The Lure of the Ozarks

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Conflict in the Ozarks, David Benac, Elder Mountain, fishing, literature, lumber, mining, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, Phil Howerton, tourism, West Plains

In 2016, I was honored to be asked to give the keynote at the annual Ozarks Studies Conference in West Plains. The theme of the conference that year was “The Lure of the Ozarks,” so I decided to play on that theme for my talk. My title was “The Lure of the Ozarks: What’s the Bait and Who’s the Fish?”

The good folks at Elder Mountain took my talk, tweaked it a little, and published it in their most recent issue. As editor Phil Howerton aptly describes the issue, it’s a whopper . . . a double issue of 290 pages.

I’m reprinting a passage from near the opening of my talk below. Literary journals need all the help they can get, so if you’d like to read the whole thing, I encourage you to take a look at the issue’s impressive table of contents here and then use the purchase link here. You won’t regret it!

To speak of the lure of the Ozarks, appropriately enough, is to use the language of the fisherman, and prompts the metaphorical question of who is the fisher and who is the caught. Nowadays our talk about the lure of the Ozarks typically involves tourism, and rightly so, as it has become a mainstay of the Ozarks economy. Certainly tourism is a pretty benign sort of catchery . . . I suppose we could extend the metaphor and call tourism the “catch and release” version of the Ozarks’ lure.

But from the earliest times, people have come to the Ozarks to take away something more tangible. From Pierre Renaud down to the Doe Run Lead Company, the Ozarks have been a source of minerals and ore. The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company and its fellow timber harvesting enterprises did the same thing from the 1880s through the early twentieth century. In a general way, I think you’d have to describe the Ozarks as a kind of internal colony of the United States, a place from which to extract value at the lowest possible cost while returning as little as possible. As David Benac observes in his book Conflict in the Ozarks, a significant component of the Ozarks timber boom consisted of companies seeking to “tame” their workers, to bring them into compliance with the needs of an industrial-age enterprise concerning punctuality, sobriety, and adherence to the concept of “working hours” instead of living their lives by the clock of the seasons. What drew these entrepreneurs and companies to the Ozarks was what they could extract from it, and that’s a facet of this landscape that will never go away. I recall during the years of my childhood that every town in the area had its factory – shoe factories, shirt factories, hat factories, that sort of thing – each one staffed mainly by women paid on a piecework basis, overseen by men. It wasn’t until the advent of the global marketplace that these companies discovered they could find workers elsewhere who were even more impoverished and who had even fewer options than the Ozarkers, and relocated their factories elsewhere. For an industry that needed unskilled workers to perform repetitious tasks, the Ozarks must have seemed like a little slice of heaven for a time.

And then there’s escape, that time-honored lure of the Ozarks. Dad Howitt, the Shepherd of the Hills, came to the Ozarks to escape the noise of the city and the memories of his past, and ever since then one of the dominant themes of Ozarks culture has been that of the mountains as a place of refuge. Trappist monks came here, and the Harmonial Vegetarian Society, and so did Bonnie and Clyde. The hollows overflow with people who have come to the Ozarks for one sort of escape or another, whether it’s from the traffic jams of the city or the long arm of the law. My own experience with these transplants has been overwhelmingly positive. People drawn to the Ozarks from elsewhere bring energy, new ideas, and often a fresh infusion of money to communities that need all three. Unfortunately, the Ozarks’ mind-our-own-business reputation also draws the occasional Frazier Glenn Miller among the retired ad executives seeking a quiet place to meditate beside a stream.

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Branson

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Branson, duck boats, economics, mourning, tourism

Say “Ozarks” to someone from another part of the country, and a likely response will be. “Oh, sure, I’ve heard of it. Branson.”

Whether you love it or hate it, Branson is the face of the Ozarks to much of the rest of the world, and it has been so pretty much ever since The Shepherd of the Hills.

Branson is mourning right now, after the appalling tragedy on Table Rock Lake in which seventeen people died. The investigation into the cause of the sinking is just beginning, but the inevitable procession of recriminations, lawsuits, settlements, and pain stretches clearly before us.

Branson’s mourning is for the drowning victims, of course, but it is also mourning for itself; an accident like this breaks the veneer of Branson. The religiosity, the patriotism, the ensemble entertainment, all combine to assure tourists that Branson is, above all things, safe. Nothing upsetting or untoward will ever happen to you in Branson. And now this has happened. Nervous statements by residents in news stories combine grief toward the victims with apprehension about the incident’s effect on future bookings.

The Branson economic ecosystem has always been fragile, as illustrated by this recent NPR story about the troubles of those who perform the many necessary services required by this tourist town, the hotel housekeepers, lawn maintenance workers, restaurant servers, and such. A town that depends on large numbers of visitors from distant cities, who come in search of a bucolic myth, is always one incident away from a crippling blow. Let’s just hope that Branson finds its feet again before this accident brings a disastrous ripple effect of shutdowns and layoffs onto those least able to weather them.