as the sun disappeared behind the prairie, the parking lot filled up with rows of campers, RVs, and trucks with license plates from across the country, as far as Alaska and Florida. Fluorescent streetlights flooded spotlights onto the campers and cast shadows between the trucks and RVs. Men slouched in camping chairs drinking or smoking as Walmart shoppers hesitantly walked by them with their carts. The FOOD CENTER sign blazed brightly in the background. Locals began calling the parking lot Pioneer Square.
Reinke tried to help. He rented out the extra bedrooms in his home to newcomer men for $300 a month, significantly below the going rate, and in his newspaper column, he urged longtime locals to do the same. He pleaded for Williston residents to welcome the new arrivals and chastised one local woman he knew for calling them “human debris.”
“We are at the epicenter of profound change. A migration. Thousands of people. Changed landscapes. It’s here and life will never be the same,” wrote Reinke in The Williston Herald in December 2011. “I have had the privilege of speaking to many of these new arrivals. Many have lost much, some have lost everything. They have suffered. They are also sons, and brothers, and fathers.”
9. WILLISTON
From its birth, the city of Williston was filled with people looking for a place to start over.
Like many new towns during America’s westward expansion, Williston sprang to existence in 1887 because of the railroad. That year, work crews laid some 545 miles of track across the state and into Montana—a rate that broke records and became known as the 1887 push. After the tracks were built, Great Northern Railway, which owned many acres of land in North Dakota, needed settlers. The railroad was offering land for cheap—only 10 percent down and seven years to pay the balance. Settlers could also acquire free land under the 1862 Homestead Act—all they needed to do was inhabit and improve an 160-acre plot for five years.
But when one of the railroad’s land commissioners traveled 60 miles west of Fargo, he knew the area would be a hard sell—even at such prices. He described what he saw as “burned-over country” with “hard, dry soil.” A “barren desert.” Finding settlers for the area seemed “a hopeless task,” he wrote. “The name Dakota had a faraway sound.” Nevertheless, the free or cheap land was advertised in hundreds of newspapers all over the United States and in England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany. In 1888, an advertisement in Harper’s Monthly magazine called the region “the richest well-watered and favorably-situated agricultural and grazing lands of the entire public domain.” The advertisement claimed the area had “mild and short winters” and that “cattle and stock graze the year around.” An advertisement in 1907 read “Go to Opportunity Land. Get away from the over-crowded East—go where opportunities exist for every man willing to work—where industry reaps generous rewards—where a man is judged by ‘what he does’ and not by ‘what he’s worth.’ Go to the great, growing, thriving Northwest.”
The positive advertising worked. Soon immigrants and settlers migrated to the region, hoping for a new life. From 1878 to 1890, the population of North Dakota went from 16,000 people to 191,000—an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Most pioneers lived in tents and canvas-covered shacks at first. Lumber was in short supply and, in many instances, had to be hauled from 50 miles away. The roads were poor—most consisted of wagon tracks—and few streams or rivers had bridges. A large number of pioneers came from Scandinavia, especially Norway. Some townships in Traill County north of Fargo were more than 90 percent Norwegian. The dominant religion in the Scandinavian communities was Lutheran, and by 1916, 76,000 Lutherans were living in North Dakota. As was common with westward expansion, vagrants, prostitutes, gambling, and saloons came with the homesteaders. Though early settlers faced some violence from the Sioux tribe, the three main tribes in the area—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara—were peaceful and reluctantly allowed the settlement.
The pioneers soon discovered that the reality of North Dakota was different from what the advertisements had promised. One year in March a trainload of immigrants arrived in Williston during a blizzard and had nowhere to stay. They searched for a guide to help them locate a desirable 160-acre homestead, but no one would take them out in the storm. Many camped out in Williston’s courthouse until the weather cleared.
The plots of land they acqui
red typically were marked only by mounds of dirt with oak stakes at the corners, and many plots weren’t close to a water source. Families had to sleep in tents, wagons, or under wagons while they built more permanent structures such as sod houses or one-room dugouts with logs blocking the entrance. During the winter, settlers sometimes shared the dugouts with horses or oxen to keep the animals from freezing to death.
The soil on North Dakota homesteads was hard, dry, and tough to plow. Farmers worked long hours, fighting against extreme temperatures, rain, and snow. Pioneers battled lice and bedbugs, dust storms and prairie fires. “Wind-blown flames could outrun a galloping horse and sometimes leaped over streams and firebreaks, sweeping over large areas of open country and destroying grain, haystacks, buildings, and stock,” wrote Elwyn Robinson in History of North Dakota.
In winter, temperatures could drop to the minus 40s. A blizzard in 1887 lasted 72 hours. During the storm, “men rode out on the range never to return,” wrote Valerie Sherer Mathes in her essay, “Theodore Roosevelt as a Naturalist and Bad Lands Rancher.” “Children froze to death only yards from their homes, women committed suicide, cattle … blew over in the gale force winds and died where they fell.” As the snow melted, dead cattle were seen drifting down the swollen Little Missouri River. The next year, another blizzard killed nearly 100 people. Others suffered from frostbite. In 1889, a severe drought struck the central United States and hit the Dakotas particularly hard. Spring often brought terrible floods. In 1897, one flood swept away property and bridges, forming a lake 30 miles wide in the Red River Valley. And a typhoid epidemic nearly wiped out 10 percent of the population of Grand Forks in 1894 after sewage leaked into the city’s water system.
Many of the first pioneers to the region, especially the women, wrote about the isolation and loneliness they felt. After a hard day on the land, men frequented saloons where women weren’t allowed. Women would be left at home for days or weeks at a time while their husbands were away. Pioneer women often came from well-to-do families back east or in their home countries, and adjusting to the prairie frontier was difficult. The unpredictable climate, long winters, and barren, wide-open land added to their loneliness.
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