THE JAMES: TRANSFORMATION OF AN OZARK RIVER

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
May 072023
 

Printed postcard, 1907. The genesis of the square-ended (and, as above, sometimes pointed), flat bottomed boats specifically for commercial floating on the James and White rivers is poorly documented. Many theories have been advanced as to how they were developed and how they came to be called “johnboats.”

We chose to profile the James River in a 352-page all color book because its watershed contains the largest town in the Ozarks, several impoundments, and the region’s most famous and oldest tourist destination: The Shepherd of the Hills Country now known as Branson.

Each phase of development has in varying degrees impacted the next. The resulting culture is a product of art, literature, technology, commerce, national trends, and politics, intersecting with each other and the region’s own natural resources. It’s a compelling and complicated tale. The messages are applicable to the entire Ozarks and even beyond. Perhaps the most intriguing transformation is the change from free-flowing river to reservoirs.

Today, suburban Springfieldians in canoes floating the James often take out at Galena where the river becomes a lake. In the pre-Table Rock Dam 1930s, outfitters like the Galena Boat Co. provided boats for 75¢ per day, tents 75¢, folding chairs 10¢, and guides $3.00, for a downstream adventure that attracted sportsmen and sportswomen from across the nation. Their brochure advertised: “The trip from Galena to Branson may be made in five days if but few stops are made, but it would be more enjoyable to allow a week if possible – floating leisurely along on clear, cool waters that rush through small necks, gush over rocky shoals, and simmer into large, gleaming, lazy pools. “

Table Rock Lake favored largemouth bass over smallmouth and motorboats replaced poled johnboats. Because of the new reservoir’s proximity to an established tourist attraction, and its deep, clear waters, it became the most visited of the Corps of Engineers White River projects. There is a forgotten history to this impoundment. Shortly after Empire District Electric closed Powersite Dam, they announced they would build a larger dam at Table Rock. Lake Taneycomo became such a tourist draw the business community rejoiced. When the federal government took over building high dams, supporters altered their advocacy of private hydro-power to match the Corps’ flood control justification. James Fork of the White chronicles such environmental changes and how our perceptions of, and interaction with nature adjust to these transformations. The story of this major Ozark stream is an ongoing saga, its ending unwritten.

 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

OZARKS TOURISM OF THE 1940S CAPTURED ON CLOTH

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Apr 052023
 

Souvenir cotton card table cover designed and printed by Steve Miller, 1940s.

Artist Steve Miller created most of Jim Owen’s advertising. He also designed the logo for an Owen dairy milk bottle which is today a pricey collector’s item. Miller was from Kirksville and after teaching in Mexico and Columbia, Missouri, became enamored with the Ozarks, setting up shop in Branson in 1941. Probably the card table sized cloth map, depicting the rustic recreational attractions of the Shepherd of the Hills Country, is from the ‘40s. We’ve found it printed in both red and blue.

Miller’s hillbilly motifs are rendered with the graphic sophistication of a New Yorker cartoonist. More than any artifact in our collection it this textile illustrates the connectivity of the various country attractions of early Branson. The place’s rusticity is artfully depicted. Miller was a fan of days and ways gone by but had a modern design flare. Cartooning gave the old-time attractions a pop culture, post-War look. “Nostalgia Heightens Interest in Ozarks” was the headline of a 1972 Springfield News-Leader article about a speech given by Miller, then the artist-in-residence at the School of the Ozarks.

Miller was mindful of the region’s traditional image. In 1949, he created the giant Nativity scene still used at Christmas on the bluff across Lake Taneycomo from downtown Branson. He joined the staff at the School (now College) of the Ozarks in 1962 where he taught, and curated the Ralph Foster collection of Ozarks artifacts and firearms. His works permeate print media of the region. He died in 1972, survived by wife, a son, and a daughter.

The tablecloth illustration is from See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image, an all color book of advertisements and souvenirs depicting early Ozarks tourism promotions and the image it created for the region. The book provides rich images and a unique aspect of history of Shepherd of the Hills Country, Eureka Springs, the Big Springs Country, Lake of the Ozarks, and more recent developments in this unique region – to answer the question: “What lured generations of travelers to the Ozarks?”

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image, is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $12.50 (half the original price of $24.95), postage paid. See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image is a  96-page all color, hardbound book.

 

CAUGHT AT OSCEOLA MO – Spoonbill / Paddlefish

 Damming the Osage  No Responses »
Mar 042023
 

Paddlefish grow big and photogenic. This late real photo postcard was not mailed, so there’s no postmark—possibly 1950s?

On the back of the low-contrast, rather unfocused postcard is a discussion of the edibility of the “spoonbill catfish,” written in blue ballpoint: “Most people eat them and say they are as good as any other fish—but some say they aren’t fit to eat and give them away. We never eat any so don’t know.” The writer explained, “the bill is about the size of a boat paddle.”

In fact, the more common name for these large plankton filter feeders is paddlefish. Their flesh is quite good, and their eggs are a decent substitute for caviar from sturgeon. In Missouri it’s illegal to transport or sell paddlefish eggs, however. Regulations vary from state to state. There is a legal commercial fishery for paddlefish on the Mississippi River.

Once a low hydroelectric dam at Osceola concentrated the spawning run of paddlefish. Before Truman Dam, the best spawning riffles for the paddlefish were between Osceola and Lake of the Ozarks. Truman Dam now thwarts the spawning run and has covered their opportunity for natural reproduction in Missouri. The Conservation Department maintains the population by raising them in hatcheries. Today artificially raised paddlefish are released into the reservoirs for the benefit of snaggers. Snagging with big treble hooks is the only way they can be taken. You can’t bait a hook with tiny zooplankton.

As beluga sturgeon are now a threatened species, an illegal trade in paddlefish eggs has developed. Poachers with Russian names have been arrested for smuggling paddlefish eggs and the caviar made from them. Their caviar sells for about $250 a pound. Mature females often carry 20 pounds of eggs (roe).

 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, a 304-page color-illustrated book, tells the dramatic saga of human ambition pitted against natural limitations and forces beyond man’s control.

UP SOUTH IN THE OZARKS – Sampling the cultural DNA of a legendary region

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 032023
 

Brooks Blevins lectures frequently after the publication of his many studies of the Ozarks.

5-Star Review of Brooks Blevins new book by Leland Payton

National and regional identities may not have disappeared but what defines a people and their relationship with place has undergone evolution. Colorful identities are challenged by the homogenization of modernization. In rural regions, more than in urban, lifestyle relates more to geographic specificities. A rural place’s reputation may not have been created by—or accurately reflect the perceptions of, its natives. Academic studies of the Ozarks are scarce compared to other regions of the U.S. Tourism and popular culture have largely shaped its image, but not always falsely, Blevins concedes.

Brooks Blevins’ latest take is Up South in the Ozarks. Subtitled, Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins challenges the overall accuracy of the place’s most dominant symbol, the hillbilly, but acknowledges that the definition of a region needs to account for its clichés. Curiously, many Ozarkers accept cartoonish rustic depictions. Professor Blevins melds academic expertise from many disciplines— an appreciation for folklore, familiarity with both literature and journalism—with the personal, insightful observations of a native son. His encyclopedic geographic and historical knowledge is delivered with humor and a talent for metaphor. Throughout he contrasts and compares this Midwestern river-cut uplifted plateau with both the Deep South and the Appalachian Mountains.

Missionaries and writers descended on the southern highlands of Appalachia before they came to save souls or describe the more isolated Ozarks. In the chapter, “A Time Zone Away and a Generation Behind,” he analogizes the Ozarks to a younger sibling: “You were never first, never original, never completely yourself. Even at school, your teachers knew you as your big brother’s little brother. If that’s your story, you know how the Ozarks feels.”

His chapter, “The South According to Andy,” makes the case that the 1960s TV show set in a fictional mountain south small town was a portrait well received by Ozarkers: “Andy’s South was not the South. It was a South. … It was a projection of something quite southern, even if not a complete portrait of the South.”

Dr. Blevins doesn’t idealize the Ozarks. He confronts the idea that the mountain south was exempt from the past racial prejudices that characterize the Deep South. In “Revisiting Race Relations in the Upland South,” he admits his earlier position based on that premise was wrong: “But the equation of a small Black population with a comparative degree of racial harmony has not always appeared so self-evident to scholars and observers of the South.” He follows facts down unmapped, rocky trails no matter where they lead.

A generational lag in scholarship he believes may be closing: “In 2010, Missouri State University established the region’s first Ozarks Studies minor for undergraduates. Five years later, the University of Arkansas Press launched a monograph series in Ozarks Studies. (They published this book). We may never be first in the Ozarks, but we get around to it eventually. Such is the life of a regional little sibling.”  Blevins is on the board of the Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of the Missouri State University Libraries. Dr. Blevins also teaches classes on Ozark history at MSU.

Up South in the Ozarks seeks the nuanced realities of a large, misunderstood region that is paradoxically both romanticized and maligned. Brooks Blevins cherishes the Ozarks and believes its story is worthy of an honest telling, quirky, droll, and marginal as its realities often are.

Available from the University of Arkansas Press, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

MISSOURI PACIFIC RAILROAD POETIC PROMOTION OF OZARK FLOAT TRIPPING

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Feb 162023
 

1922 Missouri Pacific booklet, 31 pages, photographically illustrated. This gem rhapsodically describes recreational assets of the upper White River. The artist-illustrated cover depicts the target middle class traveler looking for an idyllic vacation.

Before Jim Owen and later John Morris pitched fishing the Ozarks, the Missouri Pacific railroad lured visitors to “the White River Country in the Missouri Ozarks” with romantic descriptions: “One cannot analyze the perfume of a wild rose, nor may one explain wholly the lure of the White River country—the noblest pleasure ground of the Missouri Ozarks. After you have fished its streams, floated in a canoe through the blue magic of its moonlight, cantered over its trails in the freshness of early morning, and slept, night after night, beneath its stars, you will understand—a little.”

The cover of this 1920s-era brochure depicts an urban couple in a canoe but describes and pictures “the Famous James-White River Float Trip,” which was made in guided wooden johnboats. Sportsmen could float and fish from Galena, down the James to the White, for 125 miles, ending at Branson. The heavy boats were shipped back 21 miles by train to their Galena outfitters. A guide accompanied each boat on the floats and a cook went ahead to pitch the tents and prepare supper. These colorful mountaineers entertained the tourists with legends and folklore.

Later, Jim Owen used trucks to transport his johnboats to the put-in at Galena. His guides still spun campfire tales but were known as hillbillies. Fishermen and women had better tackle and roadbuilding opened access to more rivers. Owen and later Morris both describe an Ozark mystique, but it is less Arcadian than the promotions of the MOPAC railroad.

A Jim Owen Fishing Service mailing piece advertised his guided float trips and new services on the new reservoir, reminding his many fans that “Ole Jim—is still in the Fishin’ Business.”

The MOPAC brochure outlines the services and delights of floating, showing pictures of “Paramount Movie Star, Forrest Tucker,” and advising the guys to “bring the Little Woman” with them.  “She will be very welcome. . . . a lot of women do make these float trips and enjoy them too.” Bass Pro promotes family participation in outdoor sports as well. When Jim Owen began encouraging women to join the float, fishing was almost exclusively an all-male ritual.

 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

JOHN MORRIS ON JIM OWEN

 James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

1950s mailing piece for Jim Owen’s famed float fishing enterprise

After the publication of James Fork of the White, we acquired this brochure with the photo of Jim Owen holding up a stringer of bass. It is not dated but it refers to Bull Shoals as “one of the best fishing lakes in the United States.” It also states that Owen can arrange five- or six-day trips on the James River. The four-panel promotion for his float services must have been produced between 1951 (Bull Shoals) and 1958 (Table Rock Dam, which ended long James River float trips). If we’d had it then, we would have noted his enthusiasm for the new reservoir was surprising, given his long opposition to Corps of Engineers projects that turned free flowing rivers into ponds. The cigar chomping float trip king went with the flow – or, in this case, lack of it. “As usual ole’ man Owen is ready to take care of your fishin’ on the new lake.”

Bass Pro founder John Morris recalled Jim Owen’s influence on the evolution of Ozarks outdoor recreation in a 2012 interview with Ed Fillmer, video journalist. “He was a very colorful character. Great promoter of the natural beauty and the Ozarks. The guides – sometimes they would have to paddle hard through eddies, but mainly drifting through the river, there’s not too many rapids. A little bit of hillbilly thrown in there.”

Fillmer commented, “All along, Owen was a conservationist, stressing to his guests, nature’s balance in the forests and rivers of the Ozarks. For example, Owen insisted they keep only enough fish to enjoy in that evening’s fish fry, returning the rest of the catch to the river.”

Morris: “In a way, that ties back in to helping to preserve what we have here, these resources, these rivers and streams and how important it is to take care of our rivers and water.” Modern fishing tournaments, which the Bass Pro CEO once competed in, are catch-and-release.

Bass Pro’s White River Fish House, a floating restaurant on Taneycomo in Branson, “is kind of a salute to Jim Owen,” said Morris. The restaurant displays an historic Owen Boat Line johnboat, with photos and memorabilia.

Like Morris, Owen had many irons in his Ozarks’ campfire. He somehow found time to be Mayor of Branson, bank president, breeder of foxhounds, car dealer, a movie theater operator, restaurateur, and, with Charlie Barnes, a manufacturer of johnboats.

Johnny Morris’s empire has exceeded Jim Owen’s portfolio a thousand-fold, but both entrepreneurs artfully adapted Ozarks traditions to the consumer taste of their era.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

TAKE AN AUTUMN FLOAT WITH “SHERIFF WHITE RIVER” JIM OWEN

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 072022
 

A Jim Owen mailing piece by Steve Miller – the go-to commercial artist in the Branson area as its reputation as a tourist destination grew in the post-World War II era prosperity. His deft drawings imparted a lively pop look.

A small mailing piece drawn by Steve Miller for “White River” Jim M. Owen proclaimed, “THE BIG BASS ARE ON THE MOVE and the months of October and November are the two greatest months of the year to take an Ozark Float trip.”

Branson artist Miller’s cartoons of the native fish are silly. Oddly he proclaims, “Spike Channel, alias ‘The Cat’” is a “plug-snatcher.” Rarely are catfish taken on artificial lures, but then cartoonists have a license to distort. Still, it’s a catchy 1950s style graphic and on the flip-side is a bit of descriptive prose, reminiscent of the Arcadianism of the early railroad advertising, but toned down: “Smooth water, fast water, wide stream, narrow stream, rapids, racy riffles, tumultuous torrent, foam-flecked glides, deep holes that fair breathe of big bass . . . all this and more you will find . . . “

Both Owen and later John Morris promotions mixed contemporary media looks with splashes of the Ozarks’ earlier romantic imagery. Overall, Owen’s services were attuned to real sporting needs and featured documentary photographs – Spike the Plug-Snatching Channel Cat excepted. It’s a neat trick to continually update advertising to accommodate evolving public taste without destroying the region’s long-time, old-time image.

 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

Congressman Dewey Short – Hillbilly and Orator and proud of it

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 092022
 

Press photo, May 9, 1938, showing Congressman Short, Rep. Dudley White and their wives at a DC barn dance.

Dewey Short was “an avowed Hill-Billy.” Neither he nor renowned folklorist Vance Randolph ever disavowed the term. Unlike the transplanted Kansas folklorist, the educated congressman was an Ozark native. Like politicians from Andrew Jackson on, he exploited his backwoods credentials. The cutline of this press photo, “Chicken and Fixin’s YUM YUM,” notes they were dressed in “approved rustic styles” at a D.C. barn dance. Galena’s famous son alternately postured as an Oxford schooled philosophy professor and a Stone County hillbilly. And he was both.

Born in Galena to a family of 10 children, he served in the infantry in World War I, then graduating from Baker University in 1919 and from Boston University in 1922. Short also attended Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Berlin, and Oxford University. Dewey rose to national prominence as the Representative of Missouri’s 7th congressional district.

In 1942, the St.  Louis Star and Times sent a reporter down to Galena to find out, “Just who is Dewey Short, this 44-year-old, one-man hillbilly band from the Ozarks, who has been elected for four straight terms in Congress from the Seventh District in Southwest Missouri?”  Encountering Jackson Short, Dewey’s father, the reporter “came to the right place.”  Writer Ralph S. O’Leary noted that “the oratorical gifts” for which Dewey Short was noted came from his father, “who talks fluently and decisively.” Dewey’s own speechmaking talents earned him the moniker, “Orator of the Ozarks.”

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

River Guides at Owen’s Theater – near the end of the era

 Beautiful Ozarks, James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 052022
 

Jim Owen leans jauntily on the truck (front row, right), with artist Steve Miller and Owen’s float-fishing guides in front of his Hillbilly Theater, 1940.

At the height of the float trip era, Jim Owen and his team gathered for a photo on Owen Company truck, in front of the Owen Hillbilly Theater, Branson venue for early moving pictures. Table Rock Dam would ultimately kill the famed Galena to Branson float, but floating is still alive and well on interior Ozark rivers when this photo was taken.

James Mason Owen was many things – twelve-time mayor of Branson, bank president, car dealer, restaurateur, movie theater owner, dairyman, fishing columnist, breeder of fox hounds, manufacturer of dog food, and publicity genius. Never was he accused of being an Arcadian. Cigar-chomping capitalist and master of mass media that he was, Owen had the good sense to recruit old time river men like Charley Barnes when he launched the Owen Boat Line.

Owen’s roster included many who had pioneered floating the James and White back in the days when city folks detrained at Galena. A jokester himself, Owen encouraged colorful rustic behavior that fulfilled visitors’ expectations of being escorted downstream by a tractable variety of hillbilly.

Today, canoes and kayaks have replaced wooden john boats and lighter, more functional gear has made camp set up easier. These quick and easy floats, unlike the leisurely floats on the White River or on the James from Galena to Branson, don’t require guide services or provide colorful local characters to entertain the visitors. Newer generations don’t know what they’re missing.

In his memoir, Ted Sare, a guide for the Owen Boat Line in the 1940s, praised the colorful entrepreneur:

“There was no better promoter of that than Jim Owen. He was an ex-newspaperman and knew the value of advertising and also knew how to reach the famous and important people, and he did. He had some of the biggest names in the country and a lot of Hollywood movie stars as his clientele. Jim did more than any other one man to put White River and Branson, Missouri on the map.”

Today, the Historic Owen Theatre is the official home of the Branson Regional Arts Council presenting amateur and professional level Broadway musicals and plays year-round.

Photo from James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

“So long, free flowing White River!”

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Sep 072022
 

Dewey Short and other VIPs say goodbye to the free-flowing White River

Photograph by Townsend Godsey.  Congressman Dewey Short and unidentified colleagues looking at the White River. On the back is written, “Table Rock dam site 9-14-4″

Dewey appears to be pointing out the location where the long-delayed dam would be built. Only a month earlier the President had signed the Flood Control Act of 1941, which included both Table Rock and Bull Shoals. Headline of the October 11, 1952, Kansas City Times announced: “Start A Big Dam Barbecue And Music At Launching of 76-Million-Dollar Reservoir.” Mayor Claude Binkley of Branson remarked he had ‘hurried to the Ozarks twenty-six years ago’ to be here for the construction start.”

Although a Republican dedicated to smaller government (mostly), like most politicians the lure of bringing big buckets of federal money to his district was strong. Congressman Short did get the appropriations for Table Rock Dam flowing again. Construction got underway in 1954, and the White River was backed up behind a $65 million, 252-foot-high dam three miles above Table Rock in 1958. Dedication ceremonies were held on June 14, 1959, when the powerhouse was completed.

Short had been a fiery opponent of FDR’s New Deal except when the federal handout was in his district. Dewey self-identified as a “hillbilly.” The term better fit his bank-robbing brother, Leonard, who perished while on the lam.

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, which examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

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