Real photo postcard, 1930s. Written on the postcard, “Looking down on Gasconade River from Portuguese Point. S-243.” Inevitably, photographs of the panoramic landscape contain a figure poised at the edge of the cliff.
There is a bluff called Portuguese Point overlooking the Gasconade River valley about eleven miles south of Dixon, Missouri. It has a splendid view, is easily reached, and photographers and artists, professional and amateur alike, exploit its graphic opportunities. The mystery is, what were the Portuguese doing in the Ozarks? We found a credible explanation in the KJPW’s Old Settlers Gazette, July 26, 1997, in an article by Gary Knehans. Apparently, John Anderson Smith immigrated to the Ozarks in 1858 and ended up in a fertile valley in a bend in the Gasconade. The pioneer had Cherokee blood and apparently, he and his children had Native American features. Fearing prejudice against Indians, he told his neighbors he was of Portuguese ancestry. Smith had a colorful life. Bushwhackers hung him but he survived somehow to die of dropsy in 1922. As he had voted twice for Henry Clay for President, his age was variously calculated at 110 or 116 years old. The article doesn’t cite any references but it’s an interesting and credible explanation.
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Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. You can see sample pages of our most recent book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: hypercommon.com.
Lover’s Leap Legends won the bronze medal in the popular culture division of the 2020 Independent Publishers’ Book Awards, an international competition. This year there were entries from forty-four states, seven Canadian provinces and fifteen other countries.
James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River was a finalist in Regional Non-fiction in the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Lens & Pen Press’s earlier river book, Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, was awarded a silver medal by the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards in 2013.)