they call it the williston basin. ♪ narrator: not so long ago, this was frontier.ten closely and you will hear the old echo of covered wagons, the phantom shadows of pioneers fighting for their lives against the wilderness. lonely women wearing their dreams like a bit of right calico. ♪ narrator: they began with nothing, with their bare hands and a bucket of hope, breaking the land with freedom's plow, planting towns like fargo, stampede, bluegrass, beaver lodge, lincoln valley, williston. ♪ neil: wheat farmer and schoolteacher. i was born and raised here east of montana along the canadian line, williams county, north dakota. if i were somewhere at the ends of the earth and thinking of home, the thing i would remember would be winter, the enormous frozen silence, the snow cutting us off from the world, the wind slicing across the field. the way we say it, it's so cold that the shadows freeze to the ground and have to be pried loose with a pickax. ♪ [dog barking] ♪ neil: it might seem like a desolate place to some, but we are mostly norwegian up this way. we have an