In the 1950s, North Dakota experienced its first oil boom in the Williston

Sixty Years of Boom and Bust Conway

Basin, on the western side of the state. The region experienced unprece-

Sixty Years of
dented social and economic changes, which were carefully documented in
a 1958 report by four researchers at the University of North Dakota. Since
then, western North Dakota has undergone two more booms, the most

BOOM
recent from 2008 to 2014. Sixty Years of Boom and Bust republishes the
1958 report and updates its analysis by describing the impact of the latest
boom on the region’s physical geography, politics, economics, and social
structure.

Sixty Years of Boom and Bust addresses topics as relevant today as they

Bust
were in 1958: the natural and built environment, politics and policy,

AND
crime, intergroup relations, and access to housing and medical services. In
addition to making hard-to-find material readily available, it examines an
area shaped by resource booms and busts over the course of six decades.
As a result, it provides unprecedented insight into the patterns of develop-
ment and the roots of the challenges the region has faced.

Kyle Conway is an associate professor of communication at the University

of Ottawa. The Impact of Oil IN
North Dakota
1958–2018

The Digital Press at Edited by Kyle Conway

The University of
North Dakota
Sixty Years of
Boom and Bust

The Impact of Oil in North

Dakota, 1958–2018

Edited by
Kyle Conway

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota

Grand Forks, ND
 Robert Campbell, Samuel Kelley, Ross Talbot, and
Bernt Wills, The Williston Report: The Impact of Oil
on the Williston Area of North Dakota (University of
North Dakota Press: Grand Forks, ND, 1958) is in the
public domain.

All other sections appear under a

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons
By Attribution
4.0 International License.

2020 The Digital Press @ The University of North Dakota

Book Design: William Caraher

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944021

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks,
North Dakota

ISBN-13: 978-1-7345068-3-9 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-7345068-4-6 (PDF)

Cover photo is by James N. Holter, courtesy of Janet Zander.

Back photo is by Kyle Conway.
 Sixty Years of Boom and Bust:
The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958–2018
Table of Contents
Preface. How to Read this Book (2018) .........................................................................1
Kyle Conway

Section I. Introduction

Chapter 1. Introduction and Summary (1958) ...................................................7

Bernt L. Wills, Ross B. Talbot, Samuel C. Kelley, Jr.,
and Robert B. Campbell

Chapter 2. Introduction: Sixty Years of Boom and Bust (2018) ..............19

Kyle Conway

Section II. Physical Geography

Chapter 3. Physical Attributes of the Area (1958) ............................................35

Bernt L. Wills

Chapter 4. The Geographic Setting of the

Bakken Oil Shale Play (2018)..........................................................................................67
Bradley C. Rundquist and Gregory S. Vandeberg

Section III. Politics

Chapter 5. Political Impact (1958) ...............................................................................101

Ross B. Talbot

Chapter 6. Political Impacts of Oil in an

Era of Sustainability (2018).............................................................................................159
Andrea Olive

Section IV. Economy

Chapter 7. The Economic Impact of Oil Development (1958) ..................189

Samuel C. Kelley, Jr.

Chapter 8. The Economic Consequences of

Oil Development (2018) ...................................................................................................223
David Flynn
Section V. Social Change

Chapter 9. Social Change in the Basin (1958)......................................................245

Robert B. Campbell

Chapter 10. Social Impacts of Oil Development (2018)................................271

Rick Ruddell and Heather Ray

Chapter 11. Making Home in the Bakken Oil Patch (2018).......................287

William Caraher, Bret Weber, and Richard Rothaus

Chapter 12. Drinking, Drugs, and Long Waits:

Community Members’ Perceptions of Living in a
North Dakotan Boomtown (2018) .............................................................................309
Karin L. Becker

Chapter 13. Boomtown Bias: Reflections on the

Past, Present, and Future of Prostitution and
Sex Trafficking in North Dakota (2018) ..................................................................333
Nikki Berg Burin

Section VI. Conclusion

Chapter 14. Conclusion: Reading The Williston Report

Sixty Years Later (2018) .....................................................................................................353
Kyle Conway

Section VII. Appendices

Appendix A: Methodology Note (1958) ..................................................................367

Appendix B: Supplementary Tables (1958) ...........................................................369

Contributors ....................................................................................................................................381
 Preface
How to Read this Book
Kyle Conway

In 1958, the University of North Dakota published The Williston Report: The
Impact of Oil on the Williston Area of North Dakota. Written by four UND profes-
sors, Robert Campbell, Samuel Kelley, Ross Talbot, and Bernt Wills, the book
described the dramatic changes brought about by the discovery of oil on the
western side of the state in 1951. They wrote about the impact of oil, from
its discovery until 1954, on the region’s physical geography, politics, economy,
and social structure, providing a methodologically rigorous analysis, rich with
statistics, maps, and photographs.
Sixty Years of Boom and Bust: The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958–2018
reproduces the five chapters and two appendices of The Williston Report, which
have now entered the public domain. It also adds chapters about the same
themes as they relate to the boom that the region underwent from 2008 to
2014. The book has two goals: first, to provide a historical perspective for citi-
zens and policy makers in the state, and second, to provide a longitudinal study
useful to others wishing to understand resource booms. No study of resource
booms, it should be noted, has looked at as wide a range of impacts over as long
a period of time.
There are at least two ways to read this book, from beginning to end or selec-
tively and strategically. Readers who take the first approach will discover that
the first chapters on physical geography, politics, and economics are data-rich
and provide a solid contextual foundation for the final chapters on social
change. Those who read strategically might start with the final chapters about
social change, the topic most discussed in accounts of the boom in newspa-
pers such as the New York Times or on websites such as Buzzfeed or HuffPost.
These chapters are more focused on narrative, in contrast to the more tech-
nical examinations offered in the first chapters. Rick Ruddell and Heather Ray’s
chapter “Social Impacts of Oil Development” (chapter 10) would be an espe-
cially propitious starting point, as it provides an even-handed overview of the
effects of the boom, in contrast to the sensationalism of many of the articles
in the popular press.
2

Figure 0.1. The cover of The Williston Report (source: author’s personal
collection)
 3

Figure 0.2. Clarence Iverson No. 1, the first successful commercial well in
North Dakota (source: James N. Holter, Williston, North Dakota)
4

A couple of explanatory notes are necessary here. First, with respect to the
beginning and end points of the most recent boom, for the sake of consis-
tency and readability, I decided in my capacity as the volume’s editor to treat
the boom as beginning in 2008 and ending in 2014, despite the changes (all
minor) that this decision necessitated in certain chapters. These years are heu-
ristically useful bookends: the contrast between North Dakota’s prosperity
and the recession in the rest of the United States began to be felt in 2008 (the
country having officially entered a recession in December 2007), and the price
of crude oil dropped below the threshold necessary to make drilling new wells
profitable in 2014. But the dates are somewhat arbitrary. As certain chapters
show (for example, the 2018 introduction and David Flynn’s chapter, “The Eco-
nomic Consequences of Oil Development”), oil production was growing before
2008, and both the number of active wells and the number of barrels produced
continued to climb for several years after 2014. The number of barrels of oil
produced even rebounded in 2018.
Second, although the 2018 chapters all update the 1958 chapters, some also
consider the older report as an object of historical concern. This is especially
true of the narrative-oriented chapters at the end of the book. Whereas the
1958 chapters about the physical geography of the region, its politics, and
its economy each have only one 2018 counterpart, Campbell’s 1958 chapter
“Social Change in the Basin” has four, and they, more than those that precede
them, are critical in their historiographic approach. This fact, I think, is due at
least in part to the attention paid by the popular press to the social changes
in western North Dakota during the most recent boom. It reminds us that we
should ask how we know what we think we know, both as we read the 1958
chapters, whose unacknowledged biases the 2018 chapters work to reveal, and
as we read those from 2018, whose unacknowledged biases we as contempo-
rary readers might be inclined to share.

Sources and Acknowledgments

The task of recreating the 1958 Report involved quite a few people whom I wish
to thank here. First, I would not have discovered the book if the HathiTrust
Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/Record/001313629), working
with Google Books, had not made a scanned version available and discoverable.
Second, although HathiTrust’s e-book included a text version derived from an
optical character recognition (OCR) scan, it was only one source—and not
even the primary one—for the reconstructed text. Instead, I worked with an
 5

international team of researchers to recreate the book manually. I focused on

the text, the first draft of which Dave Haeselin gave to his students to proof-
read and copyedit during a course on digital publishing at the University of
North Dakota. My research assistant Raphaela Nehme, a master’s student in
the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, painstakingly
entered—by hand, and with exceptional accuracy—all of the data from the re-
port’s charts, of which there were more than one hundred. Roxanne Lafleur, a
media librarian at the University of Ottawa, scanned all of the images from my
paper copy of The Williston Report, demonstrating an unrivaled level of techno-
logical wizardry and aesthetic judgment. Finally, Shane Gomes copyedited the
final, revised manuscript and fixed the details that I, having read it too many
times, could no longer see.
Beyond the technical aspects of recreating the book, there were administra-
tive tasks that made its production possible. Kelly-Anne Maddox in the Faculty
of Arts at the University of Ottawa helped me prepare an application for a
publishing grant, which I received from the University of Ottawa. Finally, Bill
Caraher, my former colleague at the University of North Dakota and founder
and director of the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, champi-
oned this book from the very beginning.
A sincere thank you to every one of these collaborators. A sincere thank you,
also, to all of the contributors, whose goodwill and attention to detail made
this book possible.

A Few Final Technical Notes

First, the book is being published in 2020, meaning the “2018” in the updated
chapter titles is a symptom of wishful thinking. (I began work on the book in
2017.) During the revision process, the authors and I updated certain statistics
past 2018, leading to a slight incongruence between the title and the chapter
content. Second, I have made a few minor changes to the text of the 1958
Report, largely to correct typos, add missing information, or standardize the
presentation and layout from one chapter to the next. None of these affect the
content of the report. Likewise, the 1958 Report numbered all of its figures and
tables consecutively, from one chapter to the next. I maintained this system
in the 1958 chapters, but used a different system restarting the count at the
beginning of each of the 2018 chapters.
K.C., Ottawa, December 2019