Sneak Peek! The Ozarks in Missouri History edited by Lynn Morrow

Interest in scholarly study of the Ozarks has grown steadily in recent years, and The Ozarks in Missouri History: Discoveries in an American Region will be welcomed by historians and Ozark enthusiasts alike.  This lively collection gathers fifteen essays, many of them pioneering efforts in the field, that originally appeared in the Missouri Historical Review, the journal of the State Historical Society. 

In his introduction, editor Lynn Morrow gives the reader background on the interest in and the study of the Ozarks. The scope of the collection reflects the diversity of the region. Micro-studies by such well-known contributors as John Bradbury, Roger Grant, Gary Kremer, Stephen Limbaugh Sr., and Milton Rafferty explore the history, culture, and geography of this unique region. They trace the evolution of the Ozarks, examine the sometimes-conflicting influences exerted by St. Louis and Kansas City, and consider the sometimes highly charged struggle by federal, state, and local governments to define conservation and the future of Current River.


Excerpt:

“Good Water & Wood but the

Country Is a Miserable Botch”

Flatland Soldiers Confront the Ozarks

John F. Bradbury Jr.

Professor William Shea has examined the image of Arkansas during the Civil War in a perceptive essay entitled “A Semi-Savage State.” After studying hundreds of Yankee accounts, Shea concluded that Arkansas did not meet the standards of volunteers who compared it to their own agricultural homelands in the Midwest. Their largely negative impressions still affect the state’s reputation today. In this essay Shea concerned himself only with Arkansas; however, to get there, Union troops marched through southern Missouri. By geographical extension many of Shea’s observations about Union soldiers in Arkansas, especially regarding their reactions to the landscape, also apply to the Ozarks of Missouri.^l

As in Shea’s study, the sources for reactions to the Missouri Ozarks include hundreds of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and reminiscences by United States volunteers who served in the hills. The sources prove especially rich for the first two years of the war, when the region was the most strategically critical and both sides committed their greatest efforts to the area. Despite rugged terrain that impeded military operations, thousands of Union soldiers in the Army of Southwest Missouri and the Army of the Frontier marched to the battlefields of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove. By the time they were drawn off to other theaters, midwestern volunteers in four Union armies ultimately had triangulated all of southwestern Missouri and had reached as far south as Fayetteville and Van Buren, Arkansas. The men traveled nearly all of those miles on foot, giving them plenty of opportunity to study the terrain and express their opinions of the landscape. The men appreciated the extensive oak and pine forests and abundant springs of clear water, but as it did in Arkansas, the novelty of the wilderness hill country soon wore off.

The greatest number of Union troops moved into the Ozark Highland from St. Louis and three railroads ending at Ironton, Rolla, and Sedalia. As the fighting developed along the western flank of the Ozarks between Springfield, Missouri, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, the direct military line from St. Louis through Rolla into southwestern Missouri became the main artery of federal control. The road followed an old path from St. Louis known to geographers as the interior ridge route through the northern Ozarks. In the 1830s it had served as the state road from St. Louis to Springfield and was the northern branch of the Trail of Tears. The Frisco and Burlington Northern Railroads have followed the same corridor across the Ozark Highland, as have Route 66 and Interstate 44. The route passed along the divide between watersheds, through terrain densely covered with oaks, relatively level but poorly watered, and disappointing to travelers who looked for Ozark “mountains.” Southwest of St. Louis, the road crossed stony ridges and unremarkable post oak and prairie flats that did not always present the area in its best light.²

The volunteers spent the first one hundred miles of the journey from St. Louis aboard trains of the Southwest Branch of the Pacific Railroad, following the ridge path to its railhead at Rolla. Before stepping off the

cars at the Rolla depot, the troops had passed through miles of rough and undeveloped country. The rocks along the railroad line impressed one Iowa soldier, who wrote: “Every formation described in geology here has its representative, apparently. There were red, blue, black, gray, yellow, white, green, purple, speckled, brindled, and porphyritic rocks . . . it is an awful mean country, Missouri is.” Other soldiers called it desolate, “rantankerous, half-manufactured” territory “hardly worth fighting for,” with soil “shallow and strong,” and “poor enough to starve a cat.” An Iowa infantryman expressed similar sentiments, “Of all the unearthly, desolated regions, this takes the palm.” Still another Iowan who stepped off the train stated his considered opinion: “I am very much disappointed in Missouri, so far as I have seen it. Of all the God-forsaken countries, this is the worst. The whole section of the country, from St. Louis to here, is not worth the life of a single northern soldier, and were it not for the vital principles involved, would not pay for half an hour’s defense. As our good-natured Major remarked the other day, it is an absolute crime to kill a secesh in this part, for no greater punishment could be inflicted on him, than to compel him to live here.”³

   

Situated on the ridge route equidistant from St. Louis and Springfield, the railhead town of Rolla was barely old enough to be strategically important. No one had lived in the immediate area prior to 1845, although the Maramec Iron Works had opened in 1829 only a few miles to the east. Railroad construction along the interior ridge route resulted in the creation of Phelps County in 1857, with the designation of Rolla as the county seat. The town’s military significance derived from the fortuitous circumstances that left it as the terminus of the Southwest Branch from 1860 to 1866 and the counterclockwise progression of the first half of the war in the Ozarks. Thousands of Union troops passed through the railhead during the war because of its position on the federal line of communications. But anyone expecting an impressive town at this strategic spot was disappointed, and it was a rare soldier who had a kind word for the place. An Irish volunteer in the Seventh Missouri Infantry, sent as a reinforcement to the railhead, grumbled, “We have been very fortunate in getting good quarters, until we came to this God-forsaken place.” Another Missouri soldier described the location as “a poor post oak ridge, worn bare by soldiers of everything but roots.” A former printer turned infantryman from Bloomington, Illinois, told readers of the hometown newspaper: “Rolla was a Peruvian chieftain who was killed by Pizarro. If Pizarro were here now, Rolla would kill him.”⁴

The four-year-old town of about six hundred citizens sported a motley collection of seventy-five unpainted buildings scattered along the railroad tracks in what one soldier said resembled “the effects of a recent earthquake.” The new two-story brick courthouse and county jail were the only buildings of any note. Siege guns in an earthen fortification overlooked everything. The army’s log headquarters building was usually awash in a sea of choking dust or churned mud. A newspaper correspondent who stepped off into mud at the depot said, “There was the feeling that the place was a mortar bed and the inhabitants were preparing to make bricks.” Rolla had “miserable” hotel accommodations, mixed with a collection of “oyster shops, eating houses, and other traps for the hard earned wages of the soldier.” Looking closer, the men found it “mean and dirty” and every other door marked “saloon.” The town looked busy enough: freight and forage were stockpiled everywhere, dozens of the army’s quartermaster and commissary warehouses lined the tracks, and hundreds of horses and mules occupied the government’s corrals or pulled ponderous supply wagons through the streets. But it was a warborn flush; the army created the only business. Take away the war, said an Iowa City soldier in 1862, and Rolla was “an exotic without the surrounding to support it.”⁵

Most of the troops ultimately marched out of Rolla toward Springfield. Initially level, the land becomes increasingly rugged at the crossings of the Little Piney, Big Piney, Roubidoux, and Gasconade, all of which notch through the ridge trail. Marching up and down the Gasconade hills, the soldiers invariably thought it the poorest, roughest country they had ever seen and the spring-fed streams the coldest and clearest they had ever waded. For infantrymen toiling along the primitive road, the Ozarks provided a monotonous panorama of “scrub-oaks, up hill, limestone rocks; down hill, creeks, deserted cabins.” Iowan Nathan King called it “Opossum Country” and claimed that there were not two acres of tillable ground within five miles. On the whole, said an Illinois infantryman, the region was “a miserable, rough, rocky, broken, worthless wilderness” and remarked that “what ever induced these people to locate in this wilderness is more than I can conceive.”⁶

The troops marched through the “miserable” village of Waynesville, said to be one of those places necessary “for horse racing, quarrels & fights and where bad whiskey and poor tobacco is offered for sale at reasonable prices for approved credit or country produce.” By the middle of 1862, a garrison of federal volunteers and local militia entirely occupied the town’s score of buildings and the brick courthouse. The armies did not linger long, but a few soldiers did take time to explore the springs and “curiosities” in the caves along Roubidoux Creek and the Gasconade River, leaving their names “in haunts never tread by human foot.” The huntsmen found the abundance of wild game impressive, and one Illinois soldier saw his first wild turkeys. West of the Gasconade the country becomes gentler as the road ascends the Springfield Plain. The volunteers reported occasional patches of good land, “seldom interspersed with the beauty given to them by the enterprise of a thriving community of men,” but judged only a tenth of the land fit for agriculture.⁷

Fifty-five miles west of Rolla the soldiers discovered Lebanon, the seat of Laclede County, a town so alternately plundered by both sides as early as the beginning of 1862 that it was entirely destitute of even the most common domestic goods. According to Iowa captain Henry Ankeny, “Lebanon has been a better town than Rolla was when we first went there, but all now is gone for a generation to come.” Colonel E. A. Carr warned General Samuel Curtis that he and his staff “must not expect the luxuries of Rolla” when they arrived in Lebanon. One of Curtis’s infantrymen found the town especially cheerless in January 1862: “The streets are a gore of mud, the houses mostly dilapidated and scattered, and presenting a dismal and ominous appearance when visited on a cold cheerless, sunless winter day.”⁸

Nine months later, the other climatological extreme prevailed in the drought-stricken hills. Away from the Gasconade, good water was scarce on the ridge road, and this caused long, dry marches between campsites. Parched soldiers straggling into Lebanon had to skim the scum from the only pond that had not dried up. Finally, twelve miles east of Springfield at Mill Springs, thirsty marchers found plenty of fresh water.⁹

At Springfield the troops arrived at the gateway to the Southwest and the first town worthy of the designation within two hundred miles on the ridge road from St. Louis. The town developed in the 1830s at the intersection of the St. Louis Road with the all-important avenue (later the Telegraph or “Wire” Road) linking settlements on the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. Soon, Springfield developed a thriving regional trade based on the agricultural fertility of the Kickapoo and Grand Prairies that border the city to the west and the north. Its trade associations extended through Fayetteville to the Arkansas River at Van Buren and Fort Smith, the White River via Forsyth, and the Missouri River via Bolivar, Warsaw, and Cole Camp. Commercial connections to St. Louis passed through the Missouri River towns until construction of the Southwest Branch Railroad commenced in the mid-1850s. By 1861 Springfield boasted nearly two thousand citizens in several hundred buildings around the Greene County Courthouse, with churches, a female academy, a bank, blacksmith and machine shops, wagon and harness manufactories, and merchants offering the latest variety of goods. The soldiers liked the place; “pretty” is the word most often used in their diaries and letters. Even Major William G. Thompson, who called the country in the Gasconade hills “God-forsaken,” wrote to his wife, “The truth is I would like to live in Springfield.”¹⁰

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Sneak Peek!

Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude by W. Scott Olsen will be available in three to four weeks.  Pre-order it today! 

 

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology.  W. Scott Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground.  While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Excerpt: 

Thin Places and Thick Time

A Duet for Two Worlds

“Ready to go flying?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“Think I know how to do this?”

Roy Hammerling, a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway.

“I’m counting on it,” he says.

The throttle goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline. It’s a beautiful day for flying. Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle climbing turn to the west.

“I love that initial feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you break free.”

Roy and I are on an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery. We are looking for the place where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for something else as well.

Below us the land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve had three days of hard rain, and overland water moves toward the Maple and Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure but never see.

“I am always amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.”

There is such a thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested.

If you are looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound below us.

“I always felt there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness. But there’s always these things tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this sense of freedom in flying.”

We’ve begun this conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always paused.

“In the airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.”

When I told him I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so long, it nearly erupts.

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears; they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery. Like right now, I look over, and you don’t even have your hands on the controls.”

I smile and point at the autopilot in the panel.

“Oh,” he says, laughing. “See? Mystery explained by a higher power.”

I remember a map I have at home that shows the rock underneath the Dakota soils. Like nearly every map, it’s an aerial perspective. Archean basement rock, billions of years old, from the time when continents first formed and life, nonnucleated single-celled hopes called prokaryotes, first appeared, hides under Fargo. Heading west, however, the rock quickly becomes Cretaceous. The rock of Tyrannosaurus rex. The rock of Giganotosaurus and Triceratops. The rock of Pangaea’s breakup. The rock of the Western Interior Seaway, an ocean in the middle of the continent. The rock of a meteor falling on the Yucatán and killing nearly everything. Keep going west and the rock keeps getting younger. But none of it is visible now. The planet cooled. The glaciers came, scraped every hilltop, and filled every valley with gravel and sand. An ice sheet named Laurentide pushed the Missouri River valley into shape. And when the glaciers moved back, the meltwater Lake Agassiz, the largest inland sea in North American history, deposited sediment and clay. There are marks in the North Dakota soil that reveal where icebergs trapped in retreating pack ice scraped the lake-bottom sediment. You cannot see them from the ground.

“You know,” I say, “I have been told that there is not one single description in the Bible of an angel in the act of landing. There is one scene where a couple of them are zipping around a living room, but otherwise they are almost always in the air. And if they are on the ground, they are frequently in disguise, appearing as commonplace humans. So it would be possible to argue that their true appearance, the place where they can reveal their true nature, is airborne. It may be forcing the idea a bit, coming from a pilot, but it does strike me that there is something intuitive there. Something true about the human character.”

“You can think of Ezekiel being taken up in the fiery chariot, of Jesus’s ascending into clouds, and it lends itself to the idea that heaven and the holy are somewhere above.”

“These guys don’t just dissolve,” I say. “They don’t just fade away into some other state of being. They rise. They take off. They fly.”

“Saint Augustine,” Roy says, “in his Confessions has this great line. He says something like ‘Oh, God, are you the God of the heavens? And if so, are the birds more holy because they fly closer to you?’ He knows that God is in some type of heavenly place. But the question is, where is that place?”

“Today,” I say, “it’s fifteen hundred feet over Dakota farmland.”

“Perhaps not,” Roy says. “Augustine concludes that the way people need to fly like birds is to go within.” He looks out the window. “But I will admit, if Augustine had a Cessna, he might have changed his mind.”