I was reminded this week of the Ozarks I can only wish I had known.
The reminder came in the form of a book, “Lake of the Ozarks: The Early Years,” which pictured the Osage basin before Missouri’s first great lake covered it.
Included were pictures of Old Linn Creek, where steamboats docked near the confluence of the Niangua and Osage Rivers, and ferries plied the waters from shore-to-shore before a suspension bridge spanned the Osage in 1911.
Now lost beneath 40 feet of water are Arnhold’s Mill on the Niangua, and geologic oddities like Great Stone Face and Chimney Rock on the Osage.
Indeed, the foundations of an entire town now lie entombed in the deep, home to catfish and turtles, rather than Ozarks craftsmen, merchants and farmers.
More striking than the pictures of Main Street stores and garages soon to be torn down or burned to the ground are vistas of the broad river valleys where farmers ran cattle, planted deep, black soil in corn and once harvested huge oak trees to build their cabins and barns.
These rivers were both avenues of commerce and arteries of life deep into the remote Ozarks hills, including those of eastern Dallas County which from the 1860s until 1929 yielded rafts of oak railroad ties which were piloted down the Niangua to Linn Creek and Bagnell on the Osage.
Tie rafting was but one profession which employed rugged hillmen and rivermen of Ozarks. Millers, smithies, trappers, farmers, fishermen, merchants and dozens of other sorts scratched out often meager livings far from the bustle and gas-lit streets of big cities.
Only in pictures and the tales that old folks tell is preserved the Ozarks before dams tamed her rivers and created great lakes to cover her fertile bottomlands – an Ozarks unspoiled and undefiled by hordes of tourists, summer homes and the dubious prosperity they bestow.
Only in faded photographs and memories lives the Ozarks I wish I’d known. Few are those who can yet recall when the Osage, Niangua, James, White, Pomme de Terre, Sac and other great rivers ran free.
I envy those old timers for their memories of these hills, valleys and rivers when ties could be rafted from Corkery to the Osage, and God, rather than dams, created the deep, still waters where the big catfish prowl and imaginations steep.
But I’m thankful for the folks who photographed and wrote of them years ago.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
