A shitty room near Fort Berthold, halfway between Minot and Williston, was going for $250 a night, minimum. A bunk mate would cost you an extra $50. But you could barely get a room anyway, because the joint was so jammed. Bob and Matt, my two camera guys, and I managed to snatch the last room. They took the single beds. I rolled a bag out on the floor, which was sticky and smelled like sewage and slag. A literal cracker box, this place, packed to the lip with white men from Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Idaho looking for a last chance. Out-of-work men trying to hold the marriage together. Trying to keep the house back home. They were told there were jobs up here in the oil fields: ten billion barrels waiting to be fracked out of the shale deep below the frozen Dakota plains.
Rumor was these were good-paying jobs where a man could pull down a hundred grand in a year. All humps welcome, and all humps came.
A hundred grand! That would make the old lady happy, said one of the good ol’ boys as he smoked a menthol and sipped on a Bud Light in the frozen parking lot of the shitbox motel that evening. That’d keep her from taking the kids and walking away, or, worse, leaving the kids and walking away.
Good ol’ boy wasn’t staying in the motel, he said, ’cause the talk about all that money was a lie. His explanation went like this: You’d make the hun’red grand alright, if you could find the work. But even if you found the work, you’re working a hun’red hours a week and the work ain’t steady ’cause so many good ol’ boys with a nutsack packed their trucks and stomped the accelerator and barreled due north to this wild wasteland hoping for one last chance.
So without the money, this good ol’ boy was sleeping in his truck in the parking lot, despite the fact it was January and minus forty-five outside with the wind blowing. And even then, he had to pay the night clerk twenty bucks for the privilege of a parking space. Just be gone by sunup before the manager showed up.
They found a body out there, he went on, throwing his chin toward the darkness that marked the edge of town. In a ditch out there, past where the lights run out. Wrapped in a mattress. Shot in the head. Frozen. Mexican guy. What the fuck are Mexicans doing all the way up here?
Mexicans? They’re like the modern-day Chinese, I told him. They’ll go anywhere. Go to the Congo, there’s a Chinese restaurant. Detroit, Chinese restaurant. If your guts are rumbling with emptiness, you’ll pretty much go anywhere. Kind of like you, I said.
Dunno, he mumbled. All’s I know is there’s a frozen fucking burrito in a ditch out there. This place is wild, son. It sucks. I can’t wait to get a little bankroll and get the fuck gone.
Back inside the motel, the stench had changed like an olfactory mood ring. It now reeked of stale sweat and oil, smoke and rotten beer. Someone in a room down the hall was shrieking and it was blowing through the thin plasterboard, but no one said a thing. Someone got some bad meth. Or good meth. Hard to tell. Drug-induced paranoia is just one degree away from euphoria. Best not to open the door in any case. Best to have a beer and monitor the madman, in case he came crashing through the thin walls or started shooting the place up. Matt went to sleep with a pillow over his head. Bob snored over the ruckus. I lay awake, shivering on the floor, listening to the lunatic howl until dawn.
The morning sun came late. White and dead. Ice crystals sparkled on the prairie grass. No trees. Bold, rugged tundra. Fort Berthold was on the way to the burgeoning town of Williston, the epicenter of the Bakken Formation, which was said to be producing more oil than any other place in America, even Alaska’s Arctic Circle. About a third of that production came from Fort Berthold, the once impoverished Indian reservation that was a little less impoverished now but nevertheless impoverished—home to the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, the adopted people of Sacajawea. Over the years, the tribes had seen their territory whittled down by white theft to less than a million acres. First came the ranchers, then the railroads, and finally, in 1953, the Army Corps of Engineers, who dammed the Missouri River, flooding 150,000 acres of the best land and forcing the Indians onto the rugged, barren foothills. Funny thing about rugged, barren foothills. They tend to contain gold and uranium and oil.
Across the rolling hills of the rez, methane gas flares from fracking wells leased to white-man wildcatters blew like Roman candles. But little of the money they generated seemed be making its way to the people of the Affiliated Tribes, who had sued, claiming the federal government facilitated the theft of more than $1 billion by failing in its legal obligation to make sure the tribe was looked after. White speculators and New York hedge funds were buying up leasing rights for a song: $35 an acre.
The rez had become an ecological wasteland of oil spills and trucking roads and filthy air, and it was unclear what effect the polymers pumped down to break the oil shale might have on the health of the Missouri River above. Think about that whenever you see the blue flames of a cooking stove.
To make matters worse, the white man also claimed right-of-way for an oil and gas pipeline under the newly created sacred Lake Sakakawea. If they had known then what their land would look like today, I’m sure the natives would have slit Lewis’s and Clark’s throats, severed their hairy heads, and floated them back down the Missouri River to St. Louis.
But that was all water under the bridge. These days, the tribal government was like the white man’s government—rotten, self-serving, kleptomaniacal. Tex Hall, the tribe’s chairman, had been helping himself with a lucrative oil-services business on the side, pairing up with a white businessman who had a long, violent rap sheet in Oregon. As we were driving through North Dakota, it hit the local papers that Hall’s white man was suspected of two business-related murders for hire, one in Spokane, Washington, and one right there on the reservation, on Hall’s property no less, the victim bludgeoned to death in the chairman’s garage, the theory went. Something about an argument over an oil lease. Authorities believe his body was buried out in the oil fields. While Hall’s white partner was convicted in 2016 in the man’s slaying, Hall denied involvement in the crime and to date has never been directly implicated.
As for Tex Hall’s perfidy? Fattening himself while supposedly representing people who straggled around sucking dirty air and who on average died before they were able to collect Social Security? Well, there was nothing in the tribal constitution that forbade it, the most august sachem told the newspapers. Sovereignty by the barrel, he declared.
The receptionist at the drab tribal government offices told me the chairman did not wish to speak to media that day. The chairman was at once ill and overwhelmed attending to the welfare of his great nation.
Hmmm. I have an appointment, I reminded her. I’ve come a long way.
I’m sorry.
I’m Native too. Ojibwe. Does that count for anything?
I’m sorry, the chairman is not available.
That’s a strange name for an Indian chief, I said, showing my annoyance. Tex.
His native name is Red-Tipped Arrow, she explained. Nevertheless, as I’ve said, the chairman is not available and cannot see you right now.
In the middle of the rez, past the oil derricks and tractor-trailers and white men trudging around in canvas freezer suits manning the oil pumps, was a bridge that spanned the sacred artificial lake. From there, you could see a shining example of the chairman’s magnanimity, his gift to his people, the fantastic development project purchased with oil money that would bring his ancient tribe into the twenty-first century. Past the casino, and there, right near the bait shop. A new hospital? you ask. A factory? A vocational school? No. A two-deck party yacht on cinder blocks, the Island Girl. Cost? Two and a half million dollars. She was supposed to be a casino boat, a gem that would make the reservation a tourist destination as well as an oil field. Problem is, someone forgot to remind Commodore Tex that the lake has been freezing over since 1953. Sovereignty by the barrel.
Williston, the white burg to the west of Fort Berthold, was being called the fastest-growing town in America. The neon and asphalt and construction equipment were testament to a population that had doubled in five years to twenty-five thousand people. But that was only a measure of the people who actually stayed in Williston and put down roots. It didn’t include the huge transient population of desperate men looking to pop in, strike it rich, and hightail it home. Partly as a result of that influx, this once sleepy town of Methodist churches and tidy brick homes now had the prevailing character of a dirty hooker working at a truck stop near the end of town.
And chances were you would find dirty hookers at the truck stops between the Holiday Inn and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the El Rancho Hotel and the pop-up man-camps and the impromptu trailer parks at the edge of town. The word was, a new millionaire was minted in North Dakota every month. But where did these magnates live? Where were their mansions? Their penthouses?
A local radio evangelist—I heard him on the AM dial while driving across the plains—was preaching about toothpaste tubes at Kennedy Airport security and the lack of humanity in New York and the need to trust in Jesus here on the oil patch. Jesus brings inner peace, as well as a piece of the pie. I heard this and knew I had to meet this man of divine perceptions.
Preacher Ron Evitt lived in a simple colonial in a neighborhood of worn and stained aluminum siding. The son of a door-to-door Gideon Bible salesman, Evitt studied petroleum engineering at the University of Wyoming. He bought land with credit cards in the early aughts, hit oil, and became a rich man. And with the price of a barrel of crude at $107.57, he was getting richer with every upstroke of the horse head. But money wasn’t enough. The preacher desired souls, men, followers, acolytes, ratings! Yes, a slice of the Nielsen cake. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if his show can’t outperform NPR in Red State Country? The Preacher in the Patch—Oil Patch, that is—was his catchy tag out. But even so, the preacher found few ears for his paid radio spots—a few among the inmates at the county jail, a few druggies sleeping in their trucks, fewer still among the workers out at the wells. The well-hands lusted after money, not salvation.
We decided to film Evitt on a little proselytizing jaunt out to one of his wellheads. He brought pizza. People are more likely to sit and listen that way, he said. A little pepperoni adds spice to prayer.
The workers were all white men, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen a solitary black man in North Dakota. Nor had I seen a Native man working in the oil fields. I had seen an Asian man cooking at a grubby Chinese restaurant in Minot, however. And there was that Mexican found in the culvert, wrapped in a spring mattress tortilla, sleeping the eternal sleep, but that’s it.
We arrived at the wellhead with the preacher deep in the plains near the Canadian border. The winds had shifted, blowing in from the north now. It was blistering cold, so cold your fingers and toes burned and your face felt as if it had been scored with a sanding wheel. I had done time in slaughterhouses, but this had to be the toughest, most glum work I’d ever seen.
This ain’t real work, said Bobby, a truck driver from Arkansas, as he waited to pump out fracking detritus from one of the preacher’s holding tanks and dump it God knows where. This ain’t the dream. This ain’t the classic nine-to-five American dream. This is shit. You got to work nearly three full-time jobs if you want to make that hundred thousand. They don’t tell you that before you come. You’re tired. You’re cold. You’re beat down and lonely. A lot of guys don’t have much experience on oil rigs or driving a truck, and that just makes the whole thing that much more dangerous.
He continued: The preacher? I just tell him “no thanks.” I’m an atheist. There’s no God. Look around. You see God? Me, my wife left. There’s nothing for me back in Arkansas. I’m just trying to put a lump together. Buy me a shack in the woods in Idaho and disappear forever. That’s all I want, a shack. That’s my American dream.
Back in the workers’ trailer, the preacher was working the men. He prayed, but they didn’t. The pizza was swallowed, but the message wasn’t.
The preacher, more Opie Taylor than Howard Hughes, with his bowl haircut and denim jacket, had little more success at the trailer park back near town. There were some families there, but it was single men mostly, bunking together, refusing to answer the door. Those that did bitterly informed the millionaire minister that they didn’t need no prayers, they needed work. They needed money. The preacher said he would pray for them anyway, which was easy for him to do, since the preacher owned himself those couple of producing oil wells.
Looking around the shabby, snow-swept park with its invisible spirit of perdition and the legion of stay-at-homes and shut-ins and alcoholics, I thought: What had God wrought? I asked the preacher if he thought this is what the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ had in mind for men?
Yeah, well . . . the preacher fumbled. No, he finally admitted. Not really. Most of them aren’t gonna find that dream.
I tracked down Williston’s mayor, Ward Koeser, in his office in a shabby building off the main street not unlike the Indians’ city hall: red brick made dull by soot and dust and mud kicked up by incessant semi-traffic. He was stepping down after twenty year in office.
He began with a don’t-get-me-wrong preamble, which instantly made me think there was something wrong on the Great Plains. It’s great, the mayor said. The development. The millions in construction. The new people.
Yeah, but?
But yes, there are the problems, all right. You’re the media. You want to hear about the problems, right?
Well, yeah, right, I said, having been exposed. The good-news stuff is boring. Bad TV. Everybody’s reported the production numbers and the mythological hundred grand. What about the meth and prostitution and homeless?
If it wouldn’t be improper, the mayor said in a steady monotone, I would like to pay their way to go back where they came from.
Much of the rowdiness went on down by the rail station, the mayor told us. So naturally we went there. Down on Front Street, by the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the Missouri River, a mini–man-camp of trucks and RVs had sprung up. Before the oil rush, people didn’t move to Williston, they moved away from it. But here they were, newcomers brought in by train or bus or wheezing vehicle, suffocating from desperation, without housing or companionship, sleeping in vans. Men shambling around down by the tracks. The hiring hall was here in Railroad Park, but it never seemed to be hiring. There was the Salvation Army, which occasionally dished out hot soup at noon, but you had to bow your head for it. Then there was the bus station and the train depot, a coffee shop and five bars on Main Street—two of them strip joints, Whispers and Heartbreakers.
Never one for idle gossip, I passed by Whispers and walked into Heartbreakers. It was simple to see why they called the place that. Four scruffy rummies at the rail. Animal busts on the wall. A mangy carpet. A mangy pole. A DJ booth. The TV was tuned to cable news. I don’t know why they thought some chubby young white man wearing grandmother spectacles yammering on with the sound turned all the way down would be interesting to a strip joint full of desperadoes, but there it was. TV.
Someone had been stabbed outside Whispers recently, the lady bartender told me, assuring me at the same time that I was in the more classy establishment. People like to do that out west, I said, stabbing. Stabbing is much more neighborly, much more intimate and Christian than your basic drive-by shooting. That’s city shit. Stab a guy in the eye, he sees it coming. That’s the gentlemanly thing to do.
Oh, she said, giggling, we had someone shot and killed outside just a few months ago too. You get all kinds around here.
The bartender was a Mormon, from Idaho. She was a nicely put-together brunette. Halter top and short shorts, too cold for the weather, but a gal’s got to advertise. Her daddy wasn’t happy about her situation, she said, but what Daddy don’t know . . .
Not that I’m that type of girl, I’m just the bartender. But there are some who can keep you company. Everybody needs company. A man is nothing but a stray without a companion. Three hundred dollars.
That’s a lot of money for a few minutes in a mop closet, I said.
Price goes up when you smell. She tittered, tossing a thumb toward some greasy oilmen.
I went out for a cigarette to consider it. I was in it for the details, for the story, you understand, your intrepid reporter with his dispatch from the American dream. A $300 rumpus in a toilet stall in the train depot. Something about the image amused me. But you wouldn’t be able to fob off something like that on an expense report.
Just then, a hobo living out of his truck called to me from his window, asking to mooch a cigarette. I went over. A Mexican guy! From Vegas. (Man, these Mexican dudes will go anywhere, just like the Chinese.) He told me he came out three months ago, worked for a little bit, but couldn’t find nothing no more.
Police ran me out of the park, he said, so I’m sleeping down here, but the gas is getting low and I’ve got to keep the motor running all night or I’m going to freeze. So you see the problem I’m in, amigo? You see the problems I got? Gas runs out and I’m a Popsicle. So you understand, I’m not asking for a handout. Not asking for charity. I seen you come out of the club. Maybe you’re a little lonely or something? I could suck your cock for twenty bucks. I’m not asking for charity or nothing. I’m willing to work for it. Twenty bucks?
Come again?
Okay, fifteen bucks? There was real hope in his voice.
What in Christ’s name was this, preacher man? An angry, desperate backwater glowering orange and neon in the stinging night. Covered in mud and salt and ice, inhabited by gravel-lot hound dogs snarling on the chain, willing to lick your balls if a scoop of gravy came along with it. I didn’t like this place. There was no American dream. Not here. We were all going to have to move on and keep looking.
No? All right, he said. Then thank you very much for the cigarillo. God bless. God bless. Yes sir. God bless. Say, listen, sorry to ask, but you got a little extra change? A little something? Another cigarette?
I felt bad for the guy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was probably pricing himself well below market. At the rate he was going, that would be five thousand cocks before he reached the mythical hundred grand. I gave him ten bucks and another smoke.
Thank you, yes, gracias. I’m hoping to turn it around, a little luck. I’m expecting to hear back about a job tomorrow. If that happens, you know, then my troubles are over. A little luck, that is all that’s needed.