The oil-soaked boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, with its 0.3% unemployment rate during a national recession, is both dream and curse. It’s not exactly Deadwood, but lawlessness and a raft of social problems have attended the latter-day gold rush. From multimedia reporting by Jude Sheerin and Anna Bressanin at BBC News Magazine:

“The male-to-female ratio here is widely estimated to be about 10:1. Many women do not feel safe walking the streets alone.

Bailey Moreland, 25, a barista at Meg-A-Latte coffee shop, carries a stun gun everywhere she goes.

She has had men hit on her even after she points out that she is not only heavily pregnant but happily engaged.

‘Being in a bar, going to the gas station, walking on the street, you’ll get hooted and hollered at,’ she says.

‘I don’t make eye contact with anybody.’

But for many in a nation still bruised by recession, the modern-day gold rush here is a symbol of America’s genius for reinvention.

One of them is Carl Trudel, a 37-year-old maintenance man at the Fox Run motorhome park on the city outskirts.

He sold everything he had after the property market went bust in Florida to migrate north in 2012.

The singleton’s loyal companion in the trailer he calls home is his dog, Dooley. He lavishes affection on the Staffordshire terrier.

Living in Williston is ‘not easy’ and can be ‘very lonely,’ says Trudel.

Yet despite its rowdy bars, runaway prices, long queues at the laundrette or petrol station, and the often-bare supermarket shelves, he seems content.

‘If you have the ambition, the plan, the skills, you will make it here,” insists Trudel. ‘It’s really up to you.

‘But absolutely the American dream is here. That’s why I’m here. And so far it’s happening. Absolutely.'”