Two Boomtowns Driven By The Same Unmanaged Capitalist Animal
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Another photo of old Clifford, North Dakota from the early 20th century. The depot still exists at Eric Anderson's place, along with the Anderson house in the upper right and the old Meat Market (now a bar) barely visible in the center. The rest is gone.
As I reflect on living in the oil boomtown of Williston for the past five years, I contemplate the ruins of the boomtown of Clifford, North Dakota, that surrounded me when I was growing up. The ruins made for the best playground for a child running around town in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the history of Clifford is mostly anecdotes that don’t tell a deeper story, which maybe one day I will dig out of old newspapers and archival sources.
The lesson of past boomtowns is that they always dwindle, scatter their people, and leave ruins. Unless we do better planning and diversify, Williston and the Bakken region will also go the way of towns like Clifford, North Dakota, whose population and businesses rose and fell on the price of one thing. During Covid, I saw how quickly things around here could shut down and put everyone working here at risk of job loss.
The wild heyday of Clifford in the early days has often been referenced with anecdotes of a busy town of elevators, pool halls, and hotels with a “wild west” vibe, including fights, killings, and dead Norwegians. The boom era of Clifford, North Dakota, was the final decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th when land and wheat were booming, and workers from the nearby Jones and Brinker bonanza farm fueled business. The oil barons of today, the successors to the wheat barons that began our industrial approach to land on the plains, saw it as a thing for exploitation and not something that required a deeper reciprocal relationship.
The wheat boom of those early days stripped the soil and contributed to the Dust Bowl. The Fracking Boom, a 21st-century version of the same unmanaged capitalist animal, may be stripping away things we can’t yet quantify. Like my ancestors who plowed the soil, not realizing that it might all blow away, we don’t yet know the full long-term impact of our actions. What children will play in these ruins I wonder?
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