By Dave Galt, Executive Director of the Montana Petroleum Institute
A recent story that ran in the Daily Interlake, “Oil boom has downside for towns in the Bakken Shale,” had me wondering which TV fantasies the reporter had been watching—the towns and the people he described could have been easily lifted from “Deadwood” or “Gunsmoke” or any of the many shows that perpetuated myths about the Wild West and its lawless citizens.
In his travels to Williston and Sidney, the reporter met (horrors!) gamblers, fast women, whiskey drinkers and lawmen complaining about too much crime. It is entirely possible you could meet the same kinds of folks in New Jersey or California. But since they happened to be in North Dakota and Montana, these citizens were burnished with the mystique of the untamed West and presented as truly sinister byproducts of oil and gas drilling.
It’s almost funny to read the pulp fiction produced recently by urban journalists who fancy themselves as modern Alexis de Tocquevilles observing what to them is a strange and foreign culture in the oil patches. It would be amusing if such depictions did not do such a huge disservice to the many Montanans and North Dakotans who get up early and go to work every day. These men and women aren’t gun-slinging outlaws. They are hardworking Americans who are doing what they can do to support their families.
It is downright mean-spirited to characterize oil workers as “young men paid handsome sums” who have nothing to do but get hammered and frequent strip bars.
What about the many employees of oil and gas companies whose children are in public schools that benefit from the oil and gas revenues going directly to Montana’s school system? What about the people who work in the area’s grocery stores, doctors’ offices, libraries and, yes, the oil fields, who pay taxes just like people in every state?
It would be naïve to deny that growth can bring its own set of problems. Some communities, long-time residents and public officials are grappling with new challenges.
It is important to keep in mind that before the increased oil and gas development, main streets were struggling and storefronts were boarded up. Students were graduating high school and leaving to find work. The population was aging, and there were not many opportunities on the horizon.
Then the Bakken play changed things. An analysis of the state’s economy, Montana’s Hesitant Economic Recovery by Patrick M. Barkey of the University of Montana, January 2012, says that although the state is slowly recovering from the recession, the oil boom impacting Eastern Montana is a definite bright spot, with the energy industry making up 14 percent of the state’s economy. Dr. Scott Rickard, Montana State University Billings Center for Applied Economic Research, reports in The Montana Petroleum Association Treasure State Journal that Montana’s oil and gas industry supports nearly $10.5 billion in direct and indirect economic output. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics, a job in Montana’s oil and gas industry paid an average of $56,581 per worker or 75 percent above the state average in 2011.
Another University of Montana report released in June 2012, The National and State Economic Outlook, also by Barkey, says energy investment is robust. According to Montana’s Minerals Management Bureau, the state’s oil and gas lease sales on school trust lands for 2011 generated $22.1 million. The September 2011 sale produced $7.9 million in lease sales — the fourth largest auction since the 1970s.
Leases were sold in 20 counties across the state, an indication that interest in duplicating recent successes in oil production in Northeast Montana is spreading to central Montana, according to state and industry officials.
This boom is not an oil-and-gas nirvana by any means. But people in Montana and North Dakota have a knack for figuring things out and working together toward solutions.
Modern-day reporters may be prone to wax poetic about the new frontier – oil patch towns populated by reckless roughnecks who fill up the jails, but it’s how our West has been described inaccurately for more than 100 years. Whether writing about Tombstone, Dodge City or the Yukon Territory, journalists then and now have always found it irresistible to stereotype certain western “boom towns” as wild, lawless and deadly.
In the midst of the cattle boom in the 1800s, the New York Tribune described Abilene, Kansas, as a place where “there is no law, no restraint in this seething cauldron of vice and depravity.”
A report in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star on another cow town in 1878 trumpeted: “Dodge City is a wicked little town. Indeed, its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude that it was marked for special Providential punishment.”
The reality is that back then, a majority of workers in the Western boomtowns were honest, hard-working, rather boring family men and women. They weren’t all Doc Holliday, Jesse James or Calamity Jane. Today, it’s the same: most oil workers are trying to make a living in a tough economy, trying to save money for their families and, in that process, strengthening our energy independence. Not an easy job. They deserve respect, not ridicule.
