Short Term Settlement in Turn of the Century North Dakota

This week has brought big news for folks interested in the impact of the North Dakota oil boom on the communities of North Dakota. Yesterday, the University of North Dakota announced that Harold Hamm, the oil billionaire, has give $10 million to support a new school of geology and geological engineering which will bear his name. ExxonMobile has announced that they would buy $1.6 billion of North Dakota and Montana land suggesting that despite a recent decline in the number of rigs operating, companies still see the Bakken oil patch as a major player in onshore oil production. Exxon will own approximately 600,000 acres in North Dakota and half of the production of the Bakken.

The news demonstrated how the western part of North Dakota continues to have its place in the global economy. I’ve been reading Caroline Tauxe’s book on the North Dakota energy boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Mercer County. While the boom Tauxe examines was mostly in coal, she does position the boom of the 1970s and 1980s in the long term history of the western part of the state and its engagement in the world economy. 

My interest is in how the place of North Dakota in the global economy has impacted settlement. My recent work on short term settlement in the Bakken range – particularly man camps – has looked at the material and social signatures of these places in the landscape. Popular attitudes toward these settlements regularly contrast them with the more long term settlements. But, as I have mentioned here before, many of the long term places of habitation in western North Dakota developed through the same processes that have produced man camps. Patterns of short term settlement for resource extraction, modest investments in the landscape, and a willingness to move on quickly to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere characterized many of the early towns in North Dakota.

Tauxe provides a great window into these processes in a short summary of early settlement of Mercer County:

“Over the years, the county’s boundaries have been redefined several times, and the composition of its population centers has been even more fluid. Stanton reached a peak of 200 residents in 1888, but had been virtually abandoned ten years later. Mercer City, a town platted by the Lutheran Colonization Bureau of Chicago, never had more than one inhabitant, although 25 lots were sold to gullible buyers in Illinois. Mannhaven and Expansion were both founded by locally formed steamboat-building and -operating companies and survived as grain shipping ports and lumberyard centers until the railroads came through another part of the county. Krem was the only sizeable early town built away from the river, and with its flour mill and two general stores became for some time the busiest trading center in the county, although farmers still went to the river to sell their grain. Another victim of shifting transportation structures, Krem was abandoned after 1912 when the new railroad coming through the county bypassed it. Kroenthal and Kasmer, founding in 1900 and 1910 respectively, both began as post offices and then experimented with creameries. Kroenthal died abirthing, however, when it was discovered that butter shipped south to market failed to survive the long wagon journey without spoiling. Kasmer faired better, acquired stores and a bank (the German-American). But it ultimately succumbed with the advent of the railroad in the country, as did Ree (also known as Stoeltingen), founded as a branch of the Expansion Lumber and Mercantile Company and a grain shipping point on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Bigbend, like Mercer City, was another money-making attempt by outside speculators that failed almost before it began. There, several hundred lots were sold in Wisconsin by Milwaukee speculators, but only one settler actually took possession.” (p. 32-33)