Town hopes to hit an oil jackpot

A once-dying North Dakota town is sitting on a potential oil jackpot.

PARSHALL, N.D. (AP) — In this tiny reservation town a hundred miles from the Canadian border where temperatures once hit 60 below zero, a Southern twang is sometimes heard over the din at the local diner, and there is talk of Texas tea beneath the streets.

Roughnecks from Texas and Oklahoma have traveled here on hopes that they now share with the town’s 1,000 or so inhabitants — that there is oil in Parshall.

About 400 people own mineral rights under homes, businesses, churches, nursing homes or tribal land. All of it has been leased, town officials said.

“We were dying,” said Loren Hoffman, a local farmer and the city auditor. “Our town was slipping backward, but now we’re on the upswing.”

Though it is the namesake of the Parshall oil field, which sits in the crude-rich Bakken shale formation, a quarter of Parshall’s residents live in poverty.

No one is sure how much oil might lie beneath the town, but with the wells spreading south toward Parshall near the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, things have begun to change.

“We’re seeing an influx of youth that we didn’t have before,” Hoffman said.

At Parshall’s only restaurant, the Redwood, there is now Tex-Mex food on the menu, though locals were leery of it at first.

Business at the Redwood Restaurant, like other establishments in town, is brisk. The hamburger smothered with gravy is still a big seller.

“We put breakfast burritos on the menu and no one would try them — they thought it would be too spicy,” said Shad Green, 39, who came to the area last spring from Texas to work the oil wells for $32 an hour.

After a co-worker was killed on an oil rig where he worked, Green quit the business and bought the Redwood.

Green, his wife and her mother, sister and 18-year-old niece are there, and his son and daughter-in-law expect to move there in about a month, to help work in the restaurant, he said.

Strong Southern drawls like Green’s are becoming more prevalent in town.

“People are getting more familiar with the accent,” Green said.

But it is no longer the case that you know most of the people you see in Parshall.

“I’ve lived here all my life and I don’t recognize most of the people in the local cafe,” Hoffman said.

A number of businesses are reporting record sales, said Parshall Mayor Richard Bolkan, who also owns the town grocery store.

Occupancy is nearly at 100 percent at the 15-room Parshall Motor Inn, said owner and manager Jeanette Cecil.

Cecil purchased the inn — and the mineral rights below it — in August 2006, less than a year before the oil boom, she said.

She plans a 10-room expansion for next spring to house the welders and surveyors who are flooding into town.

In just over a year, horizontal oil wells have been spudded throughout the region, where the hilly prairie had been previously disturbed only by crops and Cold War-era missile silos.

Wichita, Kan.-based Slawson Exploration Co. has begun drilling on the outskirts of Parshall, and another well is planned this month that will partially drill beneath the town, said Todd Slawson, one of the company’s owners. Next year, a rig will likely drill directly beneath the town, he said.

“We’ve never drilled anything like this,” he said. “Every time we drill, it is a benefit to someone. This happens to be a benefit to a lot of people.”