WILLISTON, N.D.—Josef McConnell, a tennis coach from Southern California, had been unemployed for a year after the government response to the pandemic destroyed his business. Then, in 2021, a friend told him that there were good-paying jobs to be had in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield.

He knew nothing of oilfields, never heard of the Bakken Basin, nor, for that matter, could he say much about North Dakota other than he believed the state to be a cold, flat flyover tundra with corn and cows somewhere near Canada that had previously been “100 percent not on my mind.”

Nevertheless, Mr. McConnell said, “I picked up everything and left. It was do-or-die.”

He quickly secured a job laboring at SandPro, a sand, wellhead, and automation management start-up in Berthold, west of Minot. As promised, good-paying jobs were available. As promised, they were muscle jobs, dirty jobs, and long-shift jobs.

He was “cleaning iron, tearing things apart,” disassembling and rebuilding “frack trees’ that cap fracked—hydraulically fractured—oil wells. It was hard, gritty work, 12 hours a day, for weeks at a time in an industrial beehive down the road and across the highway from downtown Berthold, a towering grain elevator looming as its landmark above bald grassy ridges and cottonwood-framed creek beds.

But the money was fantastic and, it dawned on him that “this could be a career, not just a job,” Mr. McConnell said.

“I told myself that if I couldn’t make it through the first winter, this is not for me. I survived. It sucked, but I survived,” he said. “From there on, I tried to learn everything I could. I wanted to know how it worked, what it did. I cross-trained into all the aspects of the business.”

As SandPro grew, Mr. McConnell, 33, was appointed night-shift supervisor. Last December, he ascended to shop manager. In August, he became a homeowner. “I’d never be able to do that in California,” he said.

While the 2006–2014 Bakken Play shale boom is over, and the days when oil rigs were anchored on the prairie like ships on seas of waving wheat are long gone, North Dakota’s oil industry has rebounded from its pandemic-induced slump. A sense of steady has settled in.

Right now, an able-bodied unskilled laborer willing to learn and capable of working long and hard can still land a $115,000 entry-level job with room and board and nearly five months off on an oil rig site or with a growing number of independent contractors and start-up oilfield service companies in western North Dakota.

Right now, the Bakken is where stories like Mr. McConnell’s aren’t stories but invitations. It’s where an Arizona cosmetologist can monitor a rig gate while looking to buy her first home, where a New Jersey geologist can build a company that employs 300 to revive a community where she’s hailed as a hometown hero, where a “disgruntled” airman from Cincinnati can carve a niche and expand it into a broadening entrepreneurial enterprise.

“The rush is over and now we’re seeing a maturing of the play,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), a 1998 graduate of Dickinson High School who recalls having to—and being able to—stand in the middle of highways to get cellphone reception before the oil boom.

As is typical with a “maturing of the play,” most corporate players have moved on. In their wake, new players have emerged: first-time independent contractors and serial entrepreneurs, many under 40, most building local businesses, buying homes, starting families, and growing communities.

For them, fast money is fine, but sustainable “systemic growth” is preferable with perfected-in-North-Dakota advances in fracking spurring pioneering innovations in lateral drilling.

“This is a time of great technological advancements,” North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness said.

The 31 rigs operating in North Dakota in late December were pumping 1.25 million barrels of shale oil per day to nearly 19,000 wells, a per-rig production that is “a vast improvement” over past proficiency benchmarks, he said.

With lateral drilling in the Bakken expected to extend beyond four miles by early 2024, “the timeline to drill wells has been compressed” and “opened up a whole new area of the Bakken than was formerly known,” a shale play “we are going to take this technology to and earn from.”

Post-Boom Boon

Spearheading the Bakken’s post-boom boon are “smaller companies,” Mr. Ness said. “We’ve got so many, typically led by younger people who were working for these larger international service companies, found a niche, and started their own businesses.”

With oil prices expected to hover in the $70-to-$85 per barrel “sweet spot,” demand for North Dakota oil is projected to grow moderately for the foreseeable future.

“It’s better than the boom,” SandPro Vice President Joshua Blackaby said. “You want steady work and that’s where we’re at right now. And one of the distinctive things about what’s going on here now is it’s a lot of small companies, a lot of entrepreneurs.”

According to the North Dakota Job Service, the 31 rigs directly employ 50,000 people with about 35,000 working in field and technical services and about 15,000 toiling directly on sites.

As of mid-December, more than 3,000 oilfield-related jobs were vacant.

For the small farming and ranching prairie towns overwhelmed during the boom, infill ambitions spur new commercial construction, revitalized Main streets, and growing schools, with new homes being purchased by 20- and 30-something-year-olds.

“Building schools, building homes, growing communities rather than tearing them down? I think there’s lots of success stories here,” Mr. Ness said.

“Now, you have an opportunity to grow a life,” Mr. Armstrong said. “That’s a story we are proud to tell.”

For the independent-inclined, there’s ample opportunity for enterprise, Mr. Blackaby said.

“If you have any ambition at all, move to North Dakota,” he said. “There’s so much work to be had here. It’s such a business-friendly state and the opportunities … the sky’s the limit.”

In The Field

Julie Byron, 33, from Tucson, Arizona, is working in a gate shack with two heaters at her feet. Only those on the crew can gain entry to the Hess rig without checking in with her.

A cosmetologist “doing pull-tabs at the Legion,” she’d lived in Williston since 2013 but never considered working in the Bakken until a manager suggested she apply for a job with Neset Consulting Services, a Tioga-based company that provides gate monitors, roustabout crews, field medics, mud-loggers, and geologists for oil rig sites.

Since August, she’s been working seven days on and seven days off in shifts tailored to her needs as a single mother.

It’s fascinating, Ms. Byron said. “This is first time I’m seeing what’s really going on. I said to myself, ‘Okay, we’re going to learn this. We’re going to turn this into an opportunity,’” she said. “It’s cool to know the background—the geology, infrastructure, the different jobs—and understand it.”

She is looking to buy a home in 2024. She still works as a cosmetologist and “does pull-tabs at the Legion” during off-weeks.

“It’s just me starting over. I’m still figuring this out at 33-years-old,” Ms. Byron said. “Was it worth it? One-hundred percent.”

Ron Budd, 34, delivery services coordinator for Minot-based Creedence Energy Services’ Williston office, moved from Phoenix, Arizona, to North Dakota in 2010 when his stepfather got a job with Haliburton.

“I was pretty young and didn’t really have it figured out. I was just kind of day-by-day, dead-end jobs,” he recalled. “The job I was working before I came up here was at McDonald’s. I thought of it as hard work, Now, not so much.”

Mr. Budd said “financial opportunity” became “my driving force to fully commit” to the oilfield. He no longer works directly in the field, but the commitment has panned out, said the father of two children.

“Knowing I could do better for my kids than what I had, knowing that I can have things that no one else in my family has, I buckled down and committed,” Mr. Budd said, noting he has purchased his own home. “Out of my immediate family, I’m the only one that owns a home.”

On The Rigs

Among the hands, there’s a hierarchy topped by the tool-pusher. Often called “the company man,” the tool-pusher is generally descended in the chain of command by the driller, by derrick hands—roughnecks—pit hands, then motor hands.

At the bottom are floor hands, the roustabouts, a mix that can include novice gofers and indispensable kings-of-all-oilfield-trades.

Rocko Mackade, 23, of Pierz, Minnesota, on Dec. 21 was on day 32 of a 44-day stint working for Chord Energy at the Patterson 806 rig and living in an eight-trailer mancamp 15 miles east of Williston.

He’d owned a custom metal roofing company, he said, and maybe he’ll do that again, but he doesn’t regret finding work in the Bakken two years ago.

“Why? The money. I like to work, so if I like to work, I might as well get the most I can out of it—$140,000 a year does that,” Mr. Mackade said.

James Harmon, 25, of Seville, Ohio, a solids control consultant who manages and monitors drilling fluids to ensure shell, rock, and debris doesn’t impede flow to Paterson 806’s wells, has worked six years in oilfields.

“I read online you could make good money and get two weeks off for your weekend,” he said.

That was that. After high school, Mr. Harmon was gone. “It’s easier than it used to be,” he said. “They say it’s safer but it’s—the easier it gets, the more complacency there is.”

Riley Kuntz, 40, did “a little bit of everything” before finding a job on a rig seven years ago, the last four as a Patterson 806 derrick hand.

In 2022, he challenged former governor and two-term U.S. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) in the GOP primary, garnering nearly 22 percent of the tally against a household-name incumbent.

Mr. Kuntz ran because “I don’t like the way the government is run,” saying he ran a “really low-budget campaign, not well-planned, pretty reactionary” but was “never going to make a career out of it” anyway.

Unlike, he noted, Mr. Hoeven.

To be successful in the oilfield and in politics, Mr. Kuntz said, “You just got to work and get dirty.”

The Independent Contractor

Dallas Moore had wanted to be roughneck since he was a teenager in Wyoming. “The cool guys pulling up in big shiny trucks, the guys who had the prettiest girlfriends, they were the roughnecks,” he said.

But getting onto a rig was easier said than done in Wyoming in 2004. “You'd go into [state employment office], write your name on a paper with your experience and phone number. They’d fax it to all the rigs every Friday morning.”

He had no experience. “I had been putting my name on that list for about six months. Never got a call,” Mr. Moore said. And so, he claimed two years’ experience as a derrick hand.

“Three days later, I got a call. They said, ‘You’ve got a job. Start tomorrow,’” he said. “Then they asked, ‘You don’t, by chance, know a ’motor head?’ Well, my roommate was passed out on the couch next to me. He looked like a ’motor head' to me so, I said, ‘I sure do. I know a real good ’motor-head’ and got him a job, too.”

He arrived for his first day of work, knowing his bluff would be exposed. “The company man pointed me to this big rig,” he recalled. “There was a staircase, 40 stairs going up. It was the most unreal thing I’d ever seen.

”I walked up those stairs and met the driller. I said, ‘I lied. I’m not a roughneck. I don’t even know what a roughneck is but I‘ll work my butt off.’ The driller said, ‘Well, you put me in a bind, but I’ll let you stay.’ I worked my butt off for him for three years.”

Mr. Moore worked as a roughneck from 2005 to 2011 in Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and North Dakota. In 2011, he became a certified tree climber and established a tree-trimming business. “I used to walk on trees,” he said. “Did that for three years in Colorado.”

During that time, he also earned a Class A commercial driver’s license but set aside plans to “do the truck driver thing” when he learned of the emerging field of solids control in dealing with drilling fluids and preventing blowouts.

As with many fellow oilfield workers, Mr. Moore, 38, a father of three, is incorporated as an independent contractor. He is president and CEO of Matrix Oilfield, LLC.

“I work for my own company,” he said. “The pay is phenomenal. I make a daily base rate of $800. So I’m going to get a $36,000 paycheck” when he heads home Jan. 3 to Casper, Wyoming.

The Entrepreneur

Mr. Blackaby was studying to be a pilot at the University of Cincinnati when he “kind of ran out of money” and enlisted in the Air Force.

“I went to basic training and to tech school and applied for everywhere overseas. I got my orders and I'll never forget how that dream came to an end when it said ‘nuclear missile technician, Minot, North Dakota.’”

The young airman “came up here kind of disgruntled, getting sent to North Dakota. As it turned out, it was best thing that ever happened to me.”

He completed his Bachelor’s and earned a Master’s in aviation safety while in the Air Force, all aimed at “getting the hell out of North Dakota” when his enlistment was over.

But life unravels even the most well-planned of plans. He got married and “my daughter was born here,” said Mr. Blackaby, 42. “So I stayed when I got out, ended up getting into oil and gas. My daughter is now 17-years-old.”

He joined fellow Air Force “buddies who were roughnecking and making a lot of money” as a floor hand in 2008. When a supervisor learned he had a master’s in aviation safety, “he sent me to see his boss. It was during the boom, 2009-10. He hired me on the spot as EHS [environmental, health, and safety] supervisor” for Hess.

In January 2019, Mr. Blackaby and “some guys,” including a cousin, raised $50,000 to establish SandPro LLC based on a seminal sand-filtration innovation.

“When they frack wells, they push all that sand and water with high pressure down into the ground. When they get done fracking with all that pressure, and start pulling the well, a lot of that sand comes back up,” he said.

SandPro brought the first sand filter for fracked wells to market. “We didn’t invent it, but we got the exclusive technology from it,” Mr. Blackaby said. “We didn’t know if it was going to work. We went out and it worked and we knew we had something.”

Yet SandPro nearly died in its second year when COVID hit. “I thought it was lost when oil dropped to -$38 bucks a barrel. All drilling, all activity, stopped.”

Doubt haunted him. “I was out on location, going, ‘I left these wonderful jobs and what did I get myself into?’

“We were able to tighten our belt, survive on nothing,” Mr. Blackaby said. “We came out of COVID stronger than before.”

SandPro has expanded into wellhead and automation applications. It had a 2023 summer peak of 130 employees with 100 working 10-hour, five-day weeks in December in anticipation of gearing up by March and fielding a 150-employee workforce by summer.

The company’s “bread-and-butter is what’s called a ‘frack stack,’ Mr. Blackaby said, wellhead caps that are “Lego pieces that weigh thousands and thousands of pounds” that “guys are putting together using hydraulic torque wrenches.”

SandPro workers have not suffered a workplace injury beyond pinched fingers since its founding, he said.

“Safety keeps me up most at night,” he said. “These are bombs. They have 10,000 PSI running through them—60 PSI will kill you. If not put together right, I’ve seen iron break apart and shoot thousands of pounds football-fields away. It’s got to be perfect. There’s no room for error.”

North Dakota continues to surprise him. “It’s winter right now but in the summer, it’s the most beautiful place in the world. I mean, North Dakota, it’s just a jewel up here. There’s nothing like the opportunities here. There really isn’t.”