Please, everyone in western North Dakota needs to go to the Cowboy Hall Of Fame in Medora, North Dakota and spend an hour in the first floor Pioneer Museum.  Even if you are from western North Dakota and have been in the Pioneer Museum before, you need to go again now.

Everyone has forgotten how hard, barren, and poor North Dakota had been.  Everybody in North Dakota has got to realize that without oil revenue, North Dakota will be as hard as what is shown in the Pioneer Museum.

2007 to 2015 was just a brief moment in time when people in North Dakota could go out and buy a new four-door four-wheel-drive truck for $50,000, and a new tractor for $200,000.  There was one other brief time like this and that was 1978 to 1983.

Spend an hour in the Pioneer Museum, look at the photographs and read the captions.  There was no wood to construct houses, people had to cut squares of grass sod and stack it to make 10′ x 12′ shelters to live in.  There was no fire wood, people had to collect buffalo dung to burn for heating and cooking.  This is how North Dakota is, this is reality.  It is harsh, barren, cold, and desolate.

If you have extra money right now, you had better not be buying a new vehicle, motorcycle, boat, or RV.  You had better hang on to your money as tight as you can and start cutting way back on your spending.

If you have very little money right now, you should probably try to get a second or third job to make extra money, and to have some place else to work if your first job goes away.  I recommend that you look at all the job advertisements to be up to date on where you can apply.  When you see all the job advertisements go away, you will know things are about to get bad.

It is easier to watch TV and do other things than it is to stop and face the reality that oil drilling operations are not coming back to North Dakota for at least a year, and possibly not for many years.  You need to face this now.  You need to know that North Dakota is unforgiving.  I can’t tell you everything that you should do, but you need to cut back on your spending and try to save as much money as possible now.

I have run out of money at least twice in my life.  The first thing that I had to do was sell extra firearms or an extra vehicle.  All this did was buy me a little more time and allow me to travel to some place else to work.  I have traveled to the wrong place before and could not get a job.  The more money you have, the more chances you will have.

I need to start scaring people now in North Dakota, because you need to be scared now, it is to that point now.  The biggest indicator of what is happening right now is to look at the job listings in North Dakota, and see that there are fewer and fewer jobs.

(If you go look at the North Dakota Job Services listings in Dickinson now, about 35 out of 50 jobs listed are for nurses, virtually the same nursing job.  Not many other jobs at all, especially jobs that pay a living wage.)