Heritage Renewal

How many times have you heard someone speak of the hard-working people in North Dakota's petroleum industry as "those people"? And yet mineral extraction is poised to supplant agriculture this year as the leading economic engine of the Flickertail State. The petroleum industry has a powerful and significant history here, and it is time to embrace it. Clarence Herz, PhD student in History at NDSU, is delivering a constructive history of petroleum in North Dakota, through his master's thesis, his various papers, his developing dissertation, and the resulting publication. See, for instance, "A Community Affair," Clarence's article in Oil-Industry History 14 (2013): 75-79. For a web feature drawing on the same research, go here.

The Center for Heritage Renewal has gathered together its submissions to agencies pertaining to the Killdeer Mountain transmission line issue and issued them as White Paper No. 1: The Antelope Valley Station to Neset Transmission Project: A Critical Review. The white paper is now available for purchase via Amazon. For those interested in the recent submission to the Rural Utilities Service, scroll below to find the PDF.

The Fargo Forum conducted a reader poll as to the preservation of the Killdeer Mountain Battlefield. This is not at all scientific, but indicative of reader sentiment.


Note that the Forum phrased the question carefully, so as not to bias response toward protection--if anything, the "enough being done" phrasing was a bias against additional protection. Still, reader opinion was forthrightly in favor of better protection for this heritage resource.

Since the Fargo Forum has broken the news about the willful suppression of facts about the historic Killdeer Mountain Battlefield, in a story about that reporter Patrick Springer calls "the second Battle of Killdeer Mountain," it is time for the center to release to the public the submission made by the center to the Rural Utilities Service last Monday. At this time center staff will not be providing comments or giving interviews about this matter. We encourage all to read the submission--at close of which, we invite the North Dakota Public Service Commission to bring the Antelope Valley Station to Neset Transmission Project back for fact-finding under subpoena power. If anyone disputes what we say in our submission, that can be settled by testimony under oath.

One reader has suggested that the phrase buried in the report, "black puffer," is destined to go viral. We shall see. We have provided the facts as best we can discern them.