When Sherry left town, it was with the idea that things would be different. Williston, North Dakota offered jobs and hope. She soon got a cellphone and said she’s working in construction.

Depending on which Sherry you believe, Williston has either provided stability, work and a partner — or become a new setting for a continuing alcohol-fueled, troubled existence.

Williston is known as Boomtown, U.S.A. — there’s a sign bragging as much off 2nd Avenue East, just inside what was a city with a population of 14,000 at the time of the 2010 census. The discovery of oil under nutrient-rich land farmed for the last 150 years has brought thousands of workers here, by some reports doubling the population. But the wealth they seek seems to be cancelled out for many by a high cost of living and the price of pleasure often required to maintain sanity in a place so brutal. Williston is in a part of the country usually considered the middle of nowhere. It is a cold and barren prairie. In winter, temperatures hover below freezing, with wind chills falling to -30 degrees and worse. Early European settlers came here either because it reminded them of their Scandinavian homeland or because it’s a place so desolate they were sure no one would bother them. Before the oil boom, people didn’t move to Williston — they moved away from it. Even today, there are only two things to do in Williston: work and drink. For many of the workers, Williston is a place of hope until you get there.

I was hoping to find my friend Sherry, a homeless woman from the tiny town of Ponemah, Minnesota on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. My first stop was Whispers, the “original” Williston strip club, a friend and native of the town told me. Just next door is Heartbreakers, the recently opened strip club. Both are just a block from the train station that welcomes many to town. I thought someone around here may have seen Sherry when she arrived. No dice.

“Women have no business coming here. You can disappear in this town real quick,” the bartender at Whispers told me. “The reality is this country hasn’t seen anything like this since the gold rush.”

The Wild West, the gold rush and the lawless, pioneering past of the United States are popular themes in Williston and beyond in North Dakota and Montana, where the oil boom is in full swing. For anyone with the slightest interest in the concept of the American Dream, this is the place to be. It’s fascinating, depressing, hopeful and appalling all at the same time. It is America on a serious scale: macho but vulnerable, growing but falling apart, booming while pretending a bust isn’t possible.

Hopping on a train and making a break for one of the most bleak environments this country has to offer was a brave decision for Sherry. In texts and the occasional phone call, she had told me that she’s making it here, but Williston can be a dangerous place for a woman. They’re hard to find here, maybe more so than reliable and affordable housing. Websites warn those going to Williston and other towns in the Bakken Oil Patch for work to plan ahead. You can expect to sleep in your car, but don’t do so in the winter, they warn. That’s when the cold will kill you. But the workers still come, with housing or without. The warnings go unheeded.

Women still come, too, and plenty has been written about the dangers of life on the stripper’s stage and for the fairer sex in general in Williston. The women I saw that night at Whispers didn’t look like they were from Williston. They had implants, haircuts and clothes that reeked of low-end Vegas.