Williston is a town on the plains of far northwestern North Dakota, about 30 km from the Montana state line and 100 km from the Canadian border — long a sleepy farm-and-railroad town of under 15,000 people, and then, in the 2000s and 2010s, the boomtown at the centre of the Bakken oil shale play. North America's biggest onshore oil strike in a generation turned Williston into one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States overnight, packing its streets with oil workers, triplex construction sites and hastily built strip malls.
The boom has since cooled and Williston is settling back into itself, but the scale of the change is still visible. For a traveller passing through, the surrounding country is the real draw: the nearby Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, a reconstructed 1828 fur-trading fort at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers; Fort Buford where Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881; and the rugged badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park a couple of hours south. Williston's tiny airport has become a surprisingly useful jumping-off point for the whole upper-Missouri country.