{"id":14538,"date":"2016-10-13T09:38:41","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T15:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=14538"},"modified":"2016-10-14T07:50:22","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T13:50:22","slug":"fleeing-the-bakken-leather-worker-lands-in-shepherd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/10\/fleeing-the-bakken-leather-worker-lands-in-shepherd\/","title":{"rendered":"Fleeing the Bakken, leather worker lands in Shepherd"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ron<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

Ron Jore poses with some of his tools at his workshop near Shepherd.<\/p><\/div>\n

Like many people, Ron Jore came to Yellowstone County because of the Bakken oil field. But he wasn\u2019t trying to get closer to the field. He was trying to get away from it.<\/p>\n

Jore brought his leather-working business here two years ago from Watford City, N.D., where he had planned to spend his entire life. His grandparents had moved there from Norway, and his parents had spent their lives there.<\/p>\n

Jore grew up far enough out in the country that he couldn\u2019t see the house of his nearest neighbor. Perhaps a dozen vehicles a week would pass by his house.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hadn\u2019t intended to leave,\u201d he said. \u201cI was two miles from where I was born and two miles from where they were going to bury me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when the Bakken boomed, the population of Watford City exploded from 1,744 in 2010 to an estimated 6,708 last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. At the height of the boom, Jore said, as many as 15,000 people were living in and around Watford City.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Traffic by his house climbed to as many as a thousand vehicles a day, he said, and a half-dozen oil wells were within 700 feet of his place. He and his wife, who had taught there for 30 years, decided it was time to get out.<\/p>\n

They have a son in Billings, so they moved into a place on Scandia Road near Shepherd. It\u2019s a comfortable place, with a small fire burning on a rainy afternoon, a few horses behind the house and the pelt of a coyote he shot nailed to a wall.<\/p>\n

Jore, in glasses and with a toothpick firmly attached to his jaw, isn\u2019t quite ready at age 56 to retire, so he has gradually been getting his leather work going again. Working with leather has been a lifelong passion.<\/p>\n

\"You<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

You can tell a workman by his workbench, says Jore, shown working at his bench.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI like the feel of leather,\u201d he said. \u201cI like how it smells.\u201d And, he added, \u201cI like how it ages.\u201d<\/p>\n

His parents gave him a Tandy leathercraft kit for Christmas when he was 14 years old, spurring his interest in fancy leather belts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to wear one,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to make them.\u201d<\/p>\n

He worked his way through Williston State College making belts and billfolds. When he was 23, he bought a leather-working shop in Watford City and began learning the fine art of making chaps, holsters and knife sheaths, as well as repairing boots and saddles.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou feel guilty charging sometimes\u201d for some of the more complicated projects, he said.<\/p>\n

He also has made eight saddles, starting with one he made for himself. That came, he said, after he was told, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to know how to build a saddle to fix one.\u201d<\/p>\n

He found that he was more attracted to repairs than to building saddles from scratch, a preference he attributed to Attention Deficit Disorder. That sounds like an odd affliction for someone doing careful leather work, but Jore doesn\u2019t begrudge the time his work takes.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

A carefully tooled scrapbook cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cYou get lost in it,\u201d he said. \u201cPretty soon, you\u2019re looking up, and hours have gone by.\u201d<\/p>\n

He keeps a couple of scrapbooks full of his work, from chaps and chinks to before-and-after photos of saddles he has repaired and refurbished. One positive side of the oil boom, he said, was that ranchers could afford to repair saddles that had fallen into disuse years ago.<\/p>\n

He described a few of his favorite projects, including a saddle that dates back to the 1880s in Texas. He worked on another saddle whose owner had ridden on it from northeastern Wyoming to Miles City in 1933. The saddle came to Jore in pieces stored in a box, and he warned that it would be expensive to repair.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry about it,\u201d the owner said. It turned out that he owned a half-dozen oil wells of his own, and Jore wound up repairing eight or nine saddles for him.<\/p>\n

Many saddles, he said, haven\u2019t been oiled anywhere but on the seat since they were made, but he gives them a thorough oiling. He wouldn\u2019t even estimate how long it takes to complete repairs of the hundreds of saddles he has repaired.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t keep track,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d be scared to. If you figured out your dollar rate, you\u2019d get disgusted with yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now in Yellowstone County, he has placed a few items on consignment in local leather shops, and he said that skilled local leather workers have forced him to up his game.<\/p>\n

\"Ron<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

Jore shows some of his work.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI probably can\u2019t tool as well as they can,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I can tool a hell of a lot better than most.\u201d<\/p>\n

He keeps a small but neat shop in his house, and a wall is lined with the tools of his trade.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou look at a man\u2019s workbench,\u201d he said, \u201cand you can kind of tell what kind of man he is.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interview ended there, but Jore wasn\u2019t quite done. He called a bit later to urge Montana to be sure to require adequate setbacks so that what happened to his Watford City house doesn\u2019t happen to others.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we should have to make it easy for the oil companies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jore\u2019s North Fork Saddlery can be reached at (701) 770-5616.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many people, Ron Jore came to Yellowstone County because of the Bakken oil field. But he wasn\u2019t trying to get closer to the field. He was trying to get away from it. Jore brought his leather-working business here two years ago from Watford City, N.D., where he had planned to spend his entire life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":14539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[623,5075,5076],"class_list":["post-14538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-bakken","tag-ron-jore","tag-watford-city","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}