North Dakota - Trading tradition for oil
It’s another reminder of the massive transformation unfolding in North Dakota. Thousands of workers — and $30 billion of investment — have arrived and oil production records are rewritten monthly.
North Dakota now trails only Texas in oil production with more than 911,000 barrels a day getting sucked from its shale. And its population, after largely shrinking for decades, is suddenly growing faster than any other state.
All the frenzy has thrust quiet, tiny dots on the map such as Keene, N.D., into cataclysmic change — forever altering the stark landscape and the lives of families whose ancestors settled here generations ago. Many lay buried behind a Lutheran church on the hill, along with webs of new hydraulic fractured wells snaking below its cemetery out back — earning the church hefty royalty checks from oil companies.
“They don’t hit dry holes around here anymore,” says Gilstad, the dean at the branding and North Dakota’s 1956 bareback bronc-riding champ. “We’re right in the middle of it here.”
Families are cashing in. There are new pickups and Caribbean cruises, but residents lying in bed at night can also hear the roar of natural gas flares and the constant pounding of trucks out on Hwy. 23.
“Ranchers like to piss and moan about the truck traffic and such out here, but they don’t tell you how much their checks are worth,” Jeff Hepper, Abby’s dad, says during a break from lassoing and branding. “There are good parts and bad, and things have changed, but damn few would make the choice to go back to the way things were 10 years ago.”
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