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…
