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Killdeer, North Dakota: Ted Kupper does not look like a man on the fast-track to millionaire status. The rancher still wears his favourite old baseball cap, pulled down low over his craggy sun-weathered features and grey walrus moustache, as he checks on the horses he is rearing for the rodeo season.
Later, in the Buckskin Saloon in the tiny farming settlement of Killdeer, he chats with friends about hay prices, what a bull fetched at auction and the poor rains - staple bar talk on the rolling prairies of western North Dakota.
Kupper and his wife Dawn long lived hand-to-mouth raising livestock on land first settled early last century by his grandfather, an ethnic German immigrant from Russia. But the dark days of debt and juggling bills are a thing of the past for the Kuppers. For like hundreds - and soon thousands - of other families in this remote and sparsely-populated region, America's newest Black Gold Rush is making them millionaires.
Thanks to oil, America's least-visited state is one of just three with a budget in the black - a surplus of $1 billion for its 635,000 residents.
And with its three bars, two motels, car dealership, pharmacy and post office, Killdeer is an implausible boom town.
'No Vacancy' signs hang permanently outside the motels; the bars are packed; fencing companies, welders, transport firms and truck drivers have more work than they can handle; and young people who would previously have been forced to move away for work are now finding well-paid jobs.
Although oil prices have fallen back from the dizzying heights of nearly $150 a barrel they are still making the owners of underground mineral rights here wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
"For the first time in my life, I'm not in debt. That's a godsend for folks like us," said Dawn.
His ranch sits two miles above the 365-million-year-old Bakken shale formation that holds the largest contiguous onshore oil deposit surveyed in North America - a sticky black 'sea' of up to 4.3 billion recoverable barrels stretching across 25,000 square miles.
The complicated geology meant that it was not viable to extract the oil until spiralling commodity prices and major advances in horizontal drilling technology combined during 2006.
The first royalty payments started to roll in last year and some amazed beneficiaries even contacted the oil companies as they presumed their cheques had too many noughts.
Oil prices currently stand around $115 a barrel, well above the $60 cut-off below which the viability of Bakken extraction would come into question.
"I feel very blessed," said Dawn. "I am just happy that it means our children are going to have an easier time than we did and that they will be able to do what they want to in life."
Her husband added: "The country, the scenery, the life, the people - everything we want is here. Now we can afford to live here too."
Ostentatious displays of consumption are anathema to the reserved population of mainly north European and Scandinavian descent.
But Dawn said: "We haven't had a vacation since our wedding at the national rodeo finals in Las Vegas 23 years ago. It would be nice to go away together, although I went to Fargo recently and couldn't wait to come home."
Dawn was referring to the state's largest city, considered a bustling metropolis with its population of about 100,000, although to outsiders it is best known as the title of the Oscar-winning movie that made the region's slow sing-song accent famous.
Her husband, whose impressive cowboy belt buckle testifies to his champion rodeo rope-steering skills, admitted that the prospect of travel held little appeal. But he did say that it would be nice to be able to go fishing with live bait.
It is a measure of the frenzy gripping this rural backwater that there are now some 77 exploratory rigs drilling in North Dakota - each worth $6 million and costing $75,000 a day to operate - and 4,000 wells already pumping oil.
The rhythmically nodding pump jacks - known as grasshoppers or horses' heads by locals - dot a rolling pastoral landscape once roamed by Sioux tribes and buffalo herds.
On the Kuppers' land, three pumps run by Marathon are extracting high-grade sweet crude and two more are due to come on line soon. The company predicts that the wells will pump for the next 25 years.
A few miles away, inside the courthouse in the sleepy county town of Manning, 'landmen' - specialists in the often arcane art of tracking down mineral rights - sift through fading records to see who has the claim to what lies beneath the prairies.
- The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2008
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