Mystic Springs Captured By Gray Bros. View Artists

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Jul 252025
 

Throughout the United States are scenic spots where subterranean waters surface. Attaching “mystic” to the place name is not uncommon and evokes their poetic charm. Eureka Springs, Arkansas has two. This detailed cabinet photograph, circa 1900, by the local photographic firm, shows one of the springs still in its natural state. The second spring, Mystic Blue Springs (not illustrated) today is a deep pool enclosed by a concrete circle. It’s often just called Blue Springs.

Eureka Springs is an authentic Victorian village built on the sides of some of the Arkansas Ozarks steepest real estate. One hundred years ago nattily attired ladies and gentlemen strolled miles of winding paths, pausing to sip the waters of the various springs. Each was held to have singular medical properties.

The myth that spring water would cure cancer or gout has long been debunked but fanciful geologic and aboriginal histories remain about the place. In a Nov. 19, 1959, feature The Helena Daily (Ark) Daily World advanced the absurd theory that the spring waters of Eureka come from the glaciers of the Pacific Northwest in Canada. In that same article, Indian hieroglyphics carved in the limestone ledges of Eureka were said to describe visits from Desoto and Daniel Boone. Mythology aside the article ends with a paragraph that does justice to the continued attraction of the area:

As one walks about in this colorful wonderland, the silence of the woods predominates all conversation. A restful contentment prevails in this, the first home of the Ozark Indian. Here it is easy to know: “nothing in nature is altogether separate, the cooperation and attitude of the woodlands desires a complete pattern of loveliness.”

Vintage Images is a column we provide to River Hills Traveler, a monthly publication.  Lens & Pen Press publishes all-color books on the Ozarks. Our book, “See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image,” showcases many of the primary tourist destinations across the Ozarks. It is available for $22.50 (10% off retail), postage paid. Click on Buy our Books

Fruitful Opportunity in the Ozarks

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 282025
 

Specialty crops like strawberries, apples and tomatoes, where produced in the hilly Ozarks. As early as the 1870s the rail corporations promoted the region as “the Land of Big Red Apples.”

Sportsmen and vacationers were not the only groups invited to come and see the Ozarks. The Frisco Line’s full-page ad in a 1912 Washington, DC, Star Sunday Magazine asked, “why don’t you take your family to live in the beautiful Ozarks?  A small farm in the Ozarks is the opportunity you need. Think what a wholesome, healthy life it would mean for your children. You can get a small place near good towns, and good schools, as low as $10 per acre.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, and her husband Almanzo were typical of these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settlers. She and Manny bought their farm, Rocky Ridge, near Mansfield in 1894. They practiced progressive farming and she wrote her classic books on pioneer family life.

Through the decades, Ozarks promotional material often mixed appeals to both vacationers and would-be immigrants. Visitors today are seen as potential buyers of condos or second homes. After a lifetime as summer visitors, many people come to live in the region when they retire. Others, who spent their childhood in the Ozarks and their working lives in faraway cities, often return to their roots.

Vintage Ozarks is a feature we provide to the monthly publication, River Hills Traveler. Our company, Lens & Pen Press, publishes all color books on the Ozarks. This image is taken from See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image. The hardback, all-color book on early tourism in our region is sale priced at $22.50, postage paid.  Click on Buy our books .

Shorty Wilks And His Jolly Ranch Hands

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Jun 192025
 

“Shorty, as everyone called him, was born October 7, 1901,” read the 1965 obituary of Clifford Wilkinson. It mentions his string band called “Shorty Wilks and his Jolly Ranch Hands.” For his day job, he operated a confectionary in Sullivan, Missouri.

We’ve seen “Shorty” identified in one photo as the tall bass player, but in another shot the same gent is holding a fiddle. Calling tall folks “Shorty” wasn’t uncommon and was thought amusing. In his Oct. 28, 1965, obituary in the Tri-County News (Sullivan Missouri), “Shorty” is identified as Clifford Wilkinson. In addition to heading up a string band that played on numerous radio stations and played for dances, he operated a confectionery in Sullivan. He died suddenly at the age of 63 years, 11 months and 26 days.

A Christmas postcard of the Jolly Ranch Hands without the dancers was inherited by Dr. Kenneth Johnson whose mother managed Baecker’s Place, a dance hall just south of Morrison, a village in Gasconade County. Johnson, now a professor at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, grew up in a bedroom “separated from the dance hall by only a thin wall” and recalled falling asleep every Saturday night to the sound of country music. His mother couldn’t recall anything about the band except they hailed from Sullivan. Some on that town’s Chamber of Commerce gave him leads and Dr. Johnson began a quest to identify other groups that played dances at Baecker’s. To his amazement small town Ozark newspapers were full of ads promoting both country and even small/big bands who played VFWs, Grange Halls, and even floored barns.

In addition to the newspaper ads, he discovered a fantastic pictorial history of live music in rural Missouri. The bands all had professional photographs taken for publicity. Johnson collected several hundred and tracked down the few surviving musicians and relatives who identified the performers. A well-produced book, Moonlight Serenade to City Lights: Rare Images of Bands and Orchestras from the Dance Hall Era in Missouri, was published by Reedy Press (2014) from his research. Copies are available from the Gasconade Historical Society for $35.

Most of the images are from the 1940s and ‘50s. The names of the groups capture that era’s ambivalence about identifying commercial country music with the word ‘hillbilly’. Many of the band members dressed in Western togs and added to the leader’s name “ranch hand,” “rambler,” or “rhythm boys.” There were defiant exceptions—”Pappy Cheshire and His Hillbilly Band,” “Missouri Bob and His Hillbilly Pals.” What chord long time KMOX performer Roy Queen and his Brush Apes hoped to strike in listeners is unknown. Roy built a venue near Warrenton that hosted many well-known country performers.

Like the Fredericksburg Military Band, posted earlier, these live dance bands have disappeared from the rural Missouri scene. Its repertoire may have come from commercially printed music or, in the case of the country-western bands, learned from phonograph records. Both genres had a near-folky culture and sound compared to the canned, corporately controlled music that followed. A poignant movie in the mold of The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon could be made centered around the closing of a rural dance hall or the final ice cream social concert of a small-town military band.

A few of the more talented musicians ended up in Hollywood or Nashville. Lawrence Welk’s celebrated South Dakota-born accordionist, Myron Floren, played for a spell with The Buckeye Four and the Shady Valley Gang, a St. Louis countrified group who played regional dances and had a KWK radio show.

Vintage Images is a column we provide to River Hills Traveler, a monthly publication.  Lens & Pen Press publishes all-color books on the Ozarks. Our book, “See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image,” showcases many of the primary tourist destinations across the Ozarks. It is available for $22.50 (10% off retail), postage paid. Click on Buy our Books

Keith McCanse Linked Conservation with Tourism

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 062025
 

1931 issue of Where to go in the Ozarks by Keith McCanse, subtitled “The Book of the Ozarks.” 138 pages chock full of ads. Includes establishments on the new Lake of the Ozarks. Also includes excellent maps. “Outside the realm of ordinary vacation literature, this publication … serves you with actual, definite facts without exaggeration.”

Keith McCanse’s Scotch-Irish family settled in the Ozarks in the 1840s. His father, George, co-founded a bank and was a true believer in Republican politics. He took his son numerous times on the legendary Galena-to-Branson float trip.

After a stint as a stockbroker in Kansas City, Keith moved his family to Taney County due to touchy health issues. He fished and hunted and became active in organizations like the Isaac Walton League dedicated to the preservation of natural resources. In 1921 he became a game warden and gave talks on the value of protecting wildlife. In 1925, Governor Sam A. Baker appointed him commissioner of Missouri’s Game and Fish Department.

Having expertise in accounting and banking he remade the department, appointing more than 100 deputies, and producing movies and appearing on radio advancing the “gospel of conservation.” McCanse transformed the good-ole-boy political sinecure into a meritocracy, staffed by trained biologists. He increased revenue, grew the state park system from four to fourteen, and fish hatcheries from two to seven. Missouri Game & Fish News was expanded and improved. It became the template for the exemplary Missouri Conservationist magazine.

In 1929, lured by an offer that doubled his salary, he took a job with KMDX, St. Louis. He promoted tourism for the Ozarks, linking it to valuing the native landscape and its fauna. He worked with the Ozark Playgrounds Association and began producing a similar travel guide to theirs listing more than 1,000 places to “fish, camp, tour, play, and rest.” The guides cost fifty cents. Even with the support of the Sinclair Automobile Service Corporation and ads from every resort, town, and village in the region or near to it, given the work involved, Where to Go in the Ozarks probably wasn’t profitable.

Like many, McCanse invested in land near Sunrise Beach on the shores of the new Lake of the Ozarks. The crash of 1929 and the Depression caused the tourism industry to go flat for more than a decade.

Keith McCanse ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor in 1932. He moved to Texas soon after and became involved in real estate promotion and Republican politics. We don’t know the extent of his involvement with conservation after he left Missouri. His role in the creation of a natural image of the Ozarks was significant. He died in 1964.

Vintage Images is a column we provide to River Hills Traveler, a monthly publication.  Lens & Pen Press publishes all-color books on the Ozarks. Our book, “See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image,” showcases many of the primary tourist destinations across the Ozarks. It is available for $22.50 (10% off retail), postage paid. Click on Buy our Books

FREDERICKSBURG MILITARY BAND, CIRCA 1915

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
May 212025
 

The decorative cardboard mat has the embossed name Schuster Studio, Hermann, Mo. Martin Anthony Schuster was born in 1871, was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, and a widely known photographer in the Hermann area. He opened a studio there on Schiller St. in 1910. The first ad we could find for the studio noted that as well as portraiture, they offered film development and printing.

How does a marching brass band cross an unbridged Ozark river? On a cable-driven ferry, of course. This sharp focus cabinet photograph preserves the record of a lost musical tradition and a vanished transportation technology. In its entry about Fredericksburg, the Gasconade Historical Society documents the population of the tiny village in 1879 population at 40. It likely never much exceeded that.

Throughout much of the 20th century the ferry permitted crossing that bridgeless section of the Gasconade River. Originally the little barge was propelled by oars, then a cable system was followed by an outboard motor, and finally an electric motor. In the mid-20th century, a bridge at last rendered it obsolete. Both the ferry and the band survived long after their prime.

The brass band posed on the ferry was organized in 1902. An ad in the May 29, 1953, Advertiser-Courier of Hermann Missouri announced an upcoming performance:

Ice Cream

SOCIAL

St. Peter’s E. & R. Church

Fredericksburg, Mo.

Saturday, June 6,

6 p.m.

Sandwiches and Refreshments

Music by Fredericksburg Military Band

Welcome Everybody

Following the Fredericksburg band promo was the announcement that music by the Charlotte Cornet Band (an even smaller community than Fredericksburg) would be provided for an ice cream social at the Salem Presby Church at Holt, Mo. That the northeast corner of the Ozarks was heavily settled by German immigrants explains how a tiny village could supply five trombone players, four cornet players and several other wind instruments. Most Ozark highland pioneers were of Scots Irish heritage and favored stringed instruments and the ballad tradition of the British Isles.

Vintage Images is a column we provide to the monthly publication, River Hills Traveler. This photograph, along with hundreds more, are among our collection now housed at Missouri State University Libraries-Ozarks Studies Institute.

Irish Wilderness travels remembered

 Irish Wilderness, Lens & Pen Press, On the Mission and Fifty Years Ago, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 112025
 

Tim Reeves’ grave is in a small, chain-link fenced plot north of Doniphan. Weathering (in 2011) had almost obliterated the lettering, which reads: “Col. Tim Reeves, born Apr 28,1821 Died Mar 10 1885  Separation is our lot. Meeting is our hope.”

This image popped up  from my ‘google pics memory’ bank this morning. Fourteen years ago, on an equally beautiful spring morning as today, we searched out the grave of Timothy Reeves – itinerant preacher whose suspicions of Father Hogan and the Catholic Church were voiced to the early settlers of Oregon and Ripley counties – well before the Civil War. Reeves became a Colonel for the 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, “a local southern-sympathizing militia” during the Civil War.  Our chapter “Wars Devastations” in Mystery of the Irish Wilderness carries many more details of the brutal guerrilla warfare in the Ozarks.

This image however calls to mind wonderful days seeking out isolated or abandoned places associated with Father John Joseph Hogan’s Irish settlement, begun with such hope and purpose, scattered and torn by “war’s devastation.”  Still the story echoes in local history to this day and is solidified in a national account by the area’s designation as “The Irish Wilderness.”

Springfield’s Own “Strange Tribe of Nimrods” – the Molly Joggers

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press  No Responses »
Apr 082025
 

“What is a Molly Jogger?” you ask. We, too, were puzzled. Read on  to learn more about this “strange tribe of nimrods.”

 

Early 1900s photograph of the Molly Joggers, an unknown boy, and their cook Shorty. The club was organized in the late 1800s by Pennsylvania-born Cyrus H. Patterson. It became extinct in 1930 when Patterson died. Through these decades there had been a total of ten members.

The Springfield hunting and fishing club once had their headquarters near Jamesville. It was a singular, even bizarre group, kind of an Animal-House-on-the-James. One of its members, John Dunckel, a lumberman-turned-drummer, published a book, The Molly Joggers: Tales of the Camp-fire, in 1906 ostensibly based on the organization’s outings. Most of its eighty-eight pages consist of ethnic jokes told in dialect – which is what one might expect from the pen of a traveling salesman at the turn of the last century. Irish, Swedish, Dutch, and of course African-American stereotypes fill the book, but no hillbillies. That word was just beginning to appear in print around 1906 and had not yet replaced the hick, rube, or mountaineer as the naïve rustic of choice.

Twice a year they pitched large tents along the James and an accomplished black cook named Shorty furnished repasts like “fried biscuits in butter, country-cured hickory-smoked ham, fried eggs, fried potatoes and onions with wild honey and sorghum on your biscuits for dessert, washed down by a cup of good coffee.”

This amused-at-their-own-antics group did range beyond their encampment at the junction of the James and Finley. A November 6, 1899, piece in the Leader-Democrat gleefully related their outdoor adventures:

The festive “Molly Joggers” of Springfield are again out on their annual hunt. Their favorite haunts are the picturesque wilds of the lower James river. They sometimes extend their savage excursions down below the mouth of the James and the fierce and reckless hunters have now and then descended the torturous White river as far as Forsyth. The “Molly Joggers” are a strange tribe of nimrods whose real character no one ever learns till he has been initiated into this fraternity of sportsmen and taken one trip with the hunters.

Woe to the squeamish-hearted tenderfoot who rashly takes the vow to obey the regulations of this fraternity, and sets out with the “Molly Joggers” on one of their autumnal expeditions. The “Molly Joggers” at home are ordinary conventional citizens. Some of them are very prominent businessmen. They are honest and industrious, make money and spend it liberally. … When required to do so by the proprieties of a social function these gentlemen wear dress coats with practiced ease and exhibit those refined manners which the best form of the times demand.” (From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River)

We must forgive our ancestors. They were a pretty “incorrect” group!

“Vintage Ozarks” is a feature we provide to the monthly publication, River Hills Traveler.  Lens & Pen Press  publishes all color books on the Ozarks. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River is a 352-page all-color book that looks at the effect of development on a famous float stream and our efforts to protect riverine resources. Once the James River, which flows through Springfield, was the premier float-fishing stream of the Ozarks.  Even though transformed and still changing, the watershed of the James Fork of the White is still in many places scenic and beautiful. It is available for $31.50 postage paid.

Indian Creek McDonald County – timeless

 Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Oct 292024
 

                                         Real photo postcard: Indian Creek Scouts, Anderson, MO. September 4, 1913

“Shall we gather at the river? The beautiful, the beautiful river?” Familiar lyrics bring images such as this to mind. Since before photography people have gathered at the river to play, to relax, to share momentous events and ceremonies like baptizings.

Indian Creek flows from the north into the Elk River in McDonald County. The clear, spring-fed streams of the Ozarks have always attracted folks for recreation. As this photo attests, Indian Creek outside Anderson has long been a magnet for summer recreation – fishing, swimming, boating, for generations. Today, it still attracts recreationists. Indian Creek is noted for spring floats especially, with 25 miles of a good, steady, fast run through relatively undisturbed countryside, despite its proximity to development. The Conservation Department has developed an access point to Indian Creek right in Anderson. The Dabbs Greer Town Hole Park and Access is in Anderson on Main Street next to the Post Office.

Describing a pleasant day’s float, the NW Arkansas Democrat Gazette (July 25, 2013) waxed eloquent:  “…Indian Creek, an Ozark waterway that is truly a stream of dreams.” –

This and many other vintage images of Ozarks recreation and activities are now in the collection of the Ozarks Studies Institute at MSU.

The Payton’s book on early tourism and recreation in our region, See The Ozarks: The Touristic Image, is now available on the website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $22.50 (10% off retail price of $24.95), postage paid.

Meramec Cave – early tourism

 Damming the Osage, Lens & Pen Press  No Responses »
Oct 012024
 

              Real photo postcard. Entrance to Meramec Cave in Stanton, Missouri. Probably 1930s

Caves have been inhabited and served as the stage for mythological tales in most cultures, past and present. Indigenous peoples used Missouri’s numerous caves for shelter long before Europeans arrived. For a century and a half after that, it was mined for saltpeter (potassium nitrate, which is used in the manufacture of fireworks, fluxes, gunpowder, etc.), and was even named “Saltpeter Cave.” By the time this photo was taken Meramec Cave had a well-known history.

After the Civil War, local residents found more genial uses for the cavernous space like celebrations, music events, and “cave parties.” In 1933, Lester Dill bought the cave and turned his marketing talents to its promotion. His billboards still dot our highways. But more significant to the evolution of tourism, Les is credited with the invention of the bumper sticker. While visitors toured the cave, Dill sent “bumper sign boys” into the parking lot to tie (no stick-‘em or glue those days) Meramec Caverns bumper signs on their cars. He got free advertising; visitors had another souvenir.

The Corps of Engineers had ambitious plans for the Meramec River and its surrounding landscape:

“A fifty-one-page booklet published in 1966 by the University of Missouri Extension Division summarized the master plan the Corps and other state and federal groups had to take over the entire Meramec basin.

In 1949, they undertook an ambitious planning process to build three reservoirs in the Meramec basin. They invited fourteen other state and federal agencies to participate in a grandiose improve­ment scheme. By 1965, they proposed thirty-one reservoirs, small, medium, and large, that would transform the region into a land of lakes and a motorboat paradise.”

Lawsuits were filed. The public was alerted:

“Don Rembach and Roger Pryor and other cavers and geologists brought out the fact the dam was not only built on a fault, it was in such a karst area it might not hold water. Mr. St. Louis Zoo and national TV star, Marlon Perkins, made a short film of floating the beautiful Meramec that was shown in movie theaters in St. Louis. Folk singer Tom Shipley wrote a protest song:

Well the generals laugh and the generals gloat /
but the people of Missouri, well they never got a vote /
they’re putting up a dam and we’re putting up a fight /
on the banks of the Meramec.”

Quoted from Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir.

The original postcard is now in the Payton Ozarks Collection of the Ozarks Studies Institute at Missouri State University.

PEARL SPURLOCK, the Tourist’s Friend

 Beautiful Ozarks, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Jun 202024
 

Pearl Spurlock, tourist guide and raconteur extraordinaire of the early Shepherd of the Hills days in Branson. “Sparky” was such a legend herself; we used this photograph as a full page illustration in See The Ozarks

Pearl Spurlock became as well known as the characters and locations of Harold Bell Wright’s best-selling 1906 novel, The Shepherd of the Hills. As ‘furners’ traveled to Branson to pay homage to the events and people of the novel, most were treated to the knowledgeable services of “Sparky” – early on by horseback, and later in her car. As they bumped over the rocky hills to Sammy Lane’s Lookout and Uncle Ike’s Post Office, Pearl “not only tells the story in a beautiful and impressive manner, but feels it, … and you feel it must be the first time (she has given it) … It has grown sweeter to her each time it is told.” (Harrison County Times, Bethany, Missouri, Nov. 1, 1934.)

Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, poet of the hills, even penned a tribute to Pearl:

Velvet fingers, but grip of steel,

Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel,

A flashing smile and a kindly hail,

For passing friends on the shining trail;

 

And a fine, sure knowledge of hill and wood,

With legend, tradition, bad or good.

And Pearl Spurlock floats along

With her big car singing its steady song.

 

And yet, I wonder if sometime she

Dreams a dream of the used to be?

When a good horse answered her girlish skill

In a glorious gallop o’er vale and hill,

 

When the summer days passed gay and sweet,

On the little bay mare with dancing feet.

Today the same strong love abides

For her still streams, her mountain sides,

And that is why they all depend

On dear Pearl Spurlock—the tourist’s friend.

The article noted that Pearl was a Harrison County local, as her family was from there, well outside the territory of the Shepherd of the Hills.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

See The Ozarks: The Touristic Image is available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $22.50 (10% off retail price of $24.95), postage paid.

 

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