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.

Lake of the Ozarks’ LOVER’S LEAP

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Sep 132017
 

In a recent post, we promised more details on Lake of the Ozarks’ own Lover’s Leap and one account of the legend that gave it its name

J.W. Vincent, owner, editor and publisher of the Linn Creek Reveille, published the story of Lover’s Leap more than once in his newspaper. It was a popular tale—one he reprinted in his newspaper twice – “in 1879 and again, by oft repeated request in 1886.” His author’s note to his booklet, Tales of the Ozarks (1913) his tone is almost apologetic:

It was written on a regular assignment in the course of the author’s early newspaper work and bears many marks of the writer’s youth, which fortunately for himself if not for his readers, he has never entirely outgrown. The migration of the Delaware Indians and their subsequent contact with the Osages and other tribes is historical though little known—the local incidents are mainly fictitious.

This particular Lover’s Leap legend strayed somewhat from the standard issue tale of an overbearing patriarch preventing the marriage of a beautiful daughter to the handsome brave she loved. In J. W. Vincent’s tale, the maiden herself rejected a powerful suitor for her own true love. No father is mentioned. The unwelcome suitor is a friend of her brother.

In the picturesque and salubrious valley, where “dwelt a powerful branch of the Osages, one of the great nations of the aboriginal inhabitants of our country,” came a band of weary Lenapes, or Delaware, who had been forced westward from their home on the eastern seaboard. The Osages welcomed them and the two groups lived as congenial neighbors in the valley of Linn Creek.

The Chief of the Osage, Okema, was young and handsome, giant in stature. He and the Lenape chief, Marabo, were close friends—and Marabo had a beautiful sister, Winona. Unfortunately for Okema, Winona’s heart belonged to another, Minetas. The players are named; the stage is set.

The denouement takes place at night on the high bluff above the valley, overlooking the junction of the Osage and Niangua rivers far below. Winona leapt from the cliff to escape Okema. An intense fight ensued between the contending suitors and Okema’s braves. Both braves went over the cliff, as well as another of Okema’s braves. It was a dolorous end to unrequited love, but the dramatic tale has left its mark on the spot.

Netflix’s Marty Byrde undoubtedly did not understand the hallowed and bloody ground on which he stood as he launched his own desperate enterprise in Ozark. He should know, though, the fall today mercifully is forty feet less and ends in water.

Outlawry in the Ozarks: The Netflix Mythology

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Sep 052017
 

Netflix series, Ozark, has a simple plot with big challenges for a deceptively mild-mannered accountant. “With wife Wendy and their two kids in tow, Marty (Byrne) is on the move after a money-laundering scheme goes wrong, forcing him to pay off a substantial debt to a Mexican drug lord in order to keep his family safe.” Marty’s new money-laundering theater of operations is Missouri’s vacation destination, Lake of the Ozarks.

As is often pointed out in the script, this dragon-shaped reservoir has “more shoreline than the state of California.” The floodgates of Bagnell Dam closed on the Osage River in 1931, creating the lake, as detailed in our book Damming the Osage. Its real-life creation does indeed have something in common with the Netflix show.

As our subtitle, The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Dam, indicates, often there are nefarious and hidden motives for building dams. The dam and the lake that piled up behind it were the products of two schemes that could be considered money laundering. The motive for building Lake of the Ozarks had to do with the benefits of financial manipulations—not the production of hydroelectric power. Researching the origins of Lake of the Ozarks, we found subterfuge was integral to the whole scheme to dam the Osage.

A tale of Mexican drug cartels invading the lake’s shores is perhaps not too far-fetched. There is a long tradition of the Ozarks as a homeland of crime and refuge for outlaws. In the nineteenth century, it was known for the brutal irregulars of the Civil War, the James Gang, Younger Brothers, Alf Landon, bushwhackers and later Bald Knobbers. Meth dealers and dopers portrayed in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone updated the Ozarks’ outlaw reputation to the twenty-first century.

Lake of the Ozarks, on the other hand, didn’t come from backwoods outlaws. It was the brainchild of the president of a Kansas City Land Bank, Walter Cravens, and his partner, Ralph Street. Catastrophic loss of value of farm property and product began soon after World War 1. Long before 1929, farm price values were punctured. Cravens faced bankruptcy having financed hundreds of Kansas farms that were now in foreclosure. Kansas City lawyer Ralph Street had an obsession with building a dam on the Osage. Together they cooked up a scheme to ”launder” the bank’s “underwater” Kansas farms, for Osage River farms that would literally go under water if the dam were built. When Guy Huston, his principal financier went under (bankrupt) Cravens turned to Dillon Read, a New York financial institution, which then hooked into Union Electric.

Union Electric (UE) had no need for hydropower, but—as later revealed in federal charges—UE was running an extensive kickback operation to fund lobbying. This was proven long after the lake was built. We suspect UE went ahead with the lake project to rake off slush funds and probably enrich the management. It was a complicated scheme that we covered in Damming the Osage. Louis Egan, Union Electric’s “moose-tall aristocratic president,” regarded the Lake of the Ozarks as his own private pond where he wined and dined politicians, family, and friends at his twenty-nine room Adirondacks-style log lodge—now called Willmore Lodge, a venue for group or corporate events and home to the Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. Undoubtedly, it was the site of bribes and kickbacks that would ultimately lead to his downfall.

Both Cravens and Egan did time in federal prison: Cravens for his Lake of the Ozarks land-laundering scheme; Egan for his subsequent slush fund conviction.

Walter Cravens appealed his 1928 conviction on 88 counts, but the appeal was denied and in 1933 he began serving a six-year sentence in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth Kansas. “He paid his $25,000 fine in installments. No. 43517 was discharged on February 7, 1937, having served three years and nine months of his six year sentence.” (page 126, Damming the Osage)

“Egan was convicted of violation of the Corrupt Practices Section of the Holding Company Act of 1935. UE paid an $80,000 file. Egan paid $10,000 and was sentenced to two years. His appeals failed and on December 31, 1943, the $68,000—year former executive entered the federal penitentiary at St. Petersburg, Florida.” (p. 127)
We didn’t have this photo when Damming the Osage went to press or we would have used it.

Lake of the Ozarks has always been rumored to be a vacation destination for the St. Louis underworld (mob). We’ve written extensively about tourism in the Ozarks. It would be an exaggeration to call the Lake Sodom and Gomorrah. Branson, founded on Harold Bell Wright’s moralistic, bucolic novel (Shepherd of the Hills), is a stark contrast to Lake of the Ozarks and its Party Cove and cigarette boat races. And now Netflix’s series tags it with Chicago money laundering and drug cartels from Mexico. In Ozark, the ultra violent local criminals are apparently trying to avenge the loss of their land to the lake Cravens started and Egan completed.

We don’t detect much realism in the series but there is a certain poetic resonance. The image of crime in the Ozarks has now entered the twenty-first century. No longer is it just the subject of yellowing newspaper articles, fading sepia photos or local legend. Now, it is the homeland of a mass media mythology.

NOTE – We now have a special running. You can buy Damming the Osage and our new book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River for $52.50, postage paid (a $17.50 savings for the two books).

NETFLIX’S OZARK vs. the real Lake of the Ozarks

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Sep 022017
 

With great anticipation we began to binge watch Netflix’s 10-part series titled, Ozark. The promos for this turgid story of money laundering and murder set at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks set the scene: “A financial adviser drags his family from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks, where he must launder $500 million to appease a drug boss.” (Starring: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz).

A few establishing shots were grabbed at Lake of the Ozarks, but the series itself was filmed in Georgia thanks to that state’s generous tax credits for filmmakers. The first episode, set primarily in Chicago, made us ambivalent – not fully engaged. Should we finish the episode? Should we even go on to Episode 2? To our utter amazement, the last scene of that first episode showed Marty Byrde’s (Jason Bateman) first sight of the Lake at a spot we recognized as Lover’s Leap, a precipitous bluff near the drowned town of Linn Creek.

In Damming the Osage, we used a vivid linen postcard of that scene. Chrome sunset colors aside, some changes to the landscape have occurred since this 1940s image was printed. The distinctive rock has lost one upright piece; a small tree is growing through the cracks; and the tree where the postcard model leaned is gone, the grounds charred by a recent campfire. A modern condo building marks the confluence of the Osage (straight ahead) and the Niangua rivers (coming in from the left). Run your jet ski up the Niangua arm of the Lake and you’ll find the remains of Ha Ha Tonka’s trout lake at the base of the bluff where the ruins of the castle are.

Neither of us had ever been to Lover’s Leap (it is not easy to find and is on private land), but this seemed an opportune time to plan a road trip and seek it out – especially since we were headed to Jefferson City to participate in the total solar eclipse and Lake of the Ozarks is right on the way.

Next post will be extensive passages from J. W. Vincent’s Lover’s Leap Legend in Tales of the Ozarks. Vincent was the owner and editor of the Linn Creek Reveille newspaper from 1880 to 1933. Bagnell Dam was built during his tenure and his opposition to the dam is well documented in his paper. Before that controversy, he published a modest booklet of stories that included one account of how the precipice Marty Byrde stood on got its name.

COMING THIS FALL: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE

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Jun 102017
 

In 2012 we published a 304-page book about the transformation of a big, muddy river that rises in the tall grass Kansas prairie then cuts into the northern flank of the Ozark uplift before emptying into the even muddier Missouri River. Damming the Osage is a history of engineering interventions justified by questionable hydrologic theories. Human cupidity orchestrated many of these unharmonious projects.

This October, we will publish our second “river book”: James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River. In this we look at the watershed of the river that rises in Webster County near Marshfield, wends its way to Springfield, running along its eastern edge and then drains south to Table Rock. The James – unlike the Osage – feels the effects of a major metropolitan area on its watershed. The James was a storied Ozark float stream; the Osage, a prairie-born, rich but unspectacular stream, home to a prehistoric fish.

The James is definitely a different river and this is a different book. More pages (352), more illustrations (because we have more pages!) to examine, discuss and showcase that different river and the people who live and recreate along its course.

Look for it this fall!

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The Osage Howler Moonlight Paddle Race

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Apr 302017
 

Any kayakers out there? The “Osage Howler” 61-mile race from Bagnell Dam to the Missouri Department of Conservations Pike’s Wildlife Area Access is happening on the full moon night of June 10-11.

http://www.lakenewsonline.com/news/20170430/paddlers-to-race-under-full-moon-in-new-osage-howler

The race is sponsored by the Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance (LOWA).

 

 

Book Review: OSCEOLA: A TOWN ON THE BORDER

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Apr 212017
 

A visitor driving into the St. Clair County seat, Osceola, today sees a small town with some 19th-century store facades, a classic Art Moderne movie theater (now empty), a mural proclaiming its rich and sometimes violent past and a million-dollar jail. Courthouse towns are more resistant to oblivion than many small towns. And Osceola is just a mile off US Highway 13, a major north-south artery. Beyond the square, a fatter Osage River stalls as it becomes the backwaters of Truman Reservoir. The riverfront is quiet – no boats or fishing docks or swimming beaches. Only the mural, “A town where history lives,” hints at the town’s rather amazing story.

In his new book, Osceola: A Town On The Border, Lawrence Lewis defies the borders or boundaries of the local history genre, opting instead for setting his small hometown in the context of history, philosophy, and environmental wrangling. Lewis identifies three key events that have shaped the town and brought it to its current state: the burning of the city by Jim Lane and his Kansas bushwhackers during the Civil War; 1870 bonds on the taxpayers to build a railroad that never materialized; and, last, the building of Truman Dam and the tremendous impact that had on the small city’s politics, population, and tax base.

The event that still rankles and has shaped its self-image was the 1861 burning of the town by Kansas Jayhawkers. Before the Civil War conflagration, Osceola had been a bustling trade center. In his research, Larry Lewis found an enthusiastic description penned by the newspaper editor in 1860: “Osceola can boast of better hotels, more accommodating landlords, deserving landladies, prettier women, handsomer men, faster horses, warmer weather, meaner water, more business, better whiskey, lager beer and ale, and (fewer) churches, preachers and church-going people and Sabbath Schools than any other town in the state, St. Louis not excepted.” With such a lively burg and its likely prospects for prosperity, it’s no wonder the event is still central to the town’s identity.

Osceola native and St. Louis teacher, Lawrence (Larry) Lewis is shown in this photo from the late 1960s wearing a poncho for protection against morning rains and mist from the water flowing over Osceola Dam. Ancestors of Larry’s settled near the Osage River and its tributaries Tebo Creek and Hogles Creek in St. Clair, Henry and Benton counties, Missouri, in the 1830s.

 

As well as intriguing stories and characters, Osceola: A Town On The Border, relates some little-known geologic history. Only recently was it determined that Osceola sits in a bowl created by an asteroid strike 350 million years ago. “Kaboom…” announces Chapter 2, which is devoted to this geologic peculiarity. One of the 50 largest impact craters on earth, it may be the largest exposed impact crater in the U.S. The impact somehow created perfectly round rocks that are scattered all over. Sometimes called “Osceola round rocks” or “Weaubleau eggs,” they look like geodes but are not. They’re often embedded in foundations or stone fences in Osceola. The composition of impact breccia is not often discussed in local histories. Throughout the book, the author weaves tidbits of scientific information into the story of the town.

The seat of St. Clair County, Osceola once bustled, its riverfront busy with occasional steamboats. Frequently visitors needed transport upriver to Monegaw Springs, a spa of health-giving waters and bluff-top views of the river. Lewis has searched existing written accounts of Osceola and includes good amount of his own family history.

No book on this part of the country would be complete without mentioning the gun battle at Roscoe between two of the Younger brothers and Pinkerton detectives sent by the railroad from Chicago to capture the train-robbing associates of Jesse James. Roscoe is on the road between Osceola and Monegaw, where the Youngers liked to hang out. John Younger and two of the Pinkertons were killed in the shootout. Dr. Lawrence Lewis was one of the post-mortem attending physicians.

Truman Dam at Warsaw blocked paddlefish from the upper Osage and drowned their spawning grounds. Today, the Missouri Department of Conservation artificially raises paddlefish. These hatchery-raised fish are stocked in the lake and make spawning runs up the Osage but reproduction is very rare. Osceola is also not far from significant waterfowl hunting at Schell-Osage.

Although the Osage River (now backed up by Truman Dam and Reservoir) still forms one border of the town, Osceola is “Not the River Town it used to be,” as Chapter 5 is titled. The riverbank is now owned by the Corps of Engineers and is off limits to commercial marinas. “Some losses are forever,” Lewis sums up the story of Truman Dam and Reservoir and his hometown.

One might not recognize Osceola as a seat of Platonic philosophy, but as a result of the work and life of Thomas Moore Johnson, “the Sage of the Osage,” Osceola was at one time the center of Platonism in the Midwest. Johnson was an acquaintance of the New England transcendentalists and collector of learned tomes, leaving a renowned library (known locally as the “book house”) of esoteric and wide-ranging works of philosophy and religions of the world in many languages.

Lewis’s research ranges widely from court records of the environmental lawsuit and scientific analysis of the meteor strike to historic correspondence of citizens and more recent personal reminiscences, his own and those of other longtime residents. The town this book reveals is surprising. Readers will go on a voyage of discovery in Osceola: A Town on the Border.

This review is also published in the April issue of River Hills Traveler (http://www.riverhillstraveler.com/ ) In addition to the review, we provided RHT a number of vintage photos of Osceola on the Osage.

OSCEOLA: A Town on the Border, by Lawrence B. Lewis, is available on amazon.com             CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.Paperback, 174 pages. $18.99

COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Sample pages from this new book can be seen at www.beautifulozarks.com

Our earlier ‘river book,’ DAMMING THE OSAGE, can be seen at www.dammingtheosage.com

Lens & Press Blog Moving to Word Press

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Apr 182017
 

We’re moving our Lens & Pen Press blog from Blogger to Word Press and will consolidate the two current blogs into one for our books–the Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks, the James Fork of the White (coming 2017), Damming the Osage, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness and See the Ozarks–and many other favorite topics of discussion. The archive of L&P posts is still available at http://lensandpen.blogspot.com/ The posts on our separate Damming the Osage website remain available at http://www.dammingtheosage.com/the-blog/

To bridge this move from one platform to another, below is the most recent (Blogger) post about Table Rock and the pre-dam White River landscape:

TABLE ROCK – BLUFF AND DAM

Shortly after Empire District Electric built Powersite Dam across the White River, creating Lake Taneycomo, the big electric company announced plans to build a 200-foot dam upriver at Table Rock Bluff.

“Table Rock Dam will be built across the big sandbar,” reads the handwritten caption.
Real photo postcard, 1920s, by Payne Johnson, Branson, Mo.

Most bluffs along Ozark rivers are named. Table Rock Bluff had a relatively flat top and was accessible by road. A visit to this overlook was on many vacationers’ itinerary.  For decades locals anticipated seeing machinery in the valley below building a huge dam.  That this never occurred frustrated dam supporters and led them to question if the utility really intended to proceed. They didn’t.

The Army Corps would build Table Rock Dam many years later but the Corps didn’t build it at Table Rock. They moved the location two miles upstream to a more stable geological site, but kept the name.  Table Rock Bluff remains a popular scenic overlook, but is now fenced for safety – unlike the past as shown here.

COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Sample pages from this new book can be seen at www.beautifulozarks.com

Our earlier ‘river book,’ DAMMING THE OSAGE, can be seen at www.dammingtheosage.com

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