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"Labo(u)r, Settlement, and Resources Extraction:The Man Camps of the Bakken Oil Patch in Historical and Global Perspective" William Caraher (University of North Dakota) With Bret Weber (University of North Dakota), Richard Rothaus (Trefoil Cultural and Environmental), Kostis Kourelis (Franklin and Marshall College), Aaron Barth(North Dakota State University), John Holmgren (Franklin and Marshall College)Delivered at the Midwest Association for Canadian Studies ConferenceOctober 5-6, 2012Grand Forks, North DakotaThe North Dakota Man Camp Project seeks to document the material and socialenvironment of the man or crew camps associated with the Bakken Oil Patch in western North Dakota.
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The project began as a collaboration between Bret Weber in Social Work and Bill Caraher in the Department of History at theUniversity of North Dakota, and grew to include historian Aaron Barth, archaeologistRichard Rothaus, architectural historian Kostis Kourelis, and photographer JohnHolmgren. Our collaboration brings together research questions from worldarchaeology with those central to the study of the American West and labor history. Incontrast to much ongoing research that has focused on the changing conditionspresent in the towns and communities in the Bakken region that predated the mostrecent boom, our research has focused on the communities created by the boom,namely man or crew camps established to provide accommodations for workers whocame into the area to work in the oil industry or in related services.
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Crew, work, and man camps associated with resource extraction are a well-known historical phenomenon with precedents in the 19th American West century and even earlier in a global context. The continued development of this practice into
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the 21st century is hardly surprising as remote locations continue to pose logistical andeconomic challenges for resource extraction.
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With the boom in oilproduction in the Bakken range in the western part of North Dakota, man campshave appeared to provide housing for work crews in the sparsely settled western NorthDakota counties.
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Clustered outside or around the fringes of thelongstanding towns in the area, the temporary settlements represent both the practicalneeds of an itinerant workforce as well as a continuation of longstanding practicescommon to the periphery.Historical research into the material and social conditions of work camps hasapproached the topic through three main lines.
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Recent work by archaeologists has presented the remains of man camps as important places in pastindustrial landscapes and their remains offer important evidence for understanding thearchaeology of the working class, labor, and the American West.
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Architectural historians have examined how mobile and company housing fit intochanging architectural standards throughout the late 19th and 20th century.
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These new architectural forms contributed to new forms of domesticity andcommunity. The use of temporary accommodations for the labor crucial for resourceextraction provided the social evidence for relationship between core and periphery and the consequences and responses to so-called boom/bust cycles in the Americanlandscape.A preliminary trip to the Bakken Oil Patch led to the development of a typology of the man camps in the area. We identified three types of camps and this typology hasenjoyed some support from experts in the state and is reflected in bureaucraticprocesses. Type 1 camps are the best known.
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Built typically by large non-regional corporations in most cases for large multinational corporations, Type 1 campshave the most obvious amenities including clean quarters with water and electricity,recreation and dining facilities, laundry, controlled access and security, and spacious,clean grounds. Most of the units are prefabricated and are moved onto the site andorganized in a single unified way.
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In many cases, individual units have
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accommodations for 4 to over 20.
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Type 2 camps are less formal andcentrally organized. They feature RVs typically attached to masts providing power and,in most cases, water and sewage disposal. The types of units vary and, in many cases,residents own the trailers or mobile homes, although this is not universally true.
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The camps show no particular uniformity although most have someconsistent arrangement dictated largely by the power and water hook ups, and someoffer basic amenities.
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Type 3 camps are the least formal, uniform, and offer the least access to amenities.
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They lack power or water masts, regular organization, and sometimes are little more than groups of RVs or tents shelteringtheir itinerant occupants in a windbreak or tree belt. The relationship between thedifferent types of camps and administrative apparatus of the state roughly follows our typology. Type 1 camps fall under the jurisdiction of the ND Department of Commerce and their inspectors; local health departments monitor conditions in Type2 camps, and the police manage the spread of Type 3 camps, which are typically illegal.In August of this year, we returned to the Bakken Oil patch to document examples of Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 camps. We adopted a blend of archaeological recordingtactics and ethnographic style interviews designed to document social and materialconditions at the camps.
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The archaeological recording techniques involved photography, recordingof textual descriptions, and sketches of individual units and the plan of the camps.
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By using both photography and more impressionistic methods to collectdata we have produced a rich dataset that sought both to capture data that could bemined for future research as well as more focused descriptions emphasizing datarelevant to our short term research questions regarding site formation, architecturalmodifications, and material evidence for domestic life. [SLIDE] Interviewscomplemented the archaeological documentation by documenting the range of socialand economic conditions existing in the man camps, and testing whether our materialtypology correlated to social conditions in the camps.
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Labo(u)r, Settlement, and Resources Extraction: The Man Camps of the Bakken Oil Patch in Historical and Global Perspective
This is a conference paper delivered at the Midwest Association for Canadian Studies Conference in Grand Forks, ND on October 5-6, 2012. The paper is based on research conducted by William Caraher (University of North Dakota),…
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