What If Your Small Town Suddenly Got Huge?
An oil truck drives through McKenzie County, North Dakota, near Watford City. Flickr user Tim Evanson via CC BY-SA 2.0
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When thousands of oil-field workers descended on Watford City, North Dakota, they completely redefined its character and economy.
Just after one o’clock on a Monday afternoon in June, four women gathered around a blanket-in-progress at the weekly meeting of the Lutheran quilters in a church basement in Watford City, North Dakota.
Conversation quickly moved from the matching of patterns to uncertain scenes of everyday life in the long-quiet prairie town now at the center of the Bakken oil boom.
Jean Wold, who was wearing a blue sweater and stitching steadily, grew up on a farm 20 miles east of Watford City, but lives along a leafy town street lined with sturdy curbs. She mentioned a rusty horse trailer, filled with ducks and chickens, that a tenant had parked in her neighborhood.
“And then, there was a boat on the street,” Wold said. “They put that in the yard. Then one day, here is a flatbed with a wrecked truck on it. That stayed on the street for two weeks, and one day I came home and it was gone. I thought, ‘Oh good. Rid of that one.’” No such luck: “They pulled it in the backyard.”
Laurie Hamre, whose white jacket sported the name of the North Dakota State University Bisons, told the ladies of a discovery she made last winter. Hamre lives several miles south of Watford City, out past the new shopping plaza and expanding Assembly of God Church. One day in February, she found a cloth tube lying alongside a field. She suspected the tube contained some of the naturally occurring radioactive solids that come up with wastewater during the well-drilling process. “I called the sheriff’s department,” Hamre said. “There’s still one lying there exactly where it was.” She found another sack three months later near a cemetery.
The women kept close to the square table holding the quilt, and soon Swany Schmidt joined in with a story about the time her husband, who meets other farmers for morning coffee at a new convenience store, noticed an oil field worker who was living out of his truck.
“He wanted to go over and offer him. I don’t know what he would have offered him,” Schmidt said. “You almost wish, you feel guilty, because you have bedroom space at home, but you’re not really... ”
Hamre chimed in: “You don’t know these people.”
Schmidt agreed: “You don’t know them.”
A few minutes later, Wold said, “I think it’s coffee time,” and the ladies headed into a neighboring room, where cookies and caffeine waited. Wold telephoned the bank three blocks away.
“I’m calling from quilting,” she told the person on the other end of the line. “I’m calling to see if the tornado victims need quilts.”
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During the history of the American West, boomtowns have met a dramatic range of fates. In California and Arizona, mining camps that grew to small cities now stand empty, in various stages of decay. Chicago, established in the mid 1800s as a shipping and railroad hub, grew in population from 4,000 to 100,000 in just 20 years and today is the third-largest city in the United States. Then there are cities such as Butte, Montana, which reached a peak population of 60,000 during a copper boom nearly a century ago, but now is home to 34,000 people.
The Bakken oil boom has brought rapid growth to many towns and cities in western North Dakota, including Williston, north of the Missouri River, and Dickinson, alongside Interstate 94. But Watford City, where the population has jumped from just 1,400 people six years ago to more than 10,000 today, has experienced a particularly dramatic shift in character. The town, which celebrates its centennial this year, began as an isolated farming and ranching outpost. Until the early 20th century, the Missouri and Little Missouri Rivers had kept railroads and significant homesteading from much of the area that now comprises McKenzie County. The tidy Lutheran churches that stand stoically against the sky in the prairie surrounding Watford City were built by the great-grandparents of today’s farmers. McKenzie County had two smaller oil booms that didn’t last: Outsiders came to drill in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s, but the harvesting of that oil wasn’t particularly profitable, and the newcomers drifted away.
(Photo by Flickr user Tim Evanson via CC BY-SA 2.0)