NORTH DAKOTA: The Good Years

Across the jagged Badlands, over the rolling plains of stubble wheat, and even in Watford City (pop. 1,087), there were still solid patches of snow. But the miracle had happened. Throughout North Dakota, the big thaw had come. The hard-bitten men who farm the northern tip of the onetime poverty-stricken U.S. “dust bowl” had survived a decade of dust, drought. WPA, grasshoppers, mortgages. Now, after a three-year spell of war and golden weather, they could afford a little fun in town.

At the City Bar’s wide wooden counter, MacKenzie County farmers, their jeans heavy with cash, drank up 40 cases of beer a day. At Christensen’s hardware store they stripped the shelves nearly bare. They played poker, guzzled, loafed, had Doc Winter put gold in their teeth.

During the ’30s, North Dakota lost almost everything but its weathered denims and its prized “elbow room.” Last year the state came back as one of the nation’s biggest breadbaskets: first in spring and durum wheat production, first in barley, second in certified seed potatoes. North Dakota farms (average 1940 census value: $8,742) brought in an average 1943 income of $7,817.

But the farmers of North Dakota had learned that they live in an exacting country of violent extremes. Withering summer heat (up to 124°) follows hard on paralyzing blizzards (down to —40°). To scratch a living, a man must be both tough and lucky. North Dakotans are also hardheaded. They know all about poverty. Wealth is fine while it lasts. But next year —or the year after—hard times may come again. While the present boom continues, practical citizens have paid off mortgages ($33 million in the last four years), oversubscribed by 81% on “E” bonds in the Fourth War Loan Drive, and stuffed the state’s little, weathered banks with $300 million.

Last week in Watford City, its 95 government bins groaning with grain, its four elevators busily cleaning seed wheat, MacKenzie County examined its new prosperity.

¶ Lean, grizzled old Lawyer W. S. (“Bud”) Taylor sat back from making out income tax returns (at $3 each) and pulled on his pipe. “These boys are really rolling in dough this year. When the Lord gets around to raining on this land, it’ll raise anything.”

¶ Dr. Harry Ulysses Winter, the country’s only dentist, was booked up solid for seven weeks. Running two “operating rooms” simultaneously (with “lots of gold work”), he had his lunch brought in, worked in his laboratory at night.

¶ Blaine Whipple, editor of the weekly MacKenzie County Farmer and Watford Guide, never had fatter advertising lineage or a bigger circulation (1,771 paid-up subscribers).

¶ Farmer P. L. Peterson, 59, had a record year. He hired a man (at $7 a day); paid $1,000 to have his combining done; paid $1,000 in old seed loans, $800 in back taxes, $400 in income taxes; bought a seed drill, a wind charger, a secondhand Ford, an electric cream separator, a washing machine, an electric iron and a radio; surfaced the road leading up to the highway. He still had money left to buy war bonds and plunk in the bank.

¶ The two cages of the First International Bank (deposits: $1,397,916.66) were so crowded that Cashier O. N. Stenehjem greeted depositors at his own desk. Said he: “Our main trouble is finding a place fo invest all this money.”