Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-324) and index.
Contents:
The This is your treasure. I should be dead -- Tales at the water depot -- Beyond the eyes of Roosevelt -- The wild bison -- Williston Brewing Company -- Great American scam -- Streetlights -- A fugitive at the border -- Edge of the world -- Free market rhapsody. The sheer emptiness of it -- Nobody lives here -- Evolution -- Empire of junk -- Right-minded people -- Capitalism is legal -- A great steaming pile of money -- Ballad of La Bruta -- Of riches and reality. The dinner party -- Peyton Place on the plains -- Deal junkies -- Going to war -- The derrick goes sideways -- $100 oil to $1 beer -- Nat Geo's in town -- Fracking hell -- Trials of civilization. Wasteland -- The perils at twenty feet -- Pipelining blues -- You chose oil over us -- Exodus -- Bile of the subterranean -- Frigid despair -- This is your treasure.
Summary:
"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."--Inside jacket flap.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.