Tractor and truck and drilling companies
The oil boom had drawn thousands of capitalists, laborers, and fortune-seekers—more than a few outlaws, too—who had arrived with much the same purpose over the last seven years. As oil production hit 1 million barrels a day this past spring, the state began a marketing push to woo even more workers with the slogan “Find the Good Life in North Dakota.”
So there I was: chasing the good life down Highway 85, past the offices for tractor and truck and drilling companies, across the bridge over the Missouri River into McKenzie County, population 9,314. Green and brown buttes sloped over the prairie, and fathers and their sons fished at a sliver of water shaped like a steer’s horns.
An enormous white bust of Abraham Lincoln stood by the road, near an RV park and billboard for a gravel site. I would soon learn that Abe, with the long crack across his neck, was just about the only government figure keeping eyes on this stretch.
The road had not been built to hold 12,000 vehicles a day between Williston and Watford City, a sixfold increase from before the oil boom. Now the highway between those cities was being widened from two to four lanes, as part of the largest road construction efforts in state history. Motorists tended to ignore the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit in the construction zone, and flattened traffic cones lined the roadside. Around here, you earned more the faster you moved.