A Tourist Guide to the Bakken.

William Caraher
Working Draft. Do not cite without authors permission.

Excerpt from William Caraher and Bret Weber, A Tourist Guide to the Bakken. Forthcoming 2016.
Industrial Tourism and a Theoretical Epilogue
The final section to this guide lays out some theoretical consideration central to our decision to
choose the genre of tourist guide as a useful way to present and understanding the Bakken
landscape. This section is more academic than the guide itself and argues that the practice of tourism
offers a distinctly modern way for engaging the Bakken. In fact, the goal of the guide is as modern as
the regular grid of roads that crisscross the prairie of western North Dakota without concern for
topography. Like the road and rail, the Tourist Guide to the Bakken seeks is to bring order to the
apparent chaos that travelers encounter during a visit to the Bakken oil patch. This is not to suggest
that our effort to bring order to the Bakken will resolve ethical, social, economic, and even political
complexities any more than a straight road will flatten a hill. We do hope, however, that by framing
the conversation about the Bakken as a tourist guide, we introduce some of the complex issues by
locating reader (and traveler) in the historical and social context of the region. For this epilogue, we
set out some of the recent research on tourism and industrial archaeology to suggest that a tourist
guide is a particularly suitable form of writing for organizing and analyzing the social, economic,
technical, and historical complexities of the modern world. This final section of the guide weaves
together some the influences that shaped our approach to the Bakken. These influences drew upon
a wide range of disciplines and fields from landscape and industrial archaeology to the history of
tourism, tourism studies, sociology, and popular culture. The overlapping academic territories
represented in this guide parallel the overlapping interests, histories, and communities present in the
Bakken.
The unifying element in this study is oil. The large-scale exploitation of fossil fuels, whether coal,
oil, or gas, has shaped our modern world in fundamental ways (Petrocultures Research Group 2016).
The gradual shift from human labor to fossil fuel powered production during the industrial
revolution transformed economic, social, and political relationships around the world. The use of
fossil fuels in manufacturing expanded access to consumer goods, shaped a middle class, propelled
mechanized agriculture, and opened new horizons for settlement, travel, and, of course, economic
exploitation. At present fossil fuels, and especially oil, foster capital deepening in which
mechanized technology extracts ever increasing amounts of capital from human work, and this
fortifies our expectation of continuous economic growth. This oil-driven confidence in economic
growth plays a vital role in Western political culture where, among other things, it fortifies our
commitment to the equality of economic opportunity. If the economic pie continues to grow, then
people will always have the chance to claim a piece. European settlement in western North Dakota
has only ever been possible because of fossil fuels. First, coal and oil fueled rail links made it
economically viable for permanent settlements in the region to have access to markets. Interstate
highways, affordable personal transportation, and mechanized farming accelerated the regions
engagement with the rest of North America and the world. Over the course of the Bakken boom,
pipelines joined truck traffic and an expanded rail presence to move sweet Bakken crude to
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A Tourist Guide to the Bakken. William Caraher

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refineries and markets outside the region. That oil, in turn, fuels the cars, trucks, plains and trains
that carry oil workers into the region, runs generators that power lights at drilling rigs, and keeps
lonely RVs warm during the winter. Modern tourism would not be possible without oil-fueled
transportation or the emergence of a middle class with the surplus resources necessary to make
travel for pleasure possible.
The Landscape and Taskscape of Bakken Tourism
In this context, a tourist guide seems the ideal tool to link the industrial and historical landscape
of the Bakken because it offer an opportunity to emphasize the role of tourism, industry, and oil in
the development of the middle-class in the modern world. Most of these ideas came from the
sociologist Dean MacCannell. His important book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
(1976), celebrated tourisms role in allowing the growing middle class to become a leisure class, at
least for the duration of their vacation and travels. This change stemmed from the growing
disposable income of the middle class, which allowed them to imitate the upper class traditions of
seeing the world. It also depended on increased access to low-cost transportation powered by
fossil fuels. The first middle class tourists traveled on steam ships and then trains and automobiles.
By the mid-20th-century access to affordable cars, the growth of the interstate highways system, and
the arrival of inexpensive air travel allowed the middle class temporarily to shake off the stability of
suburban life for travel and adventure.
Today, tourism continues to offer the same element of escape, although it remains closely tied to
oil (Bekken 2010). In most cases, lower price of oil makes travel more affordable and, in the right
circumstances, strengthens industrial and post-industrial economies inspiring consumer confidence.
At the same time, oil presents certain challenges for tourism. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico, for example, had a negative impact on tourism along the Gulf Coast of Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska hurt that states tourism economy.
While tourism to the Bakken has a tiny economic impact on the region, the steep decline in the price
of oil over the course of 2015 has driven down occupancy rates in hotels and pushed out more
marginal businesses serving short term oil patch workers. All this is to show that the relationship
between oil and travel, tourism, and local economies is both complex and significant.
The interdependence of tourism and oil has not deterred the development of certain kinds of
socially-conscious tourism. Tourists can now go on trips built around critiques of colonial practices,
tour sites of catastrophic environmental pollution, and visit slums in order to appreciate the social,
economic, and environmental costs of the modern world. This kind of tourism echoes the growing
interest in the recent past among archaeologists. While most people imagine that archaeologists
focus on cities, temples, and tombs of distant antiquity, over the past twenty years, archaeology has
also become more willing to study sites and to address questions of contemporary social and
political significance. For example, archaeologists used material culture to revise histories of
colonialism, demonstrate resistance to political and economic forms of domination, and to
collaborate with communities to develop skills, economic opportunities, and new historical
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narratives. In Western Europe and North America, archaeological attention to industrial sites and
entire landscapes has brought to light not only a history of corporate innovation and profits, but also
the experience of workers and families who supported the the growth of the industrial economy
(Petrocultures Research Group 2016; Mitchell 2013). Our tourist guide seeks to bridge the gap
between the distinctly modern experiences of tourism and the understanding of an industrial
landscape both by commemorating significant sites throughout the Bakken and by offering the
tourist a way to experience some of the changing character and hectic pace of the Bakken landscape
first hand. In short, the presentation of the Bakken as a tourist guide allowed this work to serve the
archaeological purpose of documenting an industrial landscape as well as contributing to a growing
interest in socially aware tourism.
This book is a practical guide suitable for visitors to the Bakken ranging from industrial tourists,
journalists, scholars, photographers, industry outsiders, and to document the bustling activities in the
Bakken in an archaeologically sophisticated way. To accomplish this, we employed the concept of
historical and archaeological landscapes. Archaeologists and historians have increasingly used the
concept of landscape as a way to describe the interaction of the natural environment, man-made
sites, movable objects, and people on a regional scale (Johnson 2007). By presenting the Bakken as a
landscape, we locate the various landmarks encountered by tourists as part of a unified whole. In
this way, the Bakken landscape includes big picture features such as the topography and geology of
the region and prominent historical sites like the school at Ross or the Madson Grade. It also
includes more recent buildings like the Cinnabon store at the truck stop at 13-Mile Corner as well as
more moveable monuments, like trucks, drill rigs, and frack tanks, and even individuals that
contribute to making this region a distinct place. In fact, some of the most intriguing tensions in the
Bakken come from juxtaposing the natural world, historical landmarks, and the short-term changes
in the Bakken. Rolling hills, badlands, rivers, and once-abandoned towns frame oil-related activities,
temporary settlements, and fleeting encounters with the always changing cast of characters who
make their home in the Bakken. This landscape has room for oil company executives, long-time
residents, pipeliners, researching scholars, and frack truck drivers. Thus, our notion of the landscape
represents both the physical space of the Bakken as well as all the various attitudes and activities
taking place there.
One downside to the concept of landscape is that it tends to evoke static image frozen in time.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold offered an alternative way to view landscapes and introduced the term
taskscape to describe the intersection of a physical area and the experience of movement, work,
economic capital, and social relations (Ingold 1993). Ingold saw this as a way to emphasize the
habitual strategies required for people to live and work in particular landscapes. Taskscapes
constitute the traces of habitual acts, regular movements, and everyday rituals across the landscape
(Ingold 1993; Ingold and Kurttila 2000). Roads rutted by oil traffic, strategic intersections marked by
truck stops and housing sites, and rust-red squares of scoria in fields of canola trace the movement
of workers, equipment, and oil through the Bakken taskscape and commemorate the dynamism of
movement through the region.

A Tourist Guide to the Bakken. William Caraher

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As tourists, these taskscapes offer opportunities to synchronize our movement with the flow of
the Bakken workforce even if just for a moment or in superficial ways. In other words, modern
tourists can travel through the landscape alongside oil workers, and while the two groups do not
share the same destinations or purpose in their movement, both groups have come to western
North Dakota for oil, travel in vehicles powered by fossil fuels, and may see their time in the Bakken
as only temporary. Going with the flow of the Bakken connects tourists to a 21st century world
populated with ephemeral landmarks, like temporary crew camps and drilling rigs, and dominated by
the rapid increase in funding, workforce, drilling, and fracking. By being critically aware of our own
position in the modern tradition of tourism, we participate in the creation of Bakken taskscapes.
This awareness reinforces the value of tourism as a way to understand taskscapes and challenges the
view that the speed of modernity has rendered contemporary taskscapes unrecognizable blurs
(Edensor 2005 65-67; Auge 1995). By stopping for gas at a truck stop, navigating dusty rural byways,
or recognizing the tell-tale signs of a fracking rig, we stabilize through our own eyes the ephemeral,
but important signs of human engagements. The view of the Bakken offered by this tourist guide
freezes the landscape of an oil boom not by creating a static landscape designed to be seen from the
outside, but by providing a roadmap to experiences that locate the viewer and the taskscapes within
the same fast-pace 21st-century world. We have included evidence for the habitual, such as the
bustle of activity at prominent truck stops, as well as the ephemeral, such as drill rigs, industrial
storage lots, traffic moving down major arteries and back roads.
Understanding the Bakken as a taskscape adds an explicitly temporal dimension to how we
understand the space of the oil boom by drawing our attention to the role of both contemporary
and historical actions in defining the physical structure of the region. For example, the spacing of
towns across the Bakken reflected the regular relationship between the economic requirements of
the Great Northern Railway and the settlement of the area (Robinson 1966). The early-20th century
settlement structure necessary for both residents and railways to make profitable from farming in
the region differs dramatically from a landscape defined by the needs of truck drivers to fuel their
rigs, grab food to eat, get some sleep, or move waste water to deep, injection wells. Thus, the
Bakken has a number of temporary towns that have appeared at convenient locations for the
movement of men and equipment for the oil industry. These temporary towns are likely to vanish
just as settlements given meaning before the automobile and large-scale mechanized agriculture have
tended to fade into obscurity. The concept of taskscape provides a useful lens for understanding the
historical, temporal, and spatial contrasts that distinguish 19th and early 20th century settlement in
the region from the sites associated with the most recent oil boom.
Being a Tourist in the Industrial West
If the tourist guide functions by placing the tourist and worker in the same taskscape, the genre
of the tourist guide also introduces the element of class to our reading of the Bakken. Touring
industrial and historical landscapes is not simply a matter of producing an objective description of
spaces and places. As scholars of tourism have argued for the last 40 years, touring, tourist guides,
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and tourism are not ideologically neutral, but embedded within the creation of a leisure or tourist
class (MacCannell 1976). Access to surplus income, time to travel, and curiosity (and pride) in the
technical aspects, social organization, and spectacle of industrial activities and extractive industries
represent values common to the Western middle-class. For the 21st century middle class, the
Bakken also presents a landscape filled with poignant conflicts. For example, while the middle and
upper classes have enjoyed the benefits of technological progress, they also recognize how
environmental risks could compromise this progress. The middle classs interest in preserving
monuments to the history of industrial work can find itself at odds with aesthetic concerns,
economic pressures, and the desire to romanticize the past. Finally, tourism to pastoral, idilic, or
even pristine landscapes, particularly in the American West has foregrounded the tension between
economic growth and practices designed to preserve opportunities to encounter nature or traditional
ways of life.
In fact, the location of the Bakken Oil Boom in the American West places it at an auspicious
intersection of tourism and the industrial economy in they past. Historians have long recognized that
our engagement with the American West, like tourism more broadly, developed in parallel to the
emergence of modern American consumer culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
(MacCannell 1976; Rothmans 1998; Wrobel 2001). The expansion of railroads into the American
West during the second half of the 19th century opened access to the regions natural resource for
production of consumer goods. At the same time, rail provided access to the natural beauty of the
region to travelers and facilitated the flow of both human and financial capital to the region through
connections to global markets. The historically peripheral location of the American West required
that any visitor overcome the distance from population centers and the isolation of communities,
resources, and grand vistas. The rugged terrain and arid conditions of much of the West
compounded its remoteness and ensured that population densities remained low and at least partly
dependent on links to major urban centers outside the region. Many of the challenges facing 21st
century visitors to the Bakken center on the infrastructural limits of this sparsely populated corner
of the American west. Roads can be poor, lodging difficult to find, equipment must come from
outside the region, and produce - whether crude oil or canola - must depart for markets outside the
area. The Tourist Guide to the Bakken like so many industrial plans to extract resources from the
American West continues a very modern project of bringing, productive order to the world.
Historian Marita Sturken (2007) recognized that the tensions present in middle class of the 21st
century has created an even more pressing need to order the world. She argued that the connection
between modernity, tourism, American culture and kitsch is a response to a new and complex set of
disordering threats: terrorism, environmental disasters, economic collapse, and social crisis. For
Sturken tourism, particularly in the aftermath of traumatic events like the 9/11 terrorist attack in
New York City became part of the way in which the community coped with the destruction, death,
and trauma of these events. The proliferation of kitsch for sale around lower Manhattan created a
kind of childish innocence in how visitors engaged the site and the horrific events that took place
there. In this context, acts of consumerism like buying kitsch or visiting the site of the World Trade
Center form part of the healing engagement with this traumatic landscape. While the Bakken is
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hardly the iconic site of devastation as New Yorks Ground Zero, we suggest that its prominence in
the national media and the generally critical attention to the Bakken Boom has shaped many
peoples views of the region. The environmental damage, social dislocation, and risk associated with
travel in the Bakken have led many in the national media to see the Bakken as a dangerous place.
Sturken argues that the innocence associated with kitsch promoted a form of political acquiescence.
Bakken themed t-shirts, bumper stickers, and gifts appear at truck stops and convenience stores
across the region just as they would in a recreational tourist attraction. These objects diffuse the real
political tensions present in the region by trivializing them through clever plays on the work frack.
If kitsch attempts to defuse anxiety through playful appeals to innocence, tourism seeks to leverage
the same consumerism to produce ordered landscapes in the place of chaos or ambivalence. Thus
the earnest character of the Tourist Guide is not meant to suppress critical engagement with the
Bakken landscape, but to demonstrate how creating a landscape for consumption, whether by oil
companies, farmers, or by tourists, offers a way to make digestible the lived experiences of the 21st
century. Just as the playfulness of kitsch does not resolve anxieties, but allows us to laugh at them,
tourism does not offer easy answers, but at least presents recognizable questions. Standing on the
low ridge overlooking a massive pipeline spill near Tioga does not present an answer to whether
extractive industries are worth the environmental risk or whether pipelines provide a safer
alternative to rail, but offers a clearly-delimited encounter with a particular problem. This specific
encounter stands in for the more general and ambiguous problems facing extractive industries and
industrialization on a global scale.
The potential for tourism to simplify or delimit encounters with complex situations contributed
to the development of a specific forms of industrial tourism which communities, companies, and
sites frequently used to promote particular perspectives on local industries. In an important, if rather
obscure work, Elspeth Frew (2000) defined industrial tourism as tourism that focuses on visits to
operational industrial sites and usually functions in collaboration with the companies that operate
these industrial concerns. The Hoover Dam, for example, continues to attract hundreds of
thousands of visitors a year. Many manufacturing facilities offer tours for groups that highlight their
technological prowess and help cultivate good will. These attractions, tours, monuments reflect our
ongoing fascination with industrial activities, the individuals who toiled at these sites, and the
challenges and opportunities that changing technology provided to the contemporary world. Frews
study of industrial heritage sites noted that a range of modern industrial facilities from automobile
plants to chocolate manufacturing and nuclear waste repurposing can attract hundreds of thousands
of visitors per year. While dangers associated with work in the oil field and the confidential
processes in use limits the opportunities for directed tours of drill rigs or other facilities, the
complex, multisite processes involved in the extraction of oil provide numerous opportunities to
observe industrial production on a regional scale. In fact, the regional scale is more appropriate
perspective for understanding the complexities of the Bakken oil patch because the full network
necessary to support resource extraction relies on multiple sites across the entire landscape. An
industrial tourist looking for a single site to understand the Bakken is more likely to be edified by a
visit to the small visitor center in Watford City, which provides a well-presents description of the oil
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industry in North Dakota, than any single installation in the Bakken. At the same time, this guide
recommends a trip across US Route 2 and US Route 85 through the heart of the Bakken in William
and McKenzie Counties for a vivid display of the complex and expansive work of oil production.
The diverse and expansive character of oil production in the Bakken attracts a range of
individuals who do not view tourism as exclusively a leisure pursuit. Otgaar and his colleagues
recognized as industrial tourists any professional involved in either sourcing, producing, or
distributing goods, students in technical fields, as well as journalists and academic researchers
(Otgaar, van den Berg, Berger, and Feng 2010). Indeed, on our trips to the Bakken with the North
Dakota Man Camp project we encountered almost all of these groups of tourists making their way
across the region. An evening seated at almost any decent bar in Williston or Watford City will bring
encounters with contractors and salespeople from across the industries developed to support
activities in the Bakken. The temporary industrial workforce of the Bakken tends to live in hotels
and RVs, arrive and depart on seasonal schedules, and have relatively little familiarity with the area.
While noting similarities between the mobile and temporary workforce and tourists might trivialize
the real challenges facing temporary workers in the Bakken, our hope is that the Tourist Guide
represents the Bakken landscape in a way that is useful and engaging for both groups. In fact, the
Tourist Guide focuses on challenges common to anyone visiting or working in the Bakken and blurs
the distinction between industrial tourism, leisure tourism, and work related travel. If tourism serves
a distinctly modern way to order the world, then the similarities between leisure tourism and the
highly mobile workforce echoes the persistent middle class distinction between work and home life.
Industrial Heritage and Industrial Archaeology
Some elements of industrial tourism and historical taskscapes come together in industrial
heritage tourism. This sub-genre of industrial tourism has tended to focus on historical sites of
industry ranging from mines (Conlin and Jollife 2010) to factories, or monuments that celebrate a
bygone industrial age. In some of the most celebrated cases, industrial heritage tourism promoted
the interest of a particular company by presenting celebrating the relationship between a community
and site and types of industrial activity. This kind of tourism has benefited from the recent interest
in industrial archaeology which has sought to documenting the remains of industrial installations,
many of which have only recently received any sort of cultural protection as important historical
monuments. Efforts to recognize, protect, and conserve monuments related to industrial heritage
like manufacturing facilities, bridges and infrastructure, mines, quarries, shipwrecks, offices,
dormitories, companies, and unique examples of technologies, have moved in lockstep with
initiatives designed to encourage engagement with our industrial past through tourism, the
publication of guides, and outreach. For example, the Society for Industrial Archaeology has
supported guides to industrial regions like the Merrimack Valley (Hudson 1984) and sponsored
excursions to important centers of industry like Rockford, Illinois, Youngstown, Ohio, and
Wilmington, Delaware. In many cases, these onsite visits emphasize the inseparability of particular
industries and their regional environments. The DuPont powder mills of Wilmingtons Hagley
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Museum embed the early history of this company in the landscape of the Brandywine River valley
and fast flowing Brandywine River. Visits to these site have a wide appeal. At its most sophisticated
communities supporting industrial tourism collaborate with private industry to bring together a
number of functioning and heritage sites into a cohesive experience for the modern traveler (see
Otgaar, van den Berg, Berger, and Feng 2010). As MacCannell recognized, industrial tourism locates
worker within the tourists gaze and thus re-unites the world of the tourist, who likely hails from the
middle class, and present or historical workers. In fact, when the tourist recognizes him or herself in
the worker, tourism presents a way to combine the world of consumption with the world of current
and historical production. This brings together in a single frame the experience of industry and
modern capitalism.
Most scholars of industrial tourism, including MacCannell, tend to understand industrial heritage
tourism as sanctioned and coordinated by a company or municipal authorities. These groups see
industrial heritage and industrial tourism as a way to create positive experiences for the visitor (for
example: Xie 2006). At the same time, there exist modes of engaging industrial landscapes that offer
more complex perspectives and acknowledge that communities often have multiple stakeholders
with different priorities (Herzfeld 1991), and these alternative modes of understanding the impact of
industrial actives have received considerable attention. Toxic tourism, for example, has worked to
emphasize the impact of often invisible chemical toxicity on communities around the world
(Pezzullo 2007). Phaedra Pezzullo, for example, documented the role that toxic tourism plays in the
environmentalist movement as a way to document the impact of industry on urban or ex-urban
communities often with high percentages of minorities or vulnerable populations. Rural
communities, especially those in regions involved in extractive industries have also felt the impact of
chemical toxins in their water, air, and fields, and often lack the economic and political clout to
enforce responsible treatment of the environment. In some cases, the impact of extractive industries
on rural communities is so dramatic that it has become an attraction itself. The Berkeley Pit in Butte,
Montana represents a particularly dramatic example of a toxic tourist site. The pit was a massive
open pit copper mine that filled with water after the owners of the mine turned off the pumps
managing the water table. The result was a deep lake of almost unimaginable toxicity that has
nevertheless become a tourist attraction for the town (LeCain 2009; Leech 2011). The attitude of
communities like Butte to their history as a mining community and as a site of remarkable toxicity
provides an example for how communities associated with extractive industries can have deeply
ambivalent attitudes toward their industrial past (Leech 2011; Roberston 2006).
Of course, critics of industrial and toxic tourism frequently decry the stage-managed character
of these tourist encounters (e.g. Urry 1990) which suggest that a fleeting visual encounter with sites
and situations can communicate the experience of poverty, industrial labor, or living in closer
symbiosis with nature. Critics of ecotourism, for example, have charged that exposing well-heeled
Western tourists to ecologically sensitive landscapes runs the risk of turning nature into a product
that a tourist can then consume on a trip. Ecotourism also reinforces the dominant position of the
tourist over the physical or social environment (Selinger 2009; Fennell 2006). Moreover, the
resources expended on these kinds of tours undermines the very claims that they seek to make on
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social or environmental justice. The growing interest in poorism, or the tourism focused on some
of the poorest communities on earth, is an even easier target for critics. Many argue that the Western
quest for authenticity and global awareness shades into a voyeurism that reinforces the superiority of
the Western (Selinger 2009). Some have critiqued the tendency of tourists to rely on the visual at the
expense of authentic embodied experiences which incorporate all the senses (Pezzullo 2007). In
some places in our Tourist Guide, we have had to rely on the visual for engaging the Bakken
landscape, but, whenever possible we have emphasized the overlap between challenges facing the
tourist and member of the Bakken workforce.
Touring the Bakken will likely appeal to individuals more inclined toward authentic engagements
than those seeking the security and predictability of packaged tours. In this way, our guide has
something in common with the growing interest in urban exploration in which explorers enter
abandoned buildings to photograph them, often illegally (Garrett 2011). These individuals document
their adventures on blogs and photography websites and have attracted a cult following. The work
of urban explorers frequently overlaps with purveyors of abandonment porn whose work focuses
on sites of urban and rural decline. These daring photographers often approach the world of
monumental industry with a romantic eye. Their cameras tend to focus on the tragic passing of the
industrial age and its ironic failure to fulfill its promise. Set against dramatic tales of infiltration, the
urban explorer and abandonment porn photography have made famous sites like Detroits
crumbling Packard Plant or the the abandoned Belle Isle power plant outside of Richmond, Virginia.
Rural places have also contributed to our thirst for the abandoned, neglected, and emptied. In fact,
on the eve of the North Dakota oil boom, National Geographic published a lavish article and photo
essay on the emptied prairie that featured abandoned farms, towns, and places along the
Highline.
Urban explorers, abandonment pornographers, and toxic tourists seek out authenticity and often
skirt the tricky issue of negotiating consent from the object of their tourist gaze. Buildings stand
without explanation, the poor and the toxic stand side-by-side, and secure sites are violated in the
name of experience. For the kind of regional-scale tourist that we advocate for the Bakken it would
be impossible to get consent from every individual or even community in the region prior to a visit.
There is no doubt that subjecting communities to even the most compassionate and empathetic
tourist gaze is disconcerting and, can be, objectifying. As a result of these real ethical concerns, our
view of the Bakken tries to constantly foregrounds the ambiguity and ambivalence present in a
landscape that extends from workforce housing, to sites of industrial innovation, environmental
degradation, and historical significance. We have sought to include as many voices as possible in a
conversation, while recognizing that our efforts may not satisfy advocates for environmental justice
or community groups resisting the influx of new oil field labor. By including as many voices and
perspective as possible we attempt to avoid reductionist approaches to the North Dakota landscape
and convey the social, political, economic and environmental complexities encountered the Bakken
boom. As part of an effort to avoid privileging one voice over the others in our engagement with
the Bakken landscape, we have sought to recognize the idea of authenticity as ambiguous,
problematic, and almost always contested term (MacCannell 1973; Wang 1999). Our guide attempts
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to communicate the complexity of Bakken oil patch, the frenetic pace of change, and the bustle of
daily life in this corner of the world and offer the visitor few easy ways to comprehend tableaux.
Conclusions
There are no formal scenic overviews or information kiosks on the way through the Bakken.
The expansive character and fleeting nature of the Bakken oil boom makes defied efforts to
characterize it as a single event or monument. The ongoing activity associated with the oil boom
provides a antidote to the romanticized or ironic view of our industrial past at the core of
abandonment porn. The Bakken is constantly in motion. Trucks, housing, oil, and equipment move
from place to place and municipal policies, enforcement efforts, and economic positions change as
well ensuring that it is impossible to visit the same Bakken twice. Tourist guides traditionally assume
that the traveler will change, but the landmarks, history, and attractions would remain relatively
stable. The guide located the tourist as part of same frenetic taskscape as the constantly changing
Bakken. In fact, some might argue that the modern Bakken boom lacks history because the events
taking place there are still too recent, the agents transforming the landscape too obscure, and the
outcome of activities in the Bakken are too uncertain for us to understand the long-term significance
of any one act. While these are plausible objections, they reflect a view of the present that slowly
gives way to the past, of landscapes that are static through time, and of a historians craft that
depends on long, deliberate contemplation before judgement. The brisk pace of the present in the
Bakken, however, calls upon historians and other scholars to recognize, understand, and document
more quickly changes in our world and to find new ways to communicate the past in relation to the
rapidly decaying present.
The hope is that by framing the Bakken through a tourist guide, we create a new opportunity to
understand the Bakken in a historical context that goes beyond the transitional narratives that
emphasize a pristine wilderness or the radical changes taking place in Williams and McKenzie
counties.To goal of this work is to restore some complexity to the issues by recontextualizing the
Bakken in an unusual way.

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