SURREAL 1907 OSAGE RIVER POSTCARD

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Feb 182021
 

Real photo postcard marked, “Osage River” and “Becraft Photog. (21).”

What in the world is that ball on a stick  doing in the middle of the Osage River, poking up from the bottom of this real photo postcard?

This enigmatic view is postmarked “Monegaw Springs Aug. 23, 1907.” It was addressed to Miss Mary Mifflin Kansas City, Mo: “Dear Sister, this is a splendid picture of the Osage. Having a royal good time. Am rather used to the strange country ways by now … lovingly, Edna.” “Strange country” indeed—what IS that ball on a stick?

Did surrealism, the art of incongruous imagery, hit the Ozarks a decade before the term was even coined in Paris? If you’ve got any idea what that ball and stick are please let us know at lensandpen@yahoo.com

We have half a dozen Becraft real photo postcards, mostly of Osceola and the upriver spa, Monegaw Springs. In our book Damming the Osage, we used a wonderful image of his showing a 68 lb. blue cat proudly displayed by two men and a boy on the streets of that old river town.

NOTE: In 1905 a group of Kansas City businessmen acquired the old Monegaw log hotel (once a favorite haunt of the James and Younger brothers while laying low from the law) and began development of a resort on the Osage. It’s entirely possible Miss Edna was a guest at the Monegaw Club.  Watch for a future post on the post-outlaw life of the old hotel in Monegaw.

Several Lens & Pen Press books discuss the evolution of the Ozark landscape and our effects on its rivers. Check out Damming the Osage which has an extended explanation of Monegaw Springs and its outlaw history. All our books are now on sale for half price, postage paid. Order on www.dammingtheosage.com

MEMORIES OF THE UNDAMMED OSAGE RIVER

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Jan 012021
 

Not included in the cost/benefit analysis of Corps of Engineers water resource projects are the economic, social and emotional costs of those who are dispossessed of their land.

China’s monster dam projects displaced millions of farmers and covered hundreds (or more) villages. They caused the extinction of China’s 20-foot-long paddlefish species, a close relative of our own Polyodon spathula. Truman Dam and Reservoir didn’t cause the extinction of the smaller American paddlefish, but it did necessitate development of an artificial breeding program by the Missouri Department of Conservation. That dam destroyed the spawning beds of the spoonbill, as they are called by locals.

There was an uncounted human cost as well. Hundreds of families lost their land to Truman reservoir. Not only was their compensation based on land sale records, in many cases old (some farms had not changed hands in generations) providing misleading valuations, but comparable acreage was not available to replace their livelihood of farming. So they were essentially put out of business. Some of those operations had been in business for a century or more and had supported successive generations of a family. During that time many memories were formed and family traditions established, which were now severed.

Melanie Pruitt with her grandparents on the Sac River in 1980.
Praise to George Eastman whose 1-A Kodak first made the family snapshot feasible. Photos like this have preserved a record of pleasant, fleeting moments that might be forgotten without a picture.
Thanks to Melanie Pruitt for permission to reproduce this lovely image.

We received an email recently that poignantly describes this emotional cost of losing land to ill-justified “multipurpose” dam and reservoir schemes. With permission, here is the email from Melanie Pruitt with a wonderful snapshot of young Melanie with her grandparents on the Sac River arm of the headwaters of Truman Reservoir:

I read Damming the Osage from cover to cover in 72 hours after receiving. … It was beyond amazing. I have spent YEARS trying to explain to people the impact of this situation. And everyone always says, but it’s for flood control. My family was very much impacted by this and lost land to the Corps, but not nearly as much as many, many others impacted. I haven’t stopped talking about your book, as I now can fully explain to people something I always believed in but never knew the whole story or how to explain.

Attaching a pic of me with my grandparents from summer of 1980 on the Sac river, taken just west of new bridge on 82 highway in Osceola. The lake hadn’t completely filled yet (close though) but the color of the water was still blue, not brown. That’s what’s chilling. It’s the last pic I have of me and my grandparents together, as my grandpa passed away in January 1981. I could go on for eternity on what this river means to me, my family, etc. and the impacts of everything.

The Sac is now also dammed farther upstream at Stockton.

 

 

 

The story of Osceola and many of the colorful characters who lived there (including the James and Younger brothers) is woven through our 304-page book. It is now available for $17.50, half the original price, from our website 

Newspaper article claims, “Paddlefish survive wild ride over dams.” Do they? Really?

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Apr 262020
 

The Springfield News-Leader ran an intriguing article on paddlefish going over dams and surviving. Sadly, it didn’t mention that most are killed whether they go through the turbines or over the top in a flood. It’s common to see pieces of paddlefish below dams after they were sucked into turbines and chewed up. Our guess is one out of hundreds survive.

But it’s heartening to know that this incredible, giant prehistoric fish occasionally gets lucky. Corps of Engineers’ dams have contributed to their conceivably endangered future. While the adults thrive in reservoir pools, damming blocks access to their spawning grounds.

In our book, Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, the fate of the paddlefish occupies many pages. Truman Dam destroyed the best spawning grounds in the country. All the paddlefish in Missouri are hatchery-spawned and raised. We quoted a publication by the American Fisheries Society entitled, “The Paddlefish: Status, Management and Propagation” (1986):

Finally, a note of caution. Although techniques for producing and stocking paddlefish were presented in this symposium, we do not consider stocking to be an answer to habitat deterioration and management problems. These techniques were developed for special circumstances where stocking was the only way to maintain a population. Artificial propagation and stocking should not be used as a cure-all or substitute for wise or practical management. Trying to solve problems by treating symptoms is expensive and ineffective. In addition, stocking would affect the integrity of paddlefish gene pools and is ill-advised until we know a lot more about the genetics of this species.

The MICRA paddlefish-sturgeon committee issued a warning in 1998 that “the use of hatcheries to reduce population declines is not a substitute for solving the causes of declines.” In addition to genetic considerations, the paper listed six other problems with stocking,hatche of which “delaying habitat restoration” was the worst.

page 236, Damming the Osage

The Department of Conservation fisheries people are to be praised for keeping the paddlefish from vanishing from Missouri waters. It’s an expensive program and should there be a severe recession raising paddlefish might be defunded. MDC gets most of its money from a conservation sales tax. This largely bypasses political control. Some politicians wish to do away with this arrangement. It’s likely, should the state legislature control the MDC budget, urban interests might not be favorably disposed to maintaining the paddlefish-raising program. Paddlefish might be seen as expendable.

The fate of the paddlefish (or spoonbill) was central to a lawsuit to stop Truman Dam—which obviously failed. Our 304-page book, Damming the Osage, is available on amazon.com or this website at a discount, postage paid

OF DAYS REMEMBERED Quilt – Joe Dice’s Upper Swinging Bridge

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Nov 072019
 

Valorie Fauquier created this pieced and embroidered quilt for the 2015 Benton County Historical Society quilt raffle. Nine local landmarks are commemorated here. Members of the Historical Society sold raffle tickets through the summer and the drawing was held October 31. Mr. and Mrs. Troy Kessner of Independence Missouri won the drawing. They donated it to the Historical Society so everyone could enjoy it. We found it hanging in the Visitor Center, overlooking Truman Dam.

The center block commemorates the “Upper Swinging Bridge,” the last surviving Joe Dice bridge in Benton County. According to the explanatory legend posted nearby, “The Upper Swinging Bridge is the lone survivor of the 31 swinging bridges built in Benton County from 1895-1937. Built in 1904 by the famous local bridge builder Joe Dice, it was rebuilt by Dice after the original bridge was destroyed by a cyclone. It served highway 7 traffic until 1969.” It is now a pedestrian walkway over the Osage River outflow from Truman Dam.

Joseph A. Dice is one of the more interesting characters we discovered in our research for Damming the Osage (see pages 74-76). A self-taught engineer, Dice made his mark and living building swinging bridges across the Osage and its tributaries in what is now the Lake of the Ozarks region. Born in 1866, he built his first “swinger” in 1897 at a ferry crossing of the Osage near where US 65 crosses it today. “The Hackberry Bridge” cost $3,000.

A couple of Dice swingers remain on Aux Glaize Creek near Brumley as well. Driving across them is an adventure as they rattle loudly and sway slightly. From Damming the Osage, page 75:

Some of Dice’s smaller spans cost as little as $1,000. His 1905 Tuscumbia project, perhaps the most difficult, required an 80-foot wooden tower to connect up with a 250-foot cliff across the 600-foot wide Osage. All were constructed from locally obtained materials except the #9 galvanized wire. He worked in the summer and fall when local men were busy with crops, so most of his bridge crews were boys.

Frightened cattle or overloaded trucks broke the decks of some and tornadoes wrecked others, but no Dice bridge ever structurally failed.

Joseph Dice died in 1947 and is buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Warsaw on a high hill overlooking the Osage, with a view of a distant Truman Dam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Postscript to construction of Bagnell Dam

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Oct 242019
 

On our more expansive website, Hypercommon.com, we created a section just for Dams. Research on the two big Osage River dams (Bagnell and Harry S. Truman Dam) led us to considering the role of dams – i.e. huge public works projects that speak to the masses/electorate of the power and progress of the political forces who build them. They prove man’s mastery (for a time perhaps) over nature and the forces of relentlessly moving water. They create jobs (short term) and remodel landscape, to the benefit of some and the great detriment of others.

We pondered another, larger project examining dams worldwide and their relationship to the politics of power and money – as evidenced in the materials left behind, the ephemera of propaganda. To explore this idea after the completion of Damming the Osage, we kept collecting, searching out the souvenirs and show pieces of dams worldwide both built and only proposed.

 

 

 

 

One of our initial finds was this photograph showing Louis Egan, former president of union Electric, heading to federal prison after being sentenced under the corrupt practices act. It would have made it into Damming the Osage if we’d had it when still working on the book.

Click on this link to read the full post: “The Fall of Union Electric’s Louis Egan.”

OF DAYS REMEMBERED Quilt includes Warsaw Missouri’s Lover’s Leap

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Oct 172019
 

Valorie Fauquier created this pieced and embroidered quilt for the 2015 Benton County Historical Society quilt raffle. Nine local landmarks are commemorated here. One block shows the Lover’s Leap on the Osage. Nowadays the leap ends with a splash in the upper reaches of Lake of the Ozarks.

According to the explanatory legend posted near the quilt, “Lover’s Leap remains an unusual rock formation along the Osage River. It can be seen across the river while standing near the south end of Drake Harbor,” which is on the lakeshore below downtown Warsaw.

 

 

 

 

Valorie spent several hundred hours detailing nine of the historical landmarks of Benton County. Members of the Historical Society sold raffle tickets through the summer and the drawing was held October 31. Mr. and Mrs. Troy Kessner of Independence Missouri had the winning ticket. They donated it to the Historical Society so everyone could enjoy it. We found it hanging in the Visitor Center, overlooking Truman Dam.

 

 

 

From our forthcoming book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco:

Just below Warsaw is another Lover’s Leap also with a vague legend. This leap was modest even before Lake of the Ozarks flooded its base. The 1950s postcard (above left) shows the plunge would even be even less than when the Osage River ran underneath. Though lacking a retrievable story, this Lover’s Leap is pictured on postcards from 1909 to the 1950s and is even a block on a quilt illustrating famous local landmarks.

See a flipbook of sample pages at our website: Hypercommon.com

Damming the Osage and all our books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.  Lover’s Leap Legends will be published Spring 2020.

Construction of Bagnell Dam Began Transformation of lower Osage River

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Oct 102019
 

Raines Family at their Rock House. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.

Construction of Bagnell Dam brought great changes to the Osage River valley: road building, moving towns, graveyards, and people from its banks.

According to Tim Helton, son-in-law of Sally Raines, her father, William Maurice Raines, was “an attorney with a St. Louis firm retained by Union Electric to help secure land rights so they could create Lake of the Ozarks.”

Sally Raines on the porch of the family home. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.

In Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, we made the case that Bagnell Dam, which created Lake of the Ozarks, was a complicated scheme by complicated schemers to financially benefit themselves, not the public. It was conceived of in the Roaring Twenties and finished in the early years of the Great Depression. It did finally become a major tourist nexus after World War Two, but it was little used or developed in the 1930s and early ‘40s. There is no denying that its land acquisition and construction phase brought financial benefits to the region.

The family’s old rock house, a classic Ozark adaptation of an Arts & Crafts/Craftsman bungalow-style dwelling faced in rock rubble, is still intact on the Niangua Arm of the Lake.

Tim Helton reports, “It’s amazingly in about the same ‘configuration’ that it was all those years ago.”

Raines family home in the 1920s. The building still exists on the Niangua arm of Lake of the Ozarks. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.

Personal benefit of the construction of Lake of the Ozarks – Leland’s father, Louis Strader Payton, was employed as a highway engineer to create roads around the new project. The Kentucky engineer met and courted a local schoolteacher, Annie Lewis Daniels. They married in 1939.

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

BIG FISH IN WARSAW – and we’re not talking paddlefish (for once)!

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Oct 032019
 

 

Research for Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir had us crisscrossing the lake, river and roads that make up the Osage River watershed. One focus of the book was the loss of the spawning grounds of the paddlefish – today’s specimens are direct descendants of a prehistoric, cartilaginous fish and still roaming the waters of the Osage and Missouri river systems. But they’re not the only fish in the rivers and lakes.

One afternoon in our wanderings we came across a giant folk art concrete crappie (above) hanging from a pole in front of a taxidermy shop south of Warsaw. Naturally this concrete creature of immense proportions caught our eye. We included it on a spread with a big paddlefish (page 145, Damming the Osage). That was about 10 years ago.

In late May of this year, we were astonished to see that same monstrous crappie (there can only be one of these!) guy-wired to the back wall of Cody’s Bait & Tackle shop  across the river from downtown Warsaw.

Naturally we pulled in to ask how it crossed the river. We talked with proprietor Cody. He said it was made by the owner of the taxidermy shop where we had originally seen it. Cody purchased it from his widow. We suggested he donate it to the Benton County Historical Society—an idea he rejected. He loves that fish. And who wouldn’t?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

“Dam the Dam: Save Our Land”

 Damming the Osage, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 262019
 

On a recent trip to see flood-bloated, monstrous Truman Reservoir, bulging at its gates from this year’s rains, we stopped at Truman Visitor Center. There we found an art exhibit, which included a painting by E. Mike Parker, of a billboard Leland had photographed decades ago. The billboard is long gone, but some memories don’t fade.

The museum is professionally done and recent cadre of Corps staff are pretty enlightened about water resource projects and objective about their controversial aspects, even acknowledging that in today’s world Truman Reservoir would likely not be built.

 

 

Leland was one of the instigators (plaintiffs) of the failed lawsuit to stop construction of Harry S. Truman Dam on the upper Osage River. The sad story of the lawsuit is told in considerable detail—and we must confess with a partisan slant—in Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. 

At the time (early 1970s) Leland had a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to develop an exhibit entitled Missouri: A Portrait in Light and Sound. For this project, he photographed all regions of the state, including the Osage River basin. Driving the roads of Benton and Henry counties, he saw farms  destined to go under the water, cemeteries that must be moved, and profound changes coming to a stable agricultural life. Not everyone was on board with the Chamber of Commerce.

 

(above and left) Hand-painted roadside billboards near Clinton, 1972.  There were loud assertions that everybody in the Osage valley wanted Truman Dam completed, but anti-dam sentiments were not uncommon, just repressed and underre­ported.. page 221, Damming the Osage

 

From the beginning, the triumphant business community had ignored the feelings of farmers like W. R. Bataschelett whose poignant letter was published in the Clinton Daily Democrat on March 27, 1972:

I would like to know the reaction of Clinton businessmen, including the Democrat, if a government agency would come to them and say, we need your place of business for recreational purposes and we will give you so many dollars and expect you to vacate or we will condemn your property and will have to leave immediately. This is what farmers are told who will lose their homes and farms to Truman Dam. Their farming is a business just the same as Clinton businessmen.

About the cost of said dam that has already been paid out, would not the taxpayers be better by losing completely that 20% spent to date or spending 80% more trying to save the (above and left) already spent 20%? What is more important, a place to water ski, fish and boat or a farmer’s home and land?

 

 

For more interesting life-after-the-dam posts, check out our new website: hypercommon.com

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

 

 

Ha Ha Tonka: One family’s memories

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Sep 082019
 

This wonderful family photograph, which was sent to us by Tim Helton, shows young Sally Raines with her mother, Gladys Mary (maiden name Wells) Raines near Ha Ha Tonka before it burned. Per Tim Helton, Gladys (Wells) Raines’ father, William Maurice Raines (University of Missouri, Class of 1917), was “an attorney with a St. Louis firm retained by Union Electric to help secure land rights so they could create Lake of the Ozarks.”

“Sally does not remember where this picture was taken – only that they were nice people and put her up on that horse – because she didn’t have anyone to play with!”

Seen in the above Helton/Raines family snapshot from the 1930s, Ha Ha Tonka was built as the second home of the Snyder family of Kansas City. Robert McClure Snyder purchased 2,500 acres in 1904 on which to build his vision of a European stone castle in the Ozarks. He did not live to see it completed, dying in an automobile accident in 1906.

The Snyder Family sued Union Electric when Bagnell Dam created Lake of the Ozarks, which backed up into the spring branch full of introduced trout. The suit bounced in and out of courts for more than a decade. We covered the lawsuit extensively in Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir.

Ha Ha Tonka, now Missouri’s most popular state park, features a great spring, several large caves, and the stabilized ruins of the Snyder’s stone castle. The history of Ha Ha Tonka is indeed one of the more conflicted tales of the Osage basin.

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

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