Ratings in an isolated community?

Hypothetical question: You have a large population of chess fans who live far away from a major city or town (8 hours at least) where there is a USCF club, but they have a very enthusiastic club in their community. They've got lots of books, computers, Wi-Fi, the whole deal, but none of them has a rating. However, some of them are very very strong players and, if entered into a tournament on the mainland, would easily play at master level or above.

So let's say they all whip out their credit cards and join USCF and start running official tournaments and sending in their results to USCF. Given a large enough population, can they get ratings? How many players would they need before the ratings were actually valid? And what is they highest they could expect to go with all of them starting at zero?

I'm not a statistician, but they can certainly get ratings but the ratings would only be accurate in their local pool. If the population is large enough, you probably could get high rated players, maybe even a couple over 2200.