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Winter 2010-11 • BAKKEN BREAKOUT
In 1950, the western North Dakota Badlands were unassuming, quiet and serene. Back then, it was mainly ranch country, occupied only by a few hardy souls, descendents of
immigrants.They had settled and homesteaded there in pursuit of a new life away from an exploding population in the East long before the turn of the 20th century.
Much like today, winters in the Badlands were bitterly cold and summers relentlessly hot, but families stayed on and ranched working in pursuit of the intangible riches the land and secluded lifestyle afforded them. It was a simple life, where neighbors worked together during the week to get things done and gathered on Sundays to worship.
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The windswept prairie always hinted that there was more to the land by the thin lateral black lines that occasionally ran across bluffs and broken terrain in the form of lignite. But the secret hidden almost two miles below didn’t easily show itself and wouldn’t until nearly a century after settlers first arrived.
Locals continued to focus mainly on their families and the cattle they raised to support
themselves.Thinking beyond that reality didn’t occur to anyone at the time; there was simply no
cause.That is unless you were working for a handful of oil companies scouring the countryside in search of crude, including the Amereda Hess Corporation in
1951.Their intent was entirely different and focused on suspected black gold lying deep beneath the surface of the Clarence Iverson farm, some eight miles south of Tioga in McKenzie County, North Dakota.
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