Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier

by Maya Rao

Overview

A surreal, lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest domestic oil discovery in half a century transformed a forgotten corner of the American West into a crucible of breakneck capitalism.

As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and reported on everyone in between — including an ex-con YouTube celebrity, a trophy wife mired in scandal, and a hard-drinking British Ponzi schemer—in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor called the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids.

As the boom receded, a culture of greed and recklessness left troubling consequences for investors and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil equipment littered the fields like abandoned farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who built this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610396462
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Maya Rao is a staff writer in the Washington D.C. bureau of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, Longreads, and more.

Table of Contents

Part I The Advancement of Man

Introduction 3

I Should Be Dead 8

Tales at the Water Depot 13

Beyond the Eyes of Roosevelt 20

The Wild Bison 29

Williston Brewing Company 41

Great American Scam 52

Streetlights 63

A Fugitive at the Border 73

Edge of the World 83

Part II Free Market Rhapsody

The Sheer Emptiness of It 89

Nobody Lives Here 99

Evolution 107

Empire of Junk 117

Right-Minded People 125

Capitalism Is Legal 137

A Great Steaming Pile of Money 144

Ballad of La Bruta 152

Part III Of Riches and Reality

The Dinner Party 167

Peyton Place on the Plains 172

Deal Junkies 177

Going to War 185

The Derrick Goes Sideways 189

$100 Oil to $1 Beer 206

Nat Geo's in Town 214

Fracking Hell 226

Part IV Trials of Civilization

Wasteland 237

The Perils at Twenty Feet 247

Pipelining Blues 254

You Chose Oil over Us 261

Exodus 272

Bile of the Subterranean 286

Frigid Despair 294

This Is Your Treasure 302

Acknowledgments 313

Notes 315

Editorial Reviews

03/05/2018
Minneapolis Star-Tribune journalist Rao’s debut paints a vivid picture of the rapid development that accompanied the recent oil boom in North Dakota. For seven years beginning in 2012, Rao immersed herself in the Bakken oil boomtown, which she likens to a 21st-century gold rush as “hordes of people flock to this untrammeled terrain to make their fortune.” Her portrait focuses largely on the lives of the people she encountered there: the “pioneers, outcasts... dreamers, do-gooders, failures, drifters, deadbeats” who were drawn to the site from all around the country for its promise of economic prosperity. Rao introduces readers to Danny Witt, a surfer from North Carolina who trucked water and crude along desolate highways to and from the oil fields. She writes of the monotony of his task—much of it “was stop and go, idling and stalling”—and the peculiar rhythms of time spent largely on the road. She also follows Marcus Jundt, a restaurateur who financed four restaurants in town, including the Williston Brewing Company, to serve newcomers and offer respite for the laborers working at the Bakken rigs. Rao poignantly captures the change in atmosphere as the boom turns to bust and local businesses built on the thriving oil community start to go broke. This is a memorable account of the Bakken boom and all that it entailed. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"An important addition to the literature of the U.S. shale revolution-too often underestimated and misunderstood-Great American Outpost reminds us that the revolution is not just a story of frack fluid and oil production but a story of the human experience. Through Didionesque scenes of the North Dakota boom, Maya Rao evokes America in extremis with glimpses of lives and decisions that are sometimes frightening, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes just nuts."——Gary Sernovitz, author of The Green and the Black: The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy

"From the upper reaches of North Dakota, Maya Rao extracts a potent metaphor for modern American capitalism. Her bracing dispatch from the Bakken reveals the toll of fracking on everything it touches - from the soil of the Great Plains, to the precarious lives of roughnecks, to the remote communities that became boomtowns full of hustlers, dreamers and opportunists. Keenly observed and vividly told, Great American Outpost also has an undercurrent of anxiety that seeps from abandoned oilfields into the larger landscape of our culture, in the form of a question few dare to ask: What remains when the profiteers move on?"——Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century America

"I'm grateful for this stunning work of immersive reportage. Maya Rao tells us a tale from ground zero for modern American capitalism: the North Dakota oil rush, from boom to bust. It's a remarkable book for right now, mixing compelling portraits with smart, big picture analysis. Rao shows us stories that visiting reporters would likely miss, and the result is a rich, nuanced book that's a crucial guide to understanding twenty-first century America."——Tracie McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

"With oil at $100 a barrel, greed in North Dakota was manifest and the characters were right out of the Gold Rush, from some of the craziest get rich crooks to the recently paroled who could make $90,000 a year hurling big trucks down two-lane roads. Maya Rao's description of one of America's biggest rushes of sheer greed ranks right up there with the great books of the California Gold Rush of 1849 ...This is one of the best books in America about working men and women — and life in the oilfields when the lid blows off."——Humpy Wheeler, retired NASCAR promoter and former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway

"Maya Rao didn't just write about the boomtown life, she lived it capturing the hope and despair of a nation of citizens looking for a break. A gimlet-eyed look at the oil, dust, and, most importantly, the people living on our country's last frontier. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the American Dream or the American Nightmare can be made and lost in the blink of a two-week pay period."——Stephen Rodrick, contributing editor to Rolling Stone

From the Publisher

2018-02-06
Newspaper journalist Rao travels to remote western North Dakota to immerse herself in the boom-and-bust cycle of shale oil extraction.For more than a decade, the dangers of fracking—drilling deep into the Earth to extract shale oil using massive amounts of water and chemicals—have been widely reported: environmental degradation, earthquakes, outsized profits for the oil industry, lost savings for individuals scammed by get-rich-quick schemes, negatively transformed local economies, and deaths of itinerant oil field workers as well as local residents. Portions of Oklahoma, Texas, and Pennsylvania have received huge amounts of attention during the debates about fracking, but North Dakota, one of the most remote, frigid, and least populous of the 50 states, has been affected more heavily than any other. To understand the real situation among competing claims, Rao arrived from out of state, established a working relationship with a truck driver trying to earn a better living than he could in North Carolina, developed numerous other sources, lived in costly but substandard housing, existed on low-quality food, and placed herself in physical danger almost every day, emerging with an eye-opening, occasionally scattershot, "on-the-ground account of capitalism, industrialization, and rugged individualism" as well as "the power and failings of free enterprise." At some level, almost everybody involved in the business understood that the boom economy would collapse eventually, but the author found few who predicted that the bust would arrive in less than a decade. As a result, local businesses went broke, temporary environmental scarring became permanent, and western North Dakota became less desirable than ever as a place to settle, especially given the harsh weather and downturn in agriculture. Rao occasionally injects herself into the story, but the truck driver who freely shared his adventures rightly dominates the book.A superbly reported book marred only by an occasionally wandering narrative.

Kirkus Reviews