Gail Collins traveled from Manhattan to North Dakota to see what a real American boomtown looks like and report her findings to readers of the New York Times. 

It is sort of like what Edwin Tappan Adney did for Harper’s Weekly when he spent a year in the high north, chronicling in words and photographs the Klondike gold rush to include the tough climb up the Chilkoot pass, the long and dangerous float down the Yukon River, and the often futile search for gold in the claims around Dawson. Adney’s description of a hotel 19 miles up the Chilkoot Trail suggests that the mood of boom towns hasn’t changed all that much: