The Stream of Time

Tags

Aging, Black River, Current River, historical fiction, history, Icarians, logging, Ozarks, St. Francis River, utopia

I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, a forest-rich region containing nearly ten million acres of dense timberland, and spent much of my childhood exploring the steep hills and crystalline streams around my family’s farm. To my young mind, everything had always been as it was at the current time, so I never considered the history of the region, the environmental and cultural changes it had undergone, or the effects of those changes on the people who lived there. My grandfather, who lived with us during his final years, reminisced about having chopped out a farmstead along the St. Francis River. Our neighbor, a long-time resident, remembered helping his father float enormous rafts of railroad ties down the Current and Black rivers. These tales were just isolated curiosities to me; I never connected them to any larger narrative.

Not that history didn’t interest me. I was a good student, and history a favorite subject. But the missing part was the connection between history the subject, filled with names, locations, battles, and Important Doctrines, and history the lived experience.

When I began writing historical fiction, at the age of 52, I came to it as someone who had been writing fiction in a contemporary setting for decades. The year was 2007, the United States was at the peak of its embroilment in the Iraq war, and I had been engaged in the scholarly study of 19th-century utopian communities, more from personal curiosity than as part of any systematic agenda. I had developed an interest in utopian groups after reading a rather snide reference to the Icarians in The Communist Manifesto while I was teaching a Great Books class at Centenary College of Louisiana, wondering “Who the heck were the Icarians,” and then chasing the footnote across the country, as history fanatics often do. It turned out that the Icarians were a pre-Marxian communist group who emigrated from France to the United States in 1848 and had colonies in various parts of the country as late as the 1890s. Once bitten by the footnote bug, there is no stopping. That endeavor led me to a wider interest in utopianism, especially in Missouri in the years before the Civil War. In 2007, something in the news caught my attention, and I was struck by the parallels between the war in Iraq and Missouri’s experience in the Civil War: an occupying army, a restive civilian population whose loyalties were hard to determine, a landscape in which separating enemy from ally was a constant problem, bands of freelance fighters who used the larger war as an excuse to carry out their own vendettas, and a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty and violence, in which battle lines were never clear, neighbor betrayed neighbor, and casual encounters escalated to deadly violence in an instant.

All at once the connection between my somewhat recreational study of history and my passion for creative writing became clear. The past could give insights into the present, not simply in the “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it” sense, but in a more visceral way, engaging with the hopes, jealousies, good intentions, and broken promises of ordinary people caught up in terrible times.

That realization marked the moment when I began to think about my own history, and my home’s history, in a different way. My grandfather’s stories about life on the St. Francis River at the turn of the 20th century; my neighbor’s reminiscences of work in the lead mines and the log woods, and his tales of the great tie drives, with miles and miles of green railroad ties, freshly hacked from the forest, bound together and floated down the rivers to the railhead; these stories from my childhood took on life again.

The Ozarks that I had known as a child had not, as I should have realized even then, always been that way. The thick woods, mostly oak and hickory trees a couple of feet in diameter or less, had once been largely pine, much taller and larger. The rivers, clear but relatively shallow, had indeed carried immense volumes of cut lumber. The mound of earth on the hillside above our pasture, oddly soft underfoot, was the long-ago sawdust heap from a mill that had disappeared, along with the village that had grown up around it, leaving only the stray evidence of an overgrown lane, pieces of equipment rusted to the point of unrecognizability, and a hoard of logging tools in the barn.

History, it seemed, was all around me. It had always been, but I had simply never noticed. And it wasn’t confined to monuments and battlefields, but woven into the scenery.

It’s hard to make the claim that one must reach a certain age to appreciate history this way, but my own experience tells me that perspective is what counts in this enterprise, and perspective is a gift of aging. One becomes aware of the passing of time, and of how familiar sights – a street, a building, a landscape – shift over time to reflect changing ways of life, attitudes, and circumstances. Evidence of life-and-death struggle is concealed in plain sight. A sunken roadbed marks where a forced Indian removal passed. The incongruous name of a boat landing reveals the drowned town that once flourished where waterskiers now skim. You don’t have to get old to notice these things, but age brings an understanding of the impermanence of objects and lives, even ones that we might have imagined as children to be imperishable.

In my case, the enriched understanding of my own heritage as a fifth-generation Ozarker led to an endless fascination with the stories and conflicts of my region. As a child, my parents repeated a family tale about a great-great uncle who had been killed by a bushwhacker—a guerrilla fighter—during the Civil War. My curiosity about this tale was rewarded when I found a copy of the bushwhacker’s reminiscences, dictated to postwar interviewers, for sale in an annotated edition from the University of Arkansas Press. Like other participants in the Missouri-Kansas-Arkansas theater of the war, which was dominated by savage guerrilla fighting with no fixed lines of battle, he had sought to retell his participation in the fight by casting it in the mythical light of honor and revenge, and an eager audience of fellow reinterpreters took down his musings and published them for posterity. I discovered that my family’s story was true, although the motives for the killing remain in dispute. I picked up books like David Benac’s excellent Conflict in the Ozarks and Kenneth L. Smith’s Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies and discovered that my neighbor’s memories of tie drives, two-man crosscutting, and forests so tall and shady, and thus free from undergrowth, that a man could navigate them at a gallop, were not his memories alone, but shared experiences across the Ozarks and into the Ouachita Mountains as far west as Oklahoma.

This renewed sense of history as lived experience has led me to focus, in my novels, on how people’s conflicting belief systems change the way they live. “Be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming,” Emerson famously said, and the utopian idealists, determined slaveholders, love-maddened romantics, and money-loving capitalists of my novels demonstrate that truism again and again. We are living through history, making history, and becoming history ourselves. So when I turn to history in my novels, I see this simultaneous process of being and becoming repeated at the individual scale, relationship by relationship, person by person.

My earlier novels explored the Ozarks during the Civil War and Reconstruction years. My most recent book looks ahead to the later part of the century, when the Industrial Age came to the region in the form of large lumber and mining companies based in the nation’s urban centers. These companies moved into the deep Ozarks, built railroad lines into areas previously considered impossibly remote, and enlisted the local population in the extraction of the region’s natural resources. From the early 1880s through 1910, Missouri forests produced about half a billion board feet of lumber each year, a number that is as mind-bogglingly large as it sounds. The impact of this era reverberates to this day in the Ozarks, in ways that even longtime residents don’t always notice. For example, the large national forests in Missouri and Arkansas, some of the most extensive national forestland east of the Rockies, largely derive from cutover land that the big timber companies were unable to sell and didn’t want to pay taxes on. The environmentally calamitous cut-and-get-out philosophy of one era resulted in a surprising, and unintended, scenic and environmental benefit in another era.

In The Language of Trees, the quiet utopian community established in the 1850s, having survived the ravages of the war and the agonies of its aftermath, confronts a new challenge: what to do when the Modern Age arrives? The agrarian ideals that dominated the founding of America were giving way to the industrial organization of society, with time clocks, factory whistles, and all the social upheaval that accompanies it. From the contemporary perspective, we might see this transformation as a loss of innocence, and indeed it was. But for the inhabitants of Daybreak, the arrival of the American Lumber and Mining Company is a more complicated encounter. The new people who come to the valley, offering more money than Daybreak has ever seen before for land and labor, are not all the wicked capitalists of communal nightmare; in fact, some are quite charming and conflicted in their own motives. And not all the Communists want to remain Communist. Ultimately the villagers have to find a path that threads between love and self-advancement, between cherished ideals and new opportunities, between a changing present and a fraught future.

And thus history makes its way, neither the steady march of progress our forbears liked to imagine nor the decline from innocence it sometimes seems now, but instead a swift and twisting river that loops back on itself, disappears and reappears, and carries us along with it as we try to steer a clear route while being borne by the current. Come to think of it, history is a lot like an Ozark float stream itself. We think we understand it, we even think we can control it, but in the end it surprises us with destruction, or beauty, or both.

This essay first appear in BLOOM.

Advertisements

That Second Cross-Missouri Trail

Tags

Columbia Daily Tribune, conservation, Conservation Department, Conservation Federation of Missouri, legislature, Missouri, politics, Rock Island Trail, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nice piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning about the prospects for a second cross-Missouri trail.

It’s easy to see from the Post’s map that this proposed trail would have much less traffic than the Katy. It doesn’t connect or run near major population centers, as the Katy does. So a nay-sayer might complain about the cost-to-people-served ratio.

But the role of state parks is not always to serve the largest possible number. The map also tells us that this trail would give a much more Ozarks-flavored experience than the Katy; it travels through rougher and more forested territory, and thus would appeal more to the backpack-and-tent crowd than the winery-and-B&B types. So it would have fewer hikers and bikers. So what? Is popularity the only value for a park?

Park advocates (including myself, sometimes) have become habituated to using economic arguments to justify them. But the logical trap to that argument is that people who are swayed by economic arguments can always find a more profitable use for parkland. A recent op-ed in the Columbia Daily Tribune from the head of the Conservation Federation of Missouri argued against a proposed bill in the legislature that would allow nonresident landowners to obtain free hunting licenses. His criticism focused on the cost to the Conservation Department – about $500,000 – and included a list of dire consequences if that money were lost. But seriously, $500,000 in a department whose annual budget is nearing $200 million is not much of an argument. I agree that letting nonresident landowners get free hunting licenses is a bad idea, but not just because of the cost. It’s a bad idea because it perverts the original intent of the resident landowner exception, which was to make sure that farmers and other rural residents could hunt on their own property without too many government-imposed hoops to jump through. It’s a bad idea because it opens the door to abuses, with distant landowners finding off-the-books ways to profit from those free licenses. And it’s a bad idea because it’s yet another legislative run at the independence of the Conservation Department. As with the Rock Island Trail park, the value of an independent Conservation Department can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In fact, measuring the accomplishments of government in dollars and cents is the opposite of the point. Government is not supposed to act like a business, where dollar value is the highest priority. Government is supposed to act in the public interest, broadly defined, and serving the widest variety of citizens falls into that category as far as I’m concerned.

Great parks, like great schools and great highways, are valuable on their own merits, not on what they yield economically. And the proposed Rock Island Trail would be a great park.

“Where Is Ebbing, Missouri?”

Tags

Ebbing, film, Missouri, movies, racism, Three Billboards, violence

I am asked this question by my non-Missouri friends, in mixed tones of apprehension and excitement, as if unsure whether they’d like to road-trip there, just to see, or to make sure they never get within fifty miles of the place.

The newest contribution to the cultural portrait of Missouri is getting a lot of attention these days, an ironic turn given the fact that it was filmed in the mountains of North Carolina and that it makes little reference to the actual state of Missouri (the word “Missouri” is spoken a few times, but that’s about it). So the “Missouri” of the title is hardly referential, and no, friends, there is no Ebbing.

But the question of whether “Ebbing, Missouri” makes sense in a metaphorical way is something else entirely, and should leave Missourians with some soul-searching to do. A recent column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called attention to the ways in which the real state of Missouri is coming to resemble the town of Ebbing, where racism and violence are commonplace, police routinely brutalize citizens without consequence, and most people seem mired in the kind of attitudes we are familiar with from Cool Hand Luke. The columnist writes wryly, “Tourism commissions throughout the state are serving sides of Pepto-Bismol at their monthly luncheon meetings.”

On the other side of the state, the Kansas City Star is excited by a trend it calls “Ozarks Noir,” citing Three Billboards as the latest in a series that began with Winter’s Bone, progressed through Gone Girl, and most recently manifested itself in the Netflix series Ozark, about which I have already commented. The Star points to thriller novels by Daniel Woodrell, Robert Dunn, and many others as signs of something that looks practically like a movement, although a succession of books about meth-addled killers ain’t exactly the Harlem Renaissance. Dunn is quoted in the article of the appeal of the Ozarks: “Part of it is nostalgia for what is gone. Part of it is atmospheric, a place that is dark and brooding.”

I’ll admit to my share of dark and brooding times, and a recent article in the Springfield News-Leader about the “epidemic of despair” in the Ozarks is enough to make anyone feel a bit on edge. But the Ozarks, and Missouri, are not alone in that predicament. Anywhere education is lower, and poverty is higher, than average is experiencing that epidemic as the have-nots grow increasingly distant from the haves; it’s the great challenge of our time. Ultimately, though, I don’t think Three Billboards is about Missouri, or the South (the film’s writer/director said in an interview that the idea for the story came to him while he was traveling in the Alabama-Georgia-Florida region), or social problems in general. If you’re looking for a movie that represents Missouri, or for that matter even tries to represent Missouri, this isn’t it. The odd notes in the language and the setting signal to natives that the film isn’t “about” Missouri in the way that, say, A River Runs Through It is about Montana.

Much of the argument around Three Billboards focuses on the story arc, in which sympathetic characters act horribly, bad characters act horribly, and nobody seems to get the kind of fate they deserve. Crimes go unpunished. People say awful things. The moral universe seems askew. Critics of the film see a failure of the movie’s moral compass in these unaddressed imbalances, an implied acceptance or endorsement of the characters’ ill behavior; defenders see it as simply reflecting the mess and disorder of life itself. I’ll leave it to you to decide where to come down, but will at least give the movie credit for being more complicated and troubling than most of the movies that get the designation of “quality film” or “important social issue film” these days. (On a side note, I would add that the movie’s unrelenting insistence on having virtually all the significant characters use hard-core profanity, presumably to make them sound “tough” or “contemporary,” is tin-eared, tiresome, and untrue to the actual rhythms of rural speech.)

“Ebbing” is not in Missouri. Perhaps it’s everywhere.

 

 

Favorite Ozarks Books – 9

Tags

Bittersweet, education, Ellen Gray Massey, Foxfire, high school, Lebanon

I vividly remember the excitement many of us felt upon hearing of the Bittersweet project back in the ’70s. Modeled on the groundbreaking Foxfire project from the Appalachians, Bittersweet was a quarterly magazine of Ozarks folklore written by students from Lebanon High School and edited by their teacher, Ellen Gray Massey.

We loved getting Bittersweet in the mail, partly because of the delightful reminiscences and practical lessons in near-forgotten crafts from its elderly interview subjects, and partly because it was just as delightful to sense the excitement of the young authors as they learned about their community from people they otherwise would likely have ignored. I suspect some of those high-schoolers grew from that experience into careers as journalists, historians, or writers.

In later years, it was my good fortune to get to know Mrs. Massey, who had served as president of the Missouri Writers Guild some years before I did. I’ll confess to a little fan-boying when I met her for the first time.

So when I saw this collection of Bittersweet articles — the second, as Bittersweet Country was published first, in the late 1970s, while this one came out in 1985 — at the book table at the Ozarks Studies Symposium in West Plains, I knew I had to have it. I’ve been reading it in the past few weeks, enjoying the articles, some of which are the simple reflections of high school students suddenly discovering that their own landscape has cultural riches, and some of which are transcribed interviews from “old-timers” (undoubtedly gone now) who talk about their childhoods, their work life, their geography, their families, and anything else that prompts their fancy. It’s glorious to read their words in full Ozark dialect, written down just as they spoke them.

And yes, I’m sure a few of those expressions and stories will work their way into my next book.

An Indispensable Book

Tags

Branson, Crystal Payton, float trips, Galena, James River, Kimberling City, lakes, Leland Payton, rivers, Seymour, Springfield, Table Rock, White River

Readers of books on Ozarks culture and geography are probably familiar with Leland and Crystal Payton, whose earlier works, Damming the Osage, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, The Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks, and others, explore elements of the Ozark experience in a reflective and sympathetic though unromanticized way.

Now the Paytons are out with a new book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, which treats the James Fork (or James River, depending on your choice of nomenclature) much as Damming the Osage dealt with its river: exploring its culture, its notable inhabitants, its controversies, its geography and hydrology, its history, and ultimately its submersion into a manmade lake, in this case Table Rock Lake, which swallowed up many miles of what had been one of Missouri’s great float streams. The James gets less attention than other Ozarks rivers; it doesn’t have the national recognition of the Buffalo, Current, or Eleven Point, nor the long sinuous might of the Osage. But the stories gathered from along the James, and the variety of its topography as it flows west from near Seymour, skirts the southern edge of Springfield, then abruptly heads south through Galena to its meeting with the lake near Kimberling City, make for a book that should be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in the Ozarks, its streams, or its people.

James Fork of the White is an oversized book, 352 pages with full-color illustrations from start to finish. Many of the illustrations are photographs by Leland Payton, whose work has documented the Ozarks for decades. Payton’s photographic gaze is contemplative, sometimes wry, and often focused on the human artifacts that have marked the landscape over the generations: old bridges, buildings, the remnants of milldams and springhouses, signs, and sometimes (though not insistently) an actual human. The overlook-at-sunset-in-autumn photo is not to be found – or if found, is likely to be a tad off kilter. Just as valuable in the illustrations are the vast numbers of historical images the Paytons have collected, including postcards, maps, clippings, pamphlets, labels, and other ephemera. Taken together, the historic images and the contemporary photographs create a rich visual portrait of the James River watershed.

The text of the book, as with Damming the Osage, consists of brief vignettes about people, incidents, and landscapes within the region, grouped together into chapters that converge on a broader topic: the geography of the region, the upper river, the Springfield section, and the famous float trip stretch from Galena to Branson, for example. Each chapter covers a number of topics within that broad subject area, each typically taking two to four pages before moving on. Like the images, the text covers an immense variety of subjects. There were some I was dimly aware of, some I was familiar with, and many, many that I’d never heard of before. The Paytons, who live in Springfield, have made this river a particular project of documentation, and this book covers everything from forgotten industries and settlements to recent controversies over pollution and development.

I found the saga of the creation of Table Rock Dam and its lake particularly interesting. I suspect I am not alone in assuming that Table Rock originated in the wave of flood control public works projects of the mid-twentieth century, part of the “big dam foolishness” chronicled in Elmer T. Peterson’s book of the same name, but I was surprised to learn that the dam had its roots much farther back. The book details the plans of multiple entrepreneurs to dam the James as early as 1908, plans which were thwarted and resuscitated over the decades as the winds of politics and economics shifted. James Fork of the White treats the creation of Table Rock Lake with evenhanded understanding. The lake has brought immense economic development to Branson and the surrounding area, but that development came at the cost of the permanent inundation of hundreds of miles of valleys, farmland, and settlements. The James Fork’s legendary Galena-to-Branson float, itself a tourist attraction in its own right, was lost to the more mechanized allure of deep flat water, stocked trout, and big bass fishing.

James Fork of the White is a book I will return to again and again, both for the richness of its images and for the variety of its information. For residents of Springfield and the White River valley, and for anyone interested in Ozarks history and culture, this is an indispensable book.

An Ozarks Eccentric Passes

Tags

eccentrics, Salem, Wana Dubie

I’ve written about Chief Wana Dubie before, but this weekend came the news that he had died. You’re only an eccentric until everybody comes round to your way of thinking, and the gradual spread of legalized marijuana around the country might presage the movement of the Chief from crank to prophet.

A scholarly presentation I once attended made the point that the Ozarks’ “mind your own business” mentality allows truly scary people to flourish in its hollows. Witness the neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that set up quarters in the region from time to time. But minding one’s own business also leaves room for the colorful personalities to inhabit. I prefer a lawn that has some dandelions to one that’s a uniform green.

Virgin Pine

Tags

Eminence, Highway 19, lumber, Missouri, pine, Salem, virgin pine

Postcard from the Boston Public Library.

On a recent float trip, I drove down Highway 19 south of Salem, through the 41 acres known as Missouri’s Virgin Pine Forest. I remember being taken here as a kid, not really understanding what “virgin forest” meant—to me they just looked like regular pine trees.

Since then, I’ve visited the forest several times. There’s a two-mile drive that departs from the highway, passes through the grove, and goes a little way into the Pioneer Forest, the owner of the Virgin Pine Forest. (The highway is paved now, unlike in that historic postcard, although it still has the same stomach-wrenching twists and turns.)

For a time I doubted whether the forest had really remained uncut all these years; it’s not inaccessible, and it is located in the heart of timber country which was utterly decimated by pine loggers in the late 1880s. But this pamphlet from the L-A-D Foundation, which owns and manages the Pioneer Forest along with a lot of other Ozark land, cites research showing that some of the trees indeed predate the logging era, so I guess I’ll have to quiet my doubt, although the pamphlet is carefully worded. You’ll see considerable debate online as to whether the preservation of some old-growth trees means that the tract is truly “virgin,” i.e., uncut. It’s clear that a lot of the trees in the tract are recent growth, so I suppose it depends on what you mean by the word “virgin.” Never touched by human hands? No way. Having some trees that escaped the logging era? Looks like it.

I’d still like to know how those trees escaped the timber cutters. As far as I’m aware, the only other “virgin timber” in the state dating back to the 1700s is in cemeteries, private home lots, and other such areas where commercial lumbering was not possible.

Photo from alltrails.com

 

 

Favorite Ozarks People – 14

Tags

Arcadia, doctors, Favorite Ozarks People, Ironton, Marvin Menne

The former office of Dr. Marvin Menne in Ironton. Looks like it’s a Goodwill store now, or at least it was when this Google Street View image was taken.

Marvin Menne was my family doctor from the time I was about ten (I tried to find a photo of the good doctor himself, but was unsuccessful–who knew that someone could be that far off the grid these days?) I was a tolerably healthy kid, but had the usual number of youthful ailments and necessary check-ups, so I suppose my medical involvement was pretty typical.

Dr. Menne’s office, as you can tell from this photo, was modest. A small waiting room in front, a receptionist/appointment setter behind the counter, a couple of examining rooms, and then an office and a room for more involved procedures, which I rarely saw the inside of, thank goodness. It was the office of a small-town GP, not far removed from the Norman Rockwell illustrations.

Dr. Menne had a vaguely mournful expression much of the time, the expression of someone who’s seen too many broken limbs and lives. But I recall that even as a child, he would square himself up to me, sit, and listen, until I had told him everything I had to say. Only then would he prompt me with further questions or continue with his examination.

In today’s overheated discussions of health care, we romanticize the small-town doctor, who made house calls, accepted chickens as payment, or what have you. Let’s remember that the modern health care system has resulted in a high level of care, far beyond what my small-town doctor was capable of, and overall health has been improving. Instead of a chicken, today’s poor rural patient brings a Medicaid card. But the necessity of caring remains, and I have a feeling that doctors like Marvin Menne can be found all over rural areas just as in my childhood. With the election of a doctor from Mountain Grove to the presidency of the American Medical Association, this is a year to think seriously about the state of health care in rural America. Here’s a hint: It’s not good.

 

Myths and Mythmakers

Tags

ghost stories, legends, monsters, Springfield, Steve Yates, storytelling, The Legend of the Albino Farm

The Legend of the Albino Farm, by Steve Yates

I finished Steve Yates’ intriguing and inventive The Legend of the Albino Farm yesterday and have been pondering it since. Like all of Steve’s books, it brims with sentences that surprise and descriptions that engage. Its central character, Hettienne Sheehy, compels our attention with her multi-edged personality and lapses into premonitory trance. But at its heart, I think it’s a book about our propensity for mythmaking.

I’ve heard Steve describe this book as a horror story turned inside out, and that’s an apt description. Imagine a horror story in which the focus is on the presumed monster, and in which the “monster” turns out to be nothing of the sort. That’s the situation of the “Albino Farm,” which I am told is a long-standing Springfield ghost story/urban legend about a farm on the northern outskirts of the city. The only monsters in The Legend of the Albino Farm are the townsfolk and rowdies, snoopers and idle curious, who trespass on the farm to get a look at its inhabitants, deface its buildings, and terrorize the old folks.

We make up stories to entertain ourselves, and as a storyteller I honor that impulse. But there’s a dark side to this tendency, which we see in people’s stunning willingness to believe all sorts of wild nonsense without evidence (my Facebook news feed testifies to this) and to construct the worst possible explanation for something we don’t understand. Our love for story is also a love for gossip and ugliness sometimes, unfortunately, and we warp toward the tawdry all too often.

Working on a New Talk

Tags

books, environment, humanities, lumber, mining, speaking, The Language of Trees

I delight in working up talks to give to libraries and civic groups, usually in connection with one of my books. I conduct a great deal of research as I work on a novel, and although that research is not especially systematic or scholarly, I learn a lot about an era and can condense it into an understandable presentation. With Slant of Light, I developed a talk about 19th-century utopian communities; with This Old World, on Missouri during the years after the Civil War.

My new book takes place during the late 1880s, when large commercial interests from the Eastern cities and from St. Louis used the recently-built railroads to extend their reach deep into the Ozarks and set up lumber mills and mines to extract these natural resources. The Ozarks had been logged and mined for centuries, of course, but the industrial scale of this enterprise was new, and the impact—cultural, economic, and environmental—was profound.

Men in a lumberyard near Winona around 1890 (source: National Archives)

So I’m working up a talk about the coming of industry to this hardscrabble, rural landscape, and the changes it wrought on the people. It’s an easy story to cast villains and heroes into, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Rural folk were often their own worst enemies, or willing collaborators, in their conflict with the lumber and mining companies, and those companies themselves were not always the rapacious beasts of our imagining. And the relationship between people and company was not merely conflict or exploitation.

I’ve given talks at so many places by now that I can hardly keep track of them all—libraries, historical societies, Rotary clubs, book clubs, you name it. Every group is a bit different, and no two talks are quite the same.