New book in the works – LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS: Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco

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Apr 202018
 

We have a new book in the works – Lover’s Leap Legends; Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco. Lover’s Leaps are those dramatic prominences soaring above plains and rivers, impossible not to see, dramatic spots from where you can scan the surrounding landscape. Lover’s Leaps and their attendant legends are scattered across the land.

Inspiration for this more expansive topic comes from our favorite Missouri author and wry observer of humanity – Mark Twain. In Life on the Mississippi he tells of hearing the story of Winona from a fellow passenger on a steamship passing Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, on Lake Pepin (a watery wide spot in the Mississippi River). “…Romantic superstition has invested (Maiden Rock) with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. . . . Perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all  the legends of the Mississippi.” (Chapter 59, Legends and Scenery”)

Each of our two most recent ‘river books’ (Damming the Osage and James Fork of the White) had a Lover’s Leap – one at Lake of the Ozarks; the other called Virgin Bluff on the James. We had written their legends in our books and through Twain’s account found more.

Linen postcard, 1940s showing Lover’s Leap, overlooking
the junction of the Niangua River and the Osage River.

 

 

Real photo poscard showing Virgin Bluff on the James River, where the lovely Moon Song leapt to her death in sorrow for her father’s threat against the handsome Spaniard she loved.

 

 

So Leland launched the research as we waited for James Fork of the White to be delivered from the printer. The  legends accumulated. The geographic locations were widespread and beautiful. The souvenirs and ephemera commemorating these locations were colorful, kitschy (in an appealilng way), and numerous. The concept took shape. In addition to collecting the myriad popular culture artifacts that commemorate such attractions, which we we’ve often use as illustrations for our books, we’ve hit the trail to seek out some of the more famous ( or infamous) locations to take contemporary photographs. First stop was Mark Twain’s hometown, Hannibal, Missouri, which has its own Lover’s Leap rising above the Mississippi. More on that in the next post.

Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir (amazon.com) and James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River (amazon.com) are  available at this website , amazon.com and Barnes & Noble in Springfield.

THE SPRING AT REEDS SPRING. Real Photo Postcard, 1940s

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Apr 112018
 

The Stone County Booklet of 1927 describes the small but then-bustling commercial burg of Reeds Spring:  “Lying in a nook among the beautiful hills and around a mammoth spring of clear, cold water, where only a few years ago the cattle were want to loiter, lies one of the best trading points in Stone County.”

With its railroad connections, Reeds Spring was also a center point of the tomato canning industry, which provided employment and much needed cash to that rural economy, with twenty-two canning factories within twelve miles. Highways put Reeds Spring on the route to the Shepherd of the Hills Country and Branson. Signs decorate the spring’s shelter, promoting major tourist caves of the region – Spanish Cave, Fairy Cave (today called Talking Rocks Cavern) and Marvel Cave – are promoted . . .  and don’t miss Mother’s Cafe.  Businesses serving tourists – like souvenir and novelty shops – flourished.

Today the town has been bypassed by major highways, but has attracted artists and creative types. The spring is still a focal point of interest, its sheltering roof and shed now painted a warm brick red.

James Fork of the White is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Callaway County’s First Post Office established 1818

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Mar 312018
 

Two centuries ago this month, (yes – 200 years!) the first post office Callaway County (aka The Kingdom of Callaway) opened in Cote Sans Dessein on the north side of the Missouri River, just downstream from its confluence with the Osage.

Left: Osage River joins the Missouri River near Bonnots Mill, on the south  side of the Osage, in Osage County. Bonnots Mill “is a continuation of Dauphin that was founded by French traders a few years after Zebulon Pike passed by (1805).” (p. 290, Damming the Osage.)

To mark the occasion, the post office in Tebbetts, Missouri, which now serves the area once served by the Cote San Dessein post office, will offer a “special anniversary postmark.” This special cancellation will be available at the Tebbetts Post Office through April 26.

Read all about it in the Jefferson City Tribune.

Additional information on the history of the area is available at the Kingdom of Callaway Historical Society.

 

Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman  Reservoir is available at this website, amazon.com and Barnes & Noble in Springfield.

April 7 – Cleaning up the Osage River and the Missouri – Interested?

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Mar 252018
 

Missouri River Relief seeks volunteers for river cleanup

Missouri River Relief is asking for volunteers to help with a large-scale trash cleanup project on the Osage and Missouri rivers.

Rain or shine, Missouri River Relief and volunteers from around central Missouri will start the April 7 project with an 8:30 a.m. sign-in at Bonnots Mill River Access, south of Jefferson City. By 9 a.m., volunteers will be shuttled by motorboats operated by Missouri River Relief, the Missouri Department of Conservation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to locations along the Osage and Missouri Rivers.

 

 

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.

Coon Ridge Novelty Shop, Reeds Spring

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Mar 082018
 

Roadside souvenir, crafts and novelty shops were a feature of automobile-era Ozark tourism. Much of the merchandise was locally produced. Some were traditional pioneer crafts; some were recent innovations like the concrete drip vessels. Sometimes chenille bedspreads produced in factories in southern Appalachia flapped in the breeze. By the 1950s, inexpensive souvenirware from Japan had arrived on some shelves. Coon Ridge Novelty Shop in Reeds Spring appears to have specialized in Ozark drip pottery and handmade hickory baskets.

Bass Fishing “The Rock”

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Mar 012018
 

Even early dam opponents conceded fishing was good in newly filled reservoirs. Decaying vegetation and flooded timber provided fertility and cover for the fish.

One species drives sport fishing on Table Rock Lake, and hundreds of other government reservoirs – the largemouth black bass. They are superbly adapted to artificial lakes and they hit artificial lures with wild abandon.

As expected, Table Rock was excellent fishing soon after the dam was completed. This 1962 photograph of Virgil Ward and guide Dick Hovick with a two-day catch of Table Rock big mouth was in an ad for Ward’s “Bass-Buster” lures. This syndicated fishing show was often filmed there. Fifty years later, bass growth has slowed, but “The Rock,” as Table Rock Lake is called, hosts hundreds of bass tournaments. Since the lake filled, Missouri Department of Conservation biologists have kept track of fish populations. The Department’s “Annual Prospects Report” stated, “Fishing for black bass should be good in 2016.”

James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River (page 320)

James Fork of the White is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Reeds Spring, Real Photo Postcard, 1930s

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Feb 072018
 

For the auto-driving tourist to Branson, the signs were out  . . .  “Welcome … Drive In and LOOK” . . .  and (hopefully) buy some trinkets, food or gas. You could drink a Coke, gas up and shop this splendid selection of Ozark drip pottery and cedar novelties in a short stop in Reeds Spring. Many of the cedar boxes were made locally under small factory conditions and had decals evoking Shepherd of the Hills Country. At the time these roadside attractions were disparaged, but today many of the items they sold are high priced collectibles. Look closely at the loaded shelves in this photograph. Next time you browse through an antique mall or flea market, scan those shelves for similar items. Nowadays, foreign manufactured items compete with locally made tourist items.

This image is used in a section about Reeds Spring in James Fork of the White (p. 87).  The book is available on amazon.com, on this website  and at Barnes & Noble.

 

A SWALLOW HOLE, DRY CREEKS AND SINKING STREAMS

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Jan 232018
 

Since mid-December, the Springfield News Leader has followed the discovery and monitoring of a recently opened up “swallow hole” on the James River, near the Greenway Trail in southwest Springfield.

A dramatic sucking sound accompanies the whirling vortex as hundreds of gallons of the stream’s water disappears down the dark hole. It’s a graphic auditory and visual illustration of the porous nature of the karst typography we live on.

Loring Bullard, author of Jordan Creek: Story of an Urban Stream and past president of the Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, was one of those who found the swallow hole. He described the whirlpool as “a crack in the creek bed . . . sucking hundreds of gallons of water into a subterranean channel that likely exited more than a mile downstream at Rader Spring.”

Our research for James Fork of the White led us to Rader Spring as well. An unspectacular outpouring in a field near Wilson Creek, the spring did not historically attract the leisure class for picnics and dalliances. Still, it is instructive of our landscape. Of Rader Spring, we wrote:

The spring only a hydrologist could love pumps around six or eight million gallons a day into the now-cleaned-up Wilson Creek – a third as much as Missouri’s twentieth biggest spring. Still, it’s a lot of water, but size is not what endears it to geologists. The Association of Missouri Geologists took a field trip here and Kenneth C. Thompson wrote, “Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of Rader Spring and its supply system are the reversible sinkholes or estavellas that occur in the Wilson Creek valley. These curious karst features accept water in drier seasons and discharge water as springs during rainy seasons.” (p. 53)

The mysterious movement of water under the surface of our earth has been studied and pondered by generations of geologists, hydrologists, landowners as well as recreationalists who observe the outcomes of that movement. Dry creeks and sinking streams, which have intermittent water supplies, also prove that, although we may not see it, water courses through a complex subsurface system that does not necessarily copy the channels we see from a low water bridge. Pouring dye into one water source and waiting to see where it resurfaces is the most common method of tracking that movement.

Rader Spring is a textbook example of how leaky the Springfield Plateau is. Fluorescent dye introduced into creeks and sinks from as far away as I-44 have been detected in Rader’s waters. From a dry branch of Nichols Creek six miles away dye was injected that reached the spring in six days. Rader is only 1.3 miles from Springfield’s Southwest Waste Water Treatment Plant. (p. 53)

Fluorescent dyes have been introduced into some dry streambeds and sinkholes along Flat Creek a few miles from Cassville and emerged in the great spring at Roaring River. That twenty-six-million gallon-a-day frigid water source for a state trout park is not in the James River basin. Subsurface water movement does not always follow present-day surface stream configurations. (p. 94)

James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Joseph Philibert Cemetery, final resting place for Granny Gore, “Cherokee Doctor”

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Jan 212018
 

If you turn west from Highway 13 on Joe Bald Road, you’ll pass the entrance to Joseph Philibert Cemetery. Named for the first white settler in Stone County, this hilltop cemetery is where the graves of twenty small graveyards in the Table Rock Lake basin were relocated.

Among the markers are those for William Carol “Tipton” Gore and his second wife, Nancy “Granny” Gore, “Cherokee Doctor.” Nancy Gore was born in Tennessee about 1820, married William Gore and they moved to Arkansas, then to Stone County about 1848. They settled near the confluence of the James and White rivers. Their neighbors were the Joseph Philibert (1812-1884) and William Gillis families who had a trading post where they bought furs from the Indians. The Philibert family graveyard was near the site of the trading post. Twenty-two graves were in the old cemetery when Table Rock Lake began to fill. Among those were the Gores.

Headstones were modest, and many burials were only marked with rocks to indicate a grave. A new marker was made for Granny Gore, a Cherokee medicine woman and wife of pioneer William Tipton Gore. Small family cemeteries in the basin of Table Rock Reservoir were moved to higher ground before the lake filled. Headstones and remains of twenty graveyards, such as they were, were dug up and relocated in the new Joseph Philibert Cemetery just north of Kimberling City.
                                                                  James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River

Granny Gore’s Ozark Folk Medicine by Sherman Lee Pompey:

And finally in the words of Granny herself, “You see, the good Lord made herbs an’ roots for the purpose of medicines. A lot of medicines that we used in the early hills was nothing more than the same thing or the artificial substitute of these things used today by modern medical science.”

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