The soft brown lignite mined near Beulah and Center has kept the lights on across the plains for generations, feeding the mine-mouth power plants that ring the Missouri Slope.

North Dakota's ceaseless wind, long the farmer's foe, has become a crop of its own, and the great white turbines now share the horizon with the grain elevators.

A modern Bakken well plunges two miles down, then turns and runs two miles sideways through the oil-bearing rock — a feat of steering the old wildcatters could scarcely have imagined.

The oil beneath the western counties has made North Dakota one of the country's great petroleum producers, and Williston sits at the roaring center of the play.