Writing Wednesday: Types of Camps

Over the last week, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. I posted the first part of it last week. Here’s the second of three parts.

III.2 Types of Camps

This section starts where the last left off. the most contingent camps that appeared in shelter belts, public parks, quiet back lots, and work sites shared certain characteristics that reflected their ad hoc arrangement and situation. We defined these as “Type 3” camps (Caraher et al. 2017, 270-271). They lacked formal hooks up for electricity, water, and sewage, and as a result, adapted to suit the needs of the residents rather than the infrastructure. The most famous example of a “Type 3” style camp is probably the Williston Walmart parking lot that attracted national attention in the early days of the boom. New arrivals traveling by RV to the region gathered here and took advantage of Walmart’s longstanding tolerance of overnighting RVs in their parking lot while they looked for work and better accommodations. By the time we started to visit the Bakken regularly, this camp as well as many other ad hoc camps in the city of Williston had dispersed as much because of growing public safety concerns as better options for housing. In many of cases, the residents of these camps were squatters and the camps were illegal. Our project did document one such camp where the residents described the availability of work, but few housing options (Caraher et al. 2016, 203). As a result, they camped in a shelter belt near a construction site where some of the residents worked. They had arranged their trailers around a public area where they had created an ad hoc kitchen and some space for socializing. One resident of the camp lived in a tent and has been unable to find steady work in the region. The others in the camp provided him with friendship and support. The residents of this Type 3 camp, which included two teenagers who were there visiting their father, recognized the advantages of living together including camaraderie, cooperation on domestic tasks, and socializing at an improvised horseshoe pit. They also complained that the lack of running water, their reliance on portapotties, and the unreliability of electricity provided by extension cords run from the nearby construction site. They had lived at the site long enough to express a growing concern for sanitation and attributed the presence of flies with the people going to the bathroom in the open. When we returned to the site several months later, the camp was gone leaving only some trash. People in the area informed us that the police had removed the camp.

The most common camps in the region were Type 1 and Type 2 camps. Type 1 camps were the largest and most formal camps in the region (Caraher et al. 2017, 269-270). They were mostly characterized by prefabricated housing units with the largest offering hundreds of individual hotel style rooms. Large and even global logistics companies operate many of these camps and have agreements with the largest oilfield companies and as such they operate a bit like company towns. There were some independent Type 1 camps, including Capital Lodge which stood on US Route 2 outside of of Tioga (Caraher and Weber 2017, 62-63) and the some smaller companies which operated groups of camps in the region such as Ponderosa or the ill-fated Great American lodge which was part of a multinational Ponzi scheme. The most formal Type 1 camps had restricted access, strict rules for residents, and dining rooms, fitness centers, and social spaces with large TVs and comfortable furnishings. They operated much like an hotel where workers would stay during their multi-week shift in the region. Like hotels, these camps provided bedding and towels, featured generic wall art — usually consisting of patriotic and vaguely “western scenes”— that complemented the institutional food and furnishings of these impersonal accommodations. The largest of these camps while condoned as a “necessary evil” by local governments, nevertheless strained local infrastructure especially sewage. As a result at least one Type 1 camp near Tioga had its own sewage treatment facility and touted its temporary, modular approach for its low environmental impact (Rothaus 2013). Less formal Type 1, such as the “stackables” near the Enbridge terminal at the eastern edge of Mountrail County or the Ponderosa near Alexander, had fewer amenities but allowed for greater customization by residents who often stayed longer and could even bring their families.

Type 2 camps, such as the one documented in the photographs in this book, offered a combination of visibility and complexity that made them attractive to the archaeologist’s gaze. These camps have a parallels with RV parks and camping areas where the hook ups for electricity, water, and sewage dictate the organization of the units often in neat rows. Lot size varied from the largest being over 2500 square feet and smaller camps offering less than 1000 square feet per RV. In camps with large lots, such as MC11 documented in this volume (Caraher and Weber 2017, 72-73), residents often parked their RVs, fifth-wheel trailers, or motorhomes on one side of the lot, leaving the rest of the lot open for parking, storage and outdoor activity space. The largest Type 2 camps could accommodate several hundred RVs. MC11, for example, offered over 300 lots after a series of additions during the boom, while the smallest consisted of only a dozen or so units. The smaller camps often lacked even an office for the occasional site manager. In fact, one resident of a Type 2 camp recalls that early in the boom people just “swarmed” to camps and either waited to be kicked out or to be charged rent (Caraher et al. 2017, 270). In other cases, Type 2 camps had more developed amenities including laundry facilities, playgrounds for children, public spaces for socializing and events, wifi, maintenance personnel, and onsite managers. These larger camps often had areas where managers stored discarded material from the various modifications made to the residents’ RVs including the framing for winterized skirts around the bottom edges of the RVs, sheets of plywood from demolished mudrooms, propane tanks, shipping pallets, and PVC piping for optimizing utilities hook ups. As the interviews in Appendix I show, the managers of Type 2 camps sometimes sought to emphasize that their facility was a community and a place to call home (Caraher et al. 2020, 301; Caraher and Weber 2023, 102)). At MC11 camp managers planted trees and offered them to residents to beautify their lots, built playgrounds for children at the camp, and planned a pool room and horseshoe pit for adults. Other camp Residents of MC11, however, sometimes told a different story complaining about the transient nature of onsite management, frozen water and sewage pipes, questionable personal safety in the camp, and contentious lawsuits between the camp’s owners and operators. Frozen pipes and inadequate or substandard infrastructure often plagued these hastily planned and constructed camps (Caraher and Weber 2023, 102).