CHALLENGING KEN WHITE’s article on Paddlefish in the News Leader

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Mar 132018
 

A year ago – almost to the day – Ken White published an article on the opening of the 2017 paddlefish season on the Osage River and its tributaries. A couple of days ago, we found an almost identical article in a couple of regional newspapers, including the Springfield News-Leader. Last year, we wrote to Mr. White, noting the absence of any reference to the artificial breeding program for paddlefish at Blind Pony hatchery run by the Department of Conservation. Made necessary by the destruction of this ancient fish’s primary spawning beds when Truman Dam closed, the fish now trapped in lakes or swimming the upper or lower reaches of the Osage are hatchery spawn, and paddlefish snagging season is an outgrowth of the put-and-take program, fundamentally no different than hatchery trout with the same potential for disastrous genetic outcome.

Repeatedly, Mr. White refers to their “spawning run . ..  when the fish are concentrated in their spawning grounds.” Then he speaks of their “spawning rituals.”  Mr. White, please verify with an ichthyologist or limnologist that they are in fact successfully spawning in Missouri rivers. And he ends the piece with snaggers “ready to hook a fish that has survived for centuries.” As the paddlefish no longer successfully reproduces, they will “survive for centuries” only if the expensive artifical spawning program of the Conservation Department survives future budget cuts and the genetics don’t degenerate with reproducing a limited gene pool.

Right: Paddlefish legally snagged on the James River arm of Table Rock Lake near Cape Fair. 

“Paddlefish have been lost from four states and Canada, and eleven of twenty two states within the remaining species range now list the paddlefish as endangered, threatened, or a species of special concern. Restoration of paddlefish populations is a shared goal of many state and federal agencies.” (USGS)

Below: Map from USGS paddlefish study showing the diminishing range of the paddlefish

 

If journalists like Mr. White continue to ignore the scientific realities of conservation of species, how will the public be able to make informed choices when such issues are presented in the public forum? Truman Dam is the source of the paddlefish’s dilemma. Had the public realized the consequences of this monstrously unwise project, the lawsuit might have had a different outcome. At the time, the Conservation Department repressed the findings of their fisheries biologists because one of the commissioners was an avid supporter of the project. Ignorance continues, abetted by Mr. White.

Last year, we even offered to send him a copy of our book, Damming the Osage. Mr. White did not reply. So this year, we won’t email him our suggestions. We’ll just share our thoughts with you.

March 11, 2017:
Your article was informative about the paddlefish and included some local color and good pictures. However, there was no mention of the sad fact that snagging is a put and take fishery. The “spawning run” is a swim up the river to futility. Paddlefish snagged in the Osage above Bagnell Dam and James River arm of Table Rock are artificially reproduced and raised at the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Blind Pony Hatchery. This is a hugely expensive operation and will, in the long run, produce a genetically unfit creature that resembles the malformed rainbow trout that are the product of generations of aquaculture. Department biologists are well aware of this and it can be overcome somewhat by mixing in genetic material from paddlefish from other regions but that’s a lot of trouble and adds even more expense.
Truman Dam destroyed the only reliable paddlefish spawning environment. Occasionally eggs are produced on the upper Osage and James but there’s no indication they survive and mature.  It’s a very bad situation and if the public doesn’t understand it, the extraordinary measures that may be necessary in the future for the survival of the species may not be undertaken, as funds are research will surely be necessary.
We cover this in a book we published several years ago, Damming the Osage. If you’d like a copy, please email me your mailing address. We have quite a discussion of these issues on our website: www.dammingtheosage.com
It’s a nice piece, but incomplete. Sooner or later there will be more challenges for the paddlefish and only a community of well-informed sportsmen stand between survival and extinction. Truth is they are hanging from a slender thread even with the heroic actions of the Department of Conservation.

Our sons, Strader and Ross, supplied some video of paddlefish in China which we incorporated into a short video on the current dilemma of the paddlefish worldwide. See it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rmT090b9NT0

Damming the Osage and James Fork of the White are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Coon Ridge Novelty Shop, Reeds Spring

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Mar 082018
 

Roadside souvenir, crafts and novelty shops were a feature of automobile-era Ozark tourism. Much of the merchandise was locally produced. Some were traditional pioneer crafts; some were recent innovations like the concrete drip vessels. Sometimes chenille bedspreads produced in factories in southern Appalachia flapped in the breeze. By the 1950s, inexpensive souvenirware from Japan had arrived on some shelves. Coon Ridge Novelty Shop in Reeds Spring appears to have specialized in Ozark drip pottery and handmade hickory baskets.

Bass Fishing “The Rock”

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Mar 012018
 

Even early dam opponents conceded fishing was good in newly filled reservoirs. Decaying vegetation and flooded timber provided fertility and cover for the fish.

One species drives sport fishing on Table Rock Lake, and hundreds of other government reservoirs – the largemouth black bass. They are superbly adapted to artificial lakes and they hit artificial lures with wild abandon.

As expected, Table Rock was excellent fishing soon after the dam was completed. This 1962 photograph of Virgil Ward and guide Dick Hovick with a two-day catch of Table Rock big mouth was in an ad for Ward’s “Bass-Buster” lures. This syndicated fishing show was often filmed there. Fifty years later, bass growth has slowed, but “The Rock,” as Table Rock Lake is called, hosts hundreds of bass tournaments. Since the lake filled, Missouri Department of Conservation biologists have kept track of fish populations. The Department’s “Annual Prospects Report” stated, “Fishing for black bass should be good in 2016.”

James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River (page 320)

James Fork of the White is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Reeds Spring, Real Photo Postcard, 1930s

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Feb 072018
 

For the auto-driving tourist to Branson, the signs were out  . . .  “Welcome … Drive In and LOOK” . . .  and (hopefully) buy some trinkets, food or gas. You could drink a Coke, gas up and shop this splendid selection of Ozark drip pottery and cedar novelties in a short stop in Reeds Spring. Many of the cedar boxes were made locally under small factory conditions and had decals evoking Shepherd of the Hills Country. At the time these roadside attractions were disparaged, but today many of the items they sold are high priced collectibles. Look closely at the loaded shelves in this photograph. Next time you browse through an antique mall or flea market, scan those shelves for similar items. Nowadays, foreign manufactured items compete with locally made tourist items.

This image is used in a section about Reeds Spring in James Fork of the White (p. 87).  The book is available on amazon.com, on this website  and at Barnes & Noble.

 

A SWALLOW HOLE, DRY CREEKS AND SINKING STREAMS

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Jan 232018
 

Since mid-December, the Springfield News Leader has followed the discovery and monitoring of a recently opened up “swallow hole” on the James River, near the Greenway Trail in southwest Springfield.

A dramatic sucking sound accompanies the whirling vortex as hundreds of gallons of the stream’s water disappears down the dark hole. It’s a graphic auditory and visual illustration of the porous nature of the karst typography we live on.

Loring Bullard, author of Jordan Creek: Story of an Urban Stream and past president of the Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, was one of those who found the swallow hole. He described the whirlpool as “a crack in the creek bed . . . sucking hundreds of gallons of water into a subterranean channel that likely exited more than a mile downstream at Rader Spring.”

Our research for James Fork of the White led us to Rader Spring as well. An unspectacular outpouring in a field near Wilson Creek, the spring did not historically attract the leisure class for picnics and dalliances. Still, it is instructive of our landscape. Of Rader Spring, we wrote:

The spring only a hydrologist could love pumps around six or eight million gallons a day into the now-cleaned-up Wilson Creek – a third as much as Missouri’s twentieth biggest spring. Still, it’s a lot of water, but size is not what endears it to geologists. The Association of Missouri Geologists took a field trip here and Kenneth C. Thompson wrote, “Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of Rader Spring and its supply system are the reversible sinkholes or estavellas that occur in the Wilson Creek valley. These curious karst features accept water in drier seasons and discharge water as springs during rainy seasons.” (p. 53)

The mysterious movement of water under the surface of our earth has been studied and pondered by generations of geologists, hydrologists, landowners as well as recreationalists who observe the outcomes of that movement. Dry creeks and sinking streams, which have intermittent water supplies, also prove that, although we may not see it, water courses through a complex subsurface system that does not necessarily copy the channels we see from a low water bridge. Pouring dye into one water source and waiting to see where it resurfaces is the most common method of tracking that movement.

Rader Spring is a textbook example of how leaky the Springfield Plateau is. Fluorescent dye introduced into creeks and sinks from as far away as I-44 have been detected in Rader’s waters. From a dry branch of Nichols Creek six miles away dye was injected that reached the spring in six days. Rader is only 1.3 miles from Springfield’s Southwest Waste Water Treatment Plant. (p. 53)

Fluorescent dyes have been introduced into some dry streambeds and sinkholes along Flat Creek a few miles from Cassville and emerged in the great spring at Roaring River. That twenty-six-million gallon-a-day frigid water source for a state trout park is not in the James River basin. Subsurface water movement does not always follow present-day surface stream configurations. (p. 94)

James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Joseph Philibert Cemetery, final resting place for Granny Gore, “Cherokee Doctor”

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Jan 212018
 

If you turn west from Highway 13 on Joe Bald Road, you’ll pass the entrance to Joseph Philibert Cemetery. Named for the first white settler in Stone County, this hilltop cemetery is where the graves of twenty small graveyards in the Table Rock Lake basin were relocated.

Among the markers are those for William Carol “Tipton” Gore and his second wife, Nancy “Granny” Gore, “Cherokee Doctor.” Nancy Gore was born in Tennessee about 1820, married William Gore and they moved to Arkansas, then to Stone County about 1848. They settled near the confluence of the James and White rivers. Their neighbors were the Joseph Philibert (1812-1884) and William Gillis families who had a trading post where they bought furs from the Indians. The Philibert family graveyard was near the site of the trading post. Twenty-two graves were in the old cemetery when Table Rock Lake began to fill. Among those were the Gores.

Headstones were modest, and many burials were only marked with rocks to indicate a grave. A new marker was made for Granny Gore, a Cherokee medicine woman and wife of pioneer William Tipton Gore. Small family cemeteries in the basin of Table Rock Reservoir were moved to higher ground before the lake filled. Headstones and remains of twenty graveyards, such as they were, were dug up and relocated in the new Joseph Philibert Cemetery just north of Kimberling City.
                                                                  James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River

Granny Gore’s Ozark Folk Medicine by Sherman Lee Pompey:

And finally in the words of Granny herself, “You see, the good Lord made herbs an’ roots for the purpose of medicines. A lot of medicines that we used in the early hills was nothing more than the same thing or the artificial substitute of these things used today by modern medical science.”

Henry Doherty, Powersite Dam and the Empire District Electric Company

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Jan 152018
 

Harnessing the power of moving water for profit and community betterment has been an impulse for many an entrepreneur. On the White River, the first dam to close the flow was #Powersite, a small, almost run-of-the-river, dam that held back enough water to ‘fatten up’ the river without drastically affecting the flow or habitat.

Financial overruns caused the initial backers to withdraw their support for building Powersite. Enter New York banker Henry #Doherty who was ‘collecting’ small power companies in southwest Missouri and consolidating them into what became Empire District Electric. He financed the construction of Powersite.

The dam closed in 1913 but White River waters remained warm allowing for fishing and swimming and water sports. The newly formed riverine lake was called #Taneycomo – some said it was a nod to beautiful Lake Como in northern Italy, but the accepted explanation is a mash up of Taney County Missouri. More than forty years later a much bigger dam, Table Rock, was built upstream bringing drastic changes to the #WhiteRiver, Lake Taneycomo and the James Fork of the White.

Like Bagnell Dam, Powersite Dam was started by men who soon encountered financial difficulties and sold out to bigger concerns. The St. Louis investors who organized the Ozark Power and Water Company engaged the Ambursen Hydraulic Construction Company of Boston to build it. Nils Ambursen, a Norwegian immigrant engineer, had designed a hollow cement slab and buttress structure used successfully elsewhere. Replacing the original backers was Wall Street accumulator of energy companies, Henry Latham Doherty. Doherty had already acquired a handful of small utility companies in southwest Missouri that were branded Empire District Electric Company. The White River operation kept its original name until being folded into the Empire group in 1927.

Cutline for this 1933 press photo reads “Col. And Mrs. Doherty watched happily a Christmas party which the Dohertys gave at Coral FLA.”

The next year Doherty organized the National Committee for Birthday Balls, which sponsored dances across the country to raise money for Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs Foundation to treat victims of polio. The president had been paralyzed from the waist down himself with the disease since 1921.

Henry L. Doherty built his holding company Cities Service into a gigantic combination of all three sources of energy–gas, oil, and electricity. His charm and friendship with FDR kept him from many of the problems capitalists had during the New Deal.

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River…

LENS & PEN TITLES Also Available at Barnes and Noble

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Dec 292017
 

In the pre-Christmas countdown days, we dropped by our local Barnes & Noble to see the offerings in their regional section. Prominently displayed were four of our titles: just-released James Fork of the White; our previous “river book,” Damming the Osage; perennial favorite, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness; and our early foray into Ozarks tourism, See The Ozarks.

For a small publisher this is a big win!  When our distributor closed its doors last spring, we found ourselves in the same situation many others are in – books with an audience but no avenue to get them on the retail shelves. Unlike amazon.com, major retail outlets are reluctant to set up accounts for small individual publishers. Using regional or national distributors, (like Partners, our former distributor) they can set up one account per distributor and order multiple titles from multiple publishers.  But this was no longer an option for us.

With the publication of our new book, James Fork of the White, and its potentially large audience in our region, Renee Hunt, Community Business Development Manager, at our local  (Springfield, Missouri) B&N helped us contact their main office and we were able to establish Lens & Pen Press as a vendor for Barnes & Noble. The obvious, happy outcome was the sight of four of our titles on the regional shelves during the busy pre-Christmas days.

Happy New Year!

“An Indispensable Book” – Steve Wiegenstein on James Fork of the White

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Dec 052017
 

For an author, it’s deeply gratifying when a reader really understands what you’re doing and why. Steve Wiegenstein’s review of JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozarks River is that kind of review. Steve understands the subject and our own non-linear style of treating our topics.  Most importantly, he understand the Ozarks, the land, the streams, the people. Steve is the author of a series of historical novels set in a mid-nineteenth century Utopian community named Daybreak in a valley of the St. Francis River in Madison County.  The third in this series, just-published The Language of Trees, has earned high praise.

James Fork of the White is available on our website, www.beautifulozarks.com, at Barnes & Noble and on amazon.com

Steve Pokin on James River book: “This is the book for you”

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Dec 032017
 

Last week Steve Pokin, the Springfield News Leader‘s columnist of the unique and sometimes quirky aspects of Springfield, interviewed Leland about our new book, JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

In his columns, “Pokin Around” and “Answer Man,” Steve answers readers’ curious queries, investigates puzzles and reveals many of Springfield’s little known facts and interesting personalities. One of In his columns on the (eutrophic) small lakes of Southern Hills subdivision provided needed background information for us as we discussed Galloway Creek and other small tributaries flowing into the James.

We’re gratified that he concluded, “Interested in the James River? This is the book for you.”

Available from our website, www.beautifulozarks.com (postage paid), Barnes & Noble and at amazon.com.

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