Watford City lies within the Bakken formation, a geological formation covering some 200,000 square miles in North Dakota and parts of neighboring Montana and Saskatchewan. Oil was first discovered here in 1951, but efforts to extract it from the rock proved challenging until recently, when oil companies began taking advantage of new technology to tap the lucrative source, which is estimated to hold up to 18 billion barrels of oil. As a result, this community on the state's western high plains has become something of a boomtown. Learn More...