Garber was a “flag stop” on the Missouri Pacific line, not far from Branson. The train would stop when there were railroad ties to pick up or deliveries for the post office, which also sold groceries, patent medicine, and tobacco. Old Matt and Aunt Molly (the Rosses) welcomed tourists and would sign postcards and entertain them with stories of the old days in the White River hills, even though they were themselves relatively recent arrivals themselves from back East.
This extremely sharp real photo postcard, circa 1918, has an X over the man with a hat and goatee on the far right. On the back is typed, “I saw Uncle Ike as we passed on the train He is exactly as this picture shows him. Near here is the wonderful cave, but something like 15 or 20 miles from Hollister.” The man with the X is not Uncle Ike in Harold Bell Wright’s novel. Across the front of the store is painted, “J.K. Ross General Store.”
The man on the porch with the X above him is in fact J. K. Ross, who was reputed to be Harold Bell Wright’s model for the title character of his melodramatic novel, which launched tourism in the Branson area. Uncle Ike, a minor character in the book, was said to be based on Levi Morrell, who also was accessible to tourists at his post office at Notch, about five miles from Garber. Levi was stockier than J.K. Ross and had a full beard. Wright spent seven summers in the Branson area but denied that he had explicitly based any characters on locals. Both Ross and Morrell, and many other locals, claimed the book’s characters as their own and enjoyed the notoriety. Many of their graves have both their Christian and their fictional names engraved on their tombstones.
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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.)