Great Visit to North Dakota!

MEDORA

We stayed for 7 nights in the town of Medora, just outside the southern unit of the Teddy Roosevelt National Park.  What a great little town!  In the winter, there are 37 permanent residents, but in the summer season, it is a bustling town, offering lots of entertainment for the tourists.  We saw the Medora Musical one evening (above photo), a professionally staged musical review Branson-style, in an outdoor amphitheater.  Also saw a wonderfully performed one-man show about Teddy Roosevelt, and a free outdoor concert by a local country-western singer and composer.

 Barbara and Harold's Bicycling Encounter with Wandering Bison

On a bicycle ride one day into the TR Natl. Park, we ran into the above scene on the road: about 60 bison, including many new-borns, wandering along the same road we were riding, moving from one side of the road to the other, and holding up traffic.  Our quandry:  how to get by these 2000-pound behemoths without being knocked off our bikes!

Fortunately for us, the red pickup in this picture backed up to where we were standing and offered to carry us through in the back of their truck.  Nice people!  We didn't know how we'd make it without their help.

From the back of the truck we got up close and personal with these animals and snapped pictures right and left. 

Williston, ND - FORT UNION TRADING POST

This trading post sitting alongside the Missouri River is a faithful reconstruction (by the National Park Service) of a non-military fort that operated in Northwest North Dakota for about 40 years from the 1820s and the 1860s.  The unique thing about this fort is that it was established to facilitate trading of goods between white men (no white women ever resided here) and the various Indian tribes in the area.  The whites bartered beads, blankets, tin kitchen items, thimbles, thread and cloth (among many other things) for Indian buffalo pelts and robes.  The interactions were entirely peaceful, very formal and dignified events in which both the Indians and the white men felt superior to each other for making such good deals.  The whites felt they were getting the buffalo pelts very cheaply and the Indians couldn't believe the whites would pay them for buffalo pelts rather than shooting the buffalo themselves!

About 100 white men lived at this fort at any given time.  Because there were no white women, many married Indian women, both for love and to cement the relationships between the white trading post and the Indian tribes. 

When many more settlers began to arrive in the area in the 1860s, many fleeing from the civil war farther east and south, the military began to establish itself in the area to protect them and that was the end of friendly relations between the whites and the Indians.  The trading fort was closed around 1866 when a military fort was established down the road.  Custer passed by here in 1876 on the way to his defeat by Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn down in South Dakota. 

This is the trading fort from the outside.

In this room before the fire, the formal exchange of greetings and speeches between the white traders and the Indians took place, along with sharing a meal, before the official trading took place.  The preliminaries often lasted as long as 8 hours!

The Missouri River ambles by outside the Fort. 

While at the fort for trading, Indians would camp outside the fort in their teepees, as many as 5000 surrounding the fort - peacefully - at one time!

 Oil Boom in Williston

One of the most interesting aspects of our short stay (only two nights) in Williston was to observe the impact on this relatively small town of about 15,000 people of a recent discovery of a huge oil field in the area.  This is expected to be the largest oil field in the lower U.S., ever, and there is apparently good reason to believe that only a short distance further below this field is an even larger reservoir of oil.  The result that we saw was an incredible amount of activity.  Everywhere around town were huge makeship "man camps", temporary barracks and informal RV parks set up to accommodate the huge influx of workers.  There was new building everywhere, from large installations for the oil producers themselves plus all of the support kinds of companies, to new roads seeming to be going in everywhere.  Large trucks hauling dirt or tanker trucks crowded the roads and were on the move day and night.  The reports in the newspapers were that the number of passengers arriving at the airports in the area had doubled from a year ago, which in turn were already double that of the prior year.  Local businesses were upset at the disorganization caused by the rapid ramp-up of activity.  Oil companies appear to be hiring hundreds of workers "to report for work next Monday", only to have the workers to arrive on Sunday to find there is no place to live!  The RV park we stayed in had decided to sharply limit the number of long-term stays by workers in order to keep the park open for tourists.  And the rangers at Fort Union reported that the visits to the park were down 75% from last year, in large part, they felt, because of the decline in tourists due to the lack of accommodations for them.

In any case, jobs are going begging in Williston, ND, unlike the rest of the country.  We found empty shelves at the local Walmart, caused, we were told, by the shortage of workers available to stock the shelves, despite the fact that they are offering an extraordinary wage (for Walmart) of $16 per hour!  This is a boom town.