Speaker 1: There are people all up and down the Buffalo River
Speaker 1: who feel like that they have lost something, that something
Speaker 1: has been taken from them that they are never going
Speaker 1: to be able to get back. This is never going
Speaker 1: to be restored.
Speaker 2: In this series, we'll be examining the great American doctrine
Speaker 2: utilitarian conservation, the greatest good for the greatest number, through
Speaker 2: the lens of the formation of the Buffalo National River
Speaker 2: in the Ozarks of Arkansas, touted as our nation's first
Speaker 2: national river and celebrated without question, but will be looking
Speaker 2: at a different side of the story, one rarely told
Speaker 2: or understood, as we focus on the families who got
Speaker 2: the short end of the stick on this utilitarian doctrine
Speaker 2: and had to give up their lands, being displaced by
Speaker 2: the strong arm of the government. In this episode, we'll
Speaker 2: talk about human self interest. Take a mule ride with
Speaker 2: Willard Vlynes, meet grassroots historian Misty Langdon, and interview our
Speaker 2: longtime Bear Grease favorite historian and author and hillbilly doctor
Speaker 2: Brooks Blevins about how the heck all this happened. The
Speaker 2: water is ice cold and the story complex and windy.
Speaker 2: Hang with us for a while, because I really doubt
Speaker 2: that you're gonna want to miss this one. Where was
Speaker 2: your house from right here?
Speaker 3: Well? Let it for just about fifty yeards no foundation,
Speaker 3: John left? Is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Park till it down.
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
Speaker 2: fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 2: place as we explore. I'm in the saddle atop my
Speaker 2: trusty eight year old paint mule, Izzy, and we're following
Speaker 2: behind another, perhaps even flashier sorrel a red paint mule.
Speaker 2: Willard's mule, Rosy, is about fifteen hands tall. She's good sized.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm following a glowing led light fifty
Speaker 2: feet below the surface of a forested sea of hickory,
Speaker 2: sweet gum, and walnut. We're completely under the shade until
Speaker 2: the mule's hoofs the water as we entered the bright
Speaker 2: sunlight crossing the river. Now, did y'all have y'all had
Speaker 2: parts of the farm on both sides of the river. Right,
Speaker 2: How did you how did you manage crossing it? Just
Speaker 2: you just didn't.
Speaker 3: If it was real high, couldn't. If it was real high,
Speaker 3: it couldn't.
Speaker 2: Get across the river.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we said.
Speaker 2: Willard the lines is seventy eight years old, born February twentieth,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six. He and eight siblings were born down
Speaker 2: on this river, and two other siblings were born what
Speaker 2: he calls up on the mountain, all in Newton County, Arkansas.
Speaker 2: We're heading towards his old home place, but first we've
Speaker 2: got another home place to stop at.
Speaker 3: Grandma's maiden name was shown the line. It's nine a
Speaker 3: year to tell about in a few short lines, down
Speaker 3: in Newton County, down in Arkansham. And in nineteen one
Speaker 3: she married Grandpa. That's where.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Grandma's maiden name was Zone Blimes. There's ninety years to
Speaker 4: tell about in a few short lines. Barn in Newton County,
Speaker 4: down in Narkansas. Then in nineteen one she married Grandpa.
Speaker 5: We lead her soul resting son in the morning.
Speaker 4: And that greadbody new she tunner barn where that barn.
Speaker 2: Don't get that barn is in pretty good shape.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we always knowed this old Harper place. Merle Haggard's
Speaker 3: grandma lived here. Her maiden name was Zone Vliines. Huh
Speaker 3: she married a heart.
Speaker 2: Some of y'all skin.
Speaker 3: Yeah. She had been my probably great great ants in
Speaker 3: the real Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know he's got a criminal background.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, I have too, in prison.
Speaker 2: Doing life with U Bro. That was Merle Haggard's song
Speaker 2: Grandma Harp. Her maiden name was Vlyines, just like Willard's.
Speaker 2: She was born in eighteen seventy six and died in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine at the age of ninety three in
Speaker 2: Newton County. Haggard released this song in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: three years after her death, and it talks about her
Speaker 2: way of life dying, Which is an odd coincidence because
Speaker 2: that year, nineteen seventy two would be significant for this
Speaker 2: river and the people who lived near it. For most,
Speaker 2: it would be a year of the celebration of a
Speaker 2: conservation success. But for the people who had land that
Speaker 2: actually touched this river, for many of them, it's a
Speaker 2: year of infamy. Here's Willard telling us about his so
Speaker 2: called criminal record. Remember we're on mules standing in front
Speaker 2: of an old barn.
Speaker 3: Matter of fact, I paid my first fine right here
Speaker 3: to the park rangers. Is that right? Right?
Speaker 2: What happened?
Speaker 3: There's about ten of us come in down here and camped. Now,
Speaker 3: the eight of them was preachers. Well, the next morning
Speaker 3: the park rangers come up the creek. There's some horseback
Speaker 3: riders down here. Where's all riding mules. There's some horseback riders.
Speaker 3: They made fun of her mules. They went back up
Speaker 3: still creek and told the park ranger we's camped here.
Speaker 3: And the next morning they met us down here, and
Speaker 3: you weren't a camp here, that's what he said. We
Speaker 3: slept in the old barn. He said, we wasn't supposed to.
Speaker 2: How that's it with you?
Speaker 3: Well, not very good.
Speaker 2: The real question is why was he making fun of
Speaker 2: your mules?
Speaker 3: I don't know. They just made light of her mules.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that gets under my skin quick.
Speaker 3: But I told that park ranger, I said, I want
Speaker 3: you to just look here. I said, when my folks
Speaker 3: lived here, I said, this was all clared land. I
Speaker 3: said a rabbit couldn't get through here. Now, man, I said,
Speaker 3: I'll take the blame. I said, these are other people
Speaker 3: didn't know. I asked him. I said, well, what's to
Speaker 3: find thee and he said, be twenty five dollars. He
Speaker 3: looked in his book and he said no, said he'll
Speaker 3: be fifty dollars. I said, you look in that book
Speaker 3: and find something for twenty five dollars, and he did.
Speaker 3: He charged me twenty five. That's honest. True. Of course
Speaker 3: he left. They took up a donation. I've come out
Speaker 3: of ahead and all the preachers pitched it.
Speaker 2: I don't want to make light of breaking the law,
Speaker 2: but this story captures something that's eluded ninety nine percent
Speaker 2: of people, including me, who've enjoyed this area, which is
Speaker 2: now public land. Many of the families who had to
Speaker 2: sell their land to the government against their will are
Speaker 2: wiel sore about the whole deal, though it took place
Speaker 2: over fifty years ago. You see today Grandma Harp's land
Speaker 2: sits in the upper portion of a ninety five thousand,
Speaker 2: seven hundred and thirty acre block of land designated as
Speaker 2: the Buffalo National River in nineteen seventy two. Advertised as
Speaker 2: America's first national River, the government acquired over ninety thousand
Speaker 2: acres of private land from over two thousand property owners,
Speaker 2: some of whose families had been in the region since
Speaker 2: this place was homesteaded. At one time, you could have
Speaker 2: driven a car in here, but since nineteen seventy two
Speaker 2: the nearest road is well over an hour's ride on
Speaker 2: a mule. The fields once cleared by Willard's kinfolks have
Speaker 2: grown up into secondary succession brambles en route in the
Speaker 2: next seventy five years to return to the Ozarks Climax
Speaker 2: forest of oak and hickory. When you ride down the
Speaker 2: river with Willard and you hear the stories of his child,
Speaker 2: childhood and what used to be his community, it's kind
Speaker 2: of spooky. It might be what it's like to visit
Speaker 2: Chernobyl in Ukraine. It's like a civilization erased off the map,
Speaker 2: engulfed by the subtle violence of natural reclamation cycles, collapsing
Speaker 2: barns and smoke houses, dilapidated homes in various stages of decay,
Speaker 2: hayfields turned into cedar groves decay in nineteen forties, model
Speaker 2: forward trucks laying around, and footprints of rock foundations of
Speaker 2: buildings are scattered all down the river. But it didn't
Speaker 2: happen because of a nuclear disaster. Or industry moving. It
Speaker 2: happened because the place was so stinking beautiful that the
Speaker 2: government decided to turn it into a national park. And
Speaker 2: trust me, you don't want to be in the government
Speaker 2: sites when they want your land. They've proven that from
Speaker 2: the perspective of a human, nature's takeover of this place
Speaker 2: seems sluggish and slow, but by how the earth measures,
Speaker 2: it's as hot, tempered, and swift as a tornado. The
Speaker 2: soil is an insatiable savage, engulfing dead organic matter. Above
Speaker 2: it houses barns and flesh, while shooting rockets of living
Speaker 2: cells to the sky. Jealous for sunlight. Anything in its
Speaker 2: path be dead gummed. Its strategy is to outlast anything
Speaker 2: in everything. The earth knows that in time it will
Speaker 2: beat you, and in some ways, so does the government.
Speaker 2: This story is about the modern American people, not just here,
Speaker 2: who sacrifice their homelands for quote, the greater good of society,
Speaker 2: slain by our utilitarian land use doctrine the greatest good
Speaker 2: for the greatest number, which we including I hold so dear.
Speaker 2: But if you've never had your land taken and your
Speaker 2: family uprooted, then it's hard to understand our national parks
Speaker 2: are celebrated in our culture, and we're proud that our
Speaker 2: nation had the idea to lead the world in preserving
Speaker 2: such places of natural beauty. But the truth is that
Speaker 2: the stories of land acquisition for the Great Smoky Mountain
Speaker 2: National Park, the Shenandoah Valley National Park, and many many
Speaker 2: others were downright brutal. The story of the Buffalo is
Speaker 2: a lesser known story. Also, much like the hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of acres of land taken for recreational lakes in
Speaker 2: this country between the nineteen thirties and seventies, these are
Speaker 2: not glamorous stories celebrated in our culture. But there was
Speaker 2: a time when this country was hungry for land and
Speaker 2: somebody had to fork it up. Ozark historian doctor Brooks
Speaker 2: Blevins wrote that the land acquisition process of the National
Speaker 2: Park Service when inquiring land for the Buffalo was at
Speaker 2: best confusing and at worst deceptive. Before we get into
Speaker 2: the details of how this river came to be America's
Speaker 2: first national river, I want to talk with Misty Langdon,
Speaker 2: a Newton County native whose mother was of Alliones related
Speaker 2: to Willard. But Misty's a grassroots community leader who created
Speaker 2: the Remnants project, designed to document the history of Newton County.
Speaker 1: People ask me all the time why I do this,
Speaker 1: because it is so much work. And Richard, I know,
Speaker 1: he pulls his hair out all the time at me
Speaker 1: because I'm I'll go down a rabbit hole and I
Speaker 1: might not come up for a day or so, and
Speaker 1: and people will call in. He says, she's looking for
Speaker 1: dead people. Just you know, let her be. But there
Speaker 1: are people all up and down the Buffalo River who
Speaker 1: feel like that they have lost something, that something has
Speaker 1: been taken from them that they are never going to
Speaker 1: be able to get back. It's never to be restored.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting and kind of makes my head spin
Speaker 2: backwards to hear someone talk about the Buffalo River this way,
Speaker 2: because this is a place I've only heard celebrated. But
Speaker 2: it turns out there's a lot of stories I didn't know.
Speaker 2: I first floated this river in nineteen ninety eight, and
Speaker 2: after I got married in two thousand, my wife and
Speaker 2: I spent a lot of time here. We even named
Speaker 2: our middle daughter River. I asked Misty, from the community's perspective,
Speaker 2: how all this went from private farmland back in the
Speaker 2: seventies into a national park.
Speaker 1: I mean, you hear rumors that something's, you know, a foot,
Speaker 1: but to actually get a notice of condemnation of your
Speaker 1: property and have no formal letter or anything before that,
Speaker 1: I think it was the shock and awe factor of
Speaker 1: how it was.
Speaker 2: And this would have been in the late sixties, early
Speaker 2: seventies before there was i mean, any kind of internet
Speaker 2: or the communication was just way different back then. And
Speaker 2: so you're saying some of these people on the river
Speaker 2: were just totally caught off. They are totally because it
Speaker 2: had been embroiled in like at least twenty years of
Speaker 2: murmurs of this is going to be damned, This is
Speaker 2: not going to be damned, This is going to be
Speaker 2: a wild and scenic river. This is going to be
Speaker 2: and it probably just kind of after a decade or
Speaker 2: so of that, it was just kind of like, what
Speaker 2: is going to happen? Is it ever going to happen?
Speaker 1: Well, it kind of goes back to that thing talking
Speaker 1: about isolated communities too, because in Fayetteville, the way that
Speaker 1: their town and everything was structured, they had all the amenities.
Speaker 1: By the sixties, the late sixties and early seventies, there
Speaker 1: were people in Boxley that didn't have phones, and some
Speaker 1: probably still didn't have along the river. I know still
Speaker 1: didn't have you know, electricity, They were running off generators.
Speaker 2: Fatdeville is the largest town in the region, about fifty
Speaker 2: miles from the buffer. Low Boxley is a small community
Speaker 2: at the head of the river. Interestingly, people from the
Speaker 2: Fayedville area would play a big role in having the
Speaker 2: river nationalized. Newton County was truly the backwoods of Arkansas.
Speaker 2: And I can say this because I is one that
Speaker 2: most of the people that lived here were white folks
Speaker 2: of low financial means and what the world would call
Speaker 2: hillbilly's people rich in land, love of country, family and hardship,
Speaker 2: not money, education or political power. Later we'll see where
Speaker 2: I believe the socio economic status would come into play.
Speaker 1: So that isolation was a real, a real hardship for them,
Speaker 1: and that was something I think tactically that the locals
Speaker 1: could not get over, was the lack of organization. I
Speaker 1: know in one of the oral histories that I had
Speaker 1: listened to, the interviewer asks the lady, did you ever
Speaker 1: sign petitions? Did you ever go to meetings? And the
Speaker 1: answer was they had signed a petition once the word
Speaker 1: had started to spread, but they never had meetings. You know,
Speaker 1: those are the type of things that we look at
Speaker 1: as a culture as being bad. You know, that's something
Speaker 1: that against your government. You don't have secret meetings. And
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, these are people who were complete patriots.
Speaker 1: They had fought in, you know, World War Two, they
Speaker 1: had a Korea, World War One, and to think about
Speaker 1: setting up a meeting to talk about your government, I
Speaker 1: mean that was And especially you think about what went
Speaker 1: through during the fifties about communism and how everybody was
Speaker 1: so nervous about being, you know, branded as a communist.
Speaker 1: I think that was just a little bit too far
Speaker 1: outside their realm of comfort.
Speaker 2: They weren't really comfortable using the tools of the time
Speaker 2: period RCT that would have been able to combat it.
Speaker 2: It's not like these people would have been like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: here's what we do to stop a major government action, right.
Speaker 1: Like a town hall or a you know or whatever.
Speaker 1: They just did not utilize that because and I'm putting
Speaker 1: words in their mouths because I don't know, but in
Speaker 1: my opinion, they didn't utilize it because that was just
Speaker 1: a step too far against their against their own government.
Speaker 1: And I think that by the time, because I spoke
Speaker 1: with one guy down in Boxley and he's about my parents' age.
Speaker 1: And I said, or how in the world did nobody
Speaker 1: get killed over this? Because I know how hot tempered
Speaker 1: I am. I'm a breed loving of the lines. That
Speaker 1: is a terrible combination. And I can't imagine in the
Speaker 1: time period that they were living, I don't know how
Speaker 1: it skirted around and somebody didn't get killed.
Speaker 2: Let's stop for just a second here. It's interesting that
Speaker 2: this conversation starts from the angle that this government action
Speaker 2: and to quote preserve the Buffalo is negative And if
Speaker 2: you're from this part of the country, you'd be hard
Speaker 2: pressed to hear anybody say, narry a negative word about
Speaker 2: this place. This Buffalo National River is the crown jewel
Speaker 2: of our state. But I'm learning that perspective can turn
Speaker 2: the whole narrative one hundred and eighty degrees, So being
Speaker 2: your doctrine into the hypocritical ditch, And that's what makes
Speaker 2: this story so interesting. We love public lands and national parks,
Speaker 2: but do we like how they make the sausage in
Speaker 2: the back room? Are you a fan of displacement so
Speaker 2: that our society will have a place to recreate? That's
Speaker 2: a harsh question, but it's one we asked our society
Speaker 2: and they said yes to. It's what we asked the
Speaker 2: American people before displacing the families in the Shenandoah in
Speaker 2: Great Smoking Mountains National Park. And it's the question we
Speaker 2: asked America before the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty.
Speaker 2: It's just interesting what as a society we're able to
Speaker 2: justify now. The Indian Removal Act was pure wickedness. Even
Speaker 2: David Crockett thought so. But the questions about national parks
Speaker 2: are much more nuanced. Landowners were paid, and some got
Speaker 2: market value for their land, and in many cases simply
Speaker 2: moved right down the road out of the park. But nonetheless,
Speaker 2: the question of heavy handed government power and property owner
Speaker 2: rights is a big one. But let's get back to
Speaker 2: the river. Willard Vilnes was born down here. We've passed
Speaker 2: Merle Haggard's grandma's place and we're riding down the rivers
Speaker 2: edged the land Willard's father used to own and farm.
Speaker 2: He's taking me to another barn. So tell me about
Speaker 2: this barn.
Speaker 3: Well, my dad and two brothers colder in me and
Speaker 3: mister Daniels, they built his barn and they used a
Speaker 3: handshaw to cut the rash prison. He didn't have no
Speaker 3: electric tool to talk, but he'd be a load that
Speaker 3: was born with handhol.
Speaker 2: What year you think of this built?
Speaker 3: Uh? We moved. We moved out of here in fifty six,
Speaker 3: probably probably then fifty.
Speaker 2: I say you remember as little kid this barn?
Speaker 3: Yeah I remember? Yeah, I member, Well, yeah, we would
Speaker 3: we cut hay off down in there and Dad would
Speaker 3: he would rake it and shock it and put it
Speaker 3: on the wagon. I was just about I don't know,
Speaker 3: ship seven year old shummers in there. But he let
Speaker 3: me drive the mules while they loaded the wagon.
Speaker 2: What's it? What's it like coming to barn like this
Speaker 2: that your dad built, that's now just like engulfed in
Speaker 2: forest and all right, it's kind of it's kind of
Speaker 2: a unique situation.
Speaker 3: Will Yeah, here I visited. I probably want your class
Speaker 3: here and KYI remind this a little bit. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: brought the kids over here and took pictures with them
Speaker 3: over here.
Speaker 2: And now where was your house from here?
Speaker 3: HiT's old trufher mitch cruching.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we was able to go to your old home place.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, with crousty river.
Speaker 2: Yell, is there anything still there, no shler.
Speaker 3: Small custure there. Yeah, no foundation jo left of it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: park tore it down.
Speaker 2: The park tore down his old house. The Vilnes left
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty six, and I assumed by seventy two
Speaker 2: the old house was in disrepair and not deemed historically significant.
Speaker 2: Some of the buildings of this civilization were left, while
Speaker 2: others destroyed. How the heck did all this come about?
Speaker 2: We're heading to Willard's home place where he was born,
Speaker 2: delivered by his grandmother. We're going to have to cross
Speaker 2: what the Ozarkians call the Buffalo kind of leaving out
Speaker 2: the US Sound in Buffalo, it's a gravel bedstream with
Speaker 2: headwaters bird in the highest elevations of the Ozark Mountains
Speaker 2: in northwest Arkansas, the Boston Range, which reaches about twenty
Speaker 2: five hundred feet. The Eurogeny of the Ozarks is the
Speaker 2: work of incomprehensible time and erosion on an uplifted plateau
Speaker 2: that was once the bed of a shallow ocean. Fossils
Speaker 2: of fish and crustaceans are common here. Geologists and psychologists
Speaker 2: agree that humans are incapable of understanding deep geologic time
Speaker 2: beyond a shallow intellectual regurgitation of huge, meaningless numbers. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like trying to explain to a grasshopper the
Speaker 2: life span of a wide oak. The beasts of the
Speaker 2: Earth only understand time and segments congruit to their lifespans.
Speaker 2: Geologists believe the Ozarks are older than the Appalachians, with
Speaker 2: origins reaching back one point six billion years, but even
Speaker 2: to the world's top geologists, things are hazy back that far.
Speaker 2: The Ozark Highlands or Mountains are in the central United States,
Speaker 2: encompassing southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and a small portion in
Speaker 2: eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and it roughly encompasses fifty thousand
Speaker 2: square miles. There are no natural lakes in the Ozarks.
Speaker 2: In the rugged regions, we call them mountains, and I'd
Speaker 2: challenge any outsider to come here, hike em afoot and
Speaker 2: tell me they aren't mountains. But if you want to
Speaker 2: talk about the epicenter of beauty and ruggedness the Ozarks,
Speaker 2: it's hard to deny that the Buffalo River country is
Speaker 2: its lifeblood. Starting in Newton County, the meandering River flows
Speaker 2: through Cercy and Marion Counties until it enters the White
Speaker 2: River in Baxter County one hundred and fifty three miles
Speaker 2: from its head but as the crow flies, from its
Speaker 2: headwaters to its termination is only sixty miles. The river
Speaker 2: is known for its pristine aqua blue green water towering limestone, sandstone,
Speaker 2: and dolomite bluffs some four hundred feet above the water's surface.
Speaker 2: It's known for its caves and its incredible wet weather waterfalls.
Speaker 2: A couple hundred yards off the river, uphimned in Hollow
Speaker 2: is America's largest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies,
Speaker 2: which plunges two hundred and nine feet to the valley floor. However,
Speaker 2: by the calculations of men when they judge wildness based
Speaker 2: upon lack of human footprint, this river is one of
Speaker 2: America's few remaining free flowing, undamned rivers. And this is
Speaker 2: truly something worth celebrating. They're over ninety thousand dams in America,
Speaker 2: and they dang there, damned the buffalo put in all
Speaker 2: these houses, barns and bluffs underwater. Doctor Brooks Blevins is
Speaker 2: a professor at Missouri State University and a prolific author
Speaker 2: about the Ozarks. In twenty twenty two, he published a
Speaker 2: book called up south in the Ozarks. In it, he
Speaker 2: has an essay called against the Current. I want to
Speaker 2: get into the deeper history of how the Buffalo was
Speaker 2: saved from being damned and how it became a national river.
Speaker 2: Here's myself and doctor Brooks Blevins well in your interest,
Speaker 2: particularly in the Buffalo. In the essay that you wrote
Speaker 2: in your book. It's interesting. When I first contacted you,
Speaker 2: I believe you said you felt like you were the
Speaker 2: only historian that had written about this from the perspective
Speaker 2: of the people that had been displaced, and that kind
Speaker 2: of links back to your story about your grandparents, and
Speaker 2: that was a story the world was not interested in
Speaker 2: hearing of these oftentimes not that well to do, impoverish
Speaker 2: people living in these rural places getting displaced. Like that's
Speaker 2: not the story that America wanted to tell, and America
Speaker 2: wanted to hear.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was not a story that was told and
Speaker 5: wouldn't be for you know, another generation. And there was
Speaker 5: no Gorilla press at that time. It was something that
Speaker 5: mostly was just just forgotten and remained forgotten. And I think,
Speaker 5: as far as I know, I am the only person
Speaker 5: on the for the Buffalo River story. I'm the only
Speaker 5: person who's ever approached it. I should say I'm the
Speaker 5: only person who's ever published anything that approaches it from
Speaker 5: the kind of the perspective of the landowners. But there's
Speaker 5: as far as the published record what the public, you know,
Speaker 5: has access to, there's very little from the perspective of
Speaker 5: the people who lost their land, the people who really
Speaker 5: made the sacrifice that the rest of us now enjoy
Speaker 5: the fruits of We.
Speaker 2: Mentioned a story about doctor Blevin's grandparents. It's a family
Speaker 2: story that led him to be interested in the displaced
Speaker 2: landowners on the river. Though they didn't live on the Buffalo,
Speaker 2: but rather in the White River watershed just to the northwest.
Speaker 2: I want to hear what happened to them.
Speaker 5: My great great grandparents lived on Pigeon Creek, which is
Speaker 5: a tributary of the North Fork of the White River,
Speaker 5: and my great great grandpa was born there just a
Speaker 5: year or two before the Civil War, and so they
Speaker 5: were still there in the early nineteen forties when the
Speaker 5: Army Corps of Engineers started building the Damn Norfolk Dam.
Speaker 5: But they were one of the families who had to
Speaker 5: sell their land to the government and they were moved.
Speaker 5: I don't know a few miles south of Mountain Home
Speaker 5: and kind of a rocky hillside down there somewhere. And
Speaker 5: I found out not too many years ago what happened.
Speaker 5: I was able to contact one of my grandpa's own cousins,
Speaker 5: as we say in the Ozarks, first cousins, and she
Speaker 5: told me the story of when the authorities, whoever the
Speaker 5: authorities were, I don't know if it was the sheriff's officer,
Speaker 5: but when they came out, you know, they'd been given
Speaker 5: the final warning that they had to vacate their farm.
Speaker 5: This was before they shut the floodgates and you know,
Speaker 5: flooded the valleys and all that kind of stuff. And
Speaker 5: she said her grandparents, my great great grandparents, refused to leave.
Speaker 5: They were in their eighties and they had lived there,
Speaker 5: you know, practically all the or adult lives, so they,
Speaker 5: you know, they didn't didn't want to go, like a
Speaker 5: lot of other landowners there, and a lot of other
Speaker 5: farmers there. She said that they refused to leave and
Speaker 5: the authorities came out and physically carried them off the premises. No,
Speaker 5: I don't know, you know, in my mind, I see
Speaker 5: two old timers planking or something. You know, there's stiff
Speaker 5: as a board that been carried out. But they may
Speaker 5: have carried them off in chairs or whatever.
Speaker 2: But that received no statewide press, no national press.
Speaker 5: No, no, it didn't. The local weekly newspaper, the Baxter Bulletin,
Speaker 5: was operated by an editor named Tom Shiris, and Shyris
Speaker 5: was one of the premier damn promoters in the state
Speaker 5: of Arkansas.
Speaker 2: And it's not a story he would no, No, this is.
Speaker 5: Not It's not a story that was likely to show
Speaker 5: up in the Baxter Bulletin.
Speaker 2: It's interesting the government land condemnation, whether for a lake
Speaker 2: her national park, rarely made big headlines back in the day.
Speaker 2: There's a famous photo of a pregnant woman named Lessie
Speaker 2: Jenkins being carried out of her home in a rocking
Speaker 2: chair in nineteen thirty seven when her family, including her
Speaker 2: seven children, were evicted from their home by the National
Speaker 2: Park Service to make Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. And
Speaker 2: books have been written about the process of land acquisition
Speaker 2: for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and
Speaker 2: North Carolina, and all the stories are eerily similar. I
Speaker 2: now want to get to the deep history with doctor
Speaker 2: Blevins about the buffalo and surprisingly we're gonna have to
Speaker 2: go back to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty seven. But if you're a Bear Grease listener, you
Speaker 2: remember our Mississippi River series which started at episode one
Speaker 2: twenty six, and if you listen, you'll have a head start.
Speaker 5: To really dig into the into the heart of this matter,
Speaker 5: you have to go back even before the Great Depression,
Speaker 5: at least to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
Speaker 5: twenty seven. That was the event that really altered the
Speaker 5: trajectory of what the Army Corps of Engineers was expected
Speaker 5: to do. Before that, the Army Corps of Engineers was
Speaker 5: an organization that mainly built levees and dikes along big rivers,
Speaker 5: But the Army Corps Engineers was not a dam building agency.
Speaker 5: And because of the tremendous destruction the economic impact of
Speaker 5: that flood in nineteen twenty seven, all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: politicians had in the Mississippi Valley had tremendous pressure put
Speaker 5: on them to do something to prevent another devastating flood
Speaker 5: like this. Because you've got to remember, in the Mississippi Valley,
Speaker 5: the flood of nineteen twenty seven was basically what led
Speaker 5: us into the Great Depression, and then you get into
Speaker 5: the heart of the Great Depression, and then FDR takes
Speaker 5: office in nineteen thirty three, and you have a completely
Speaker 5: new way of looking at the way the government handles
Speaker 5: crises in a way that we've never done before, where
Speaker 5: they just try to spend your way out of it.
Speaker 5: You spend money, you put it in the hands of
Speaker 5: people who don't have it, and you expect them to
Speaker 5: turn around and spend it and try to prime the
Speaker 5: pump of the economy that way. And so it's kind
Speaker 5: of that one two punch of the nineteen twenty seven
Speaker 5: flood and the Great Depression leading into the New Deal
Speaker 5: that all of a sudden puts dams front and center
Speaker 5: on the radar for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Speaker 2: Dams came on the radar of America. They were all
Speaker 2: the rage. As we follow this story chronologically, it's also
Speaker 2: relevant to note that in nineteen thirty six there was
Speaker 2: a four thousand acre Buffalo River State Park formed, which
Speaker 2: was the first indication that this place was a special
Speaker 2: place for recreation. But let's get back to talking about
Speaker 2: the long periods of time that all this stuff took.
Speaker 5: So these flood control acts they plant the seed for
Speaker 5: these dams. Now, just because a dam is mentioned in
Speaker 5: one of these flood control acts doesn't mean it's going
Speaker 5: to get built. What they do is they authorize these dams.
Speaker 5: Then the Army Corps of Engineers has to go out
Speaker 5: finalize its plans. They have to do public hearings to
Speaker 5: gauge responses from the public, and then if they decide
Speaker 5: that the benefit cost analysis is favorable, then they go
Speaker 5: back to Congress and they present their case and they say,
Speaker 5: you know, can we have the money to build this?
Speaker 5: And so that's why it's such a long process. That's
Speaker 5: why you know, these Buffalo dams are first mentioned as
Speaker 5: early as Night teen thirty eight, but the battle for
Speaker 5: the Buffalo doesn't even heat up really till the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: So what really they talked about a dam on the
Speaker 2: Buffalo River in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's an extensive White River dam plan, a reservoir
Speaker 5: plan that's first presented in thirty eight.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to look back the big swings in government
Speaker 2: ideology around what the job of the government actually is
Speaker 2: and as author and bear grease guest John Barry said
Speaker 2: in his book Rising Tied, the nineteen twenty seven flood
Speaker 2: truly changed America, and oddly we'll see how it affected
Speaker 2: the Buffalo River. The Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: eight was an extensive plan to build dams that included
Speaker 2: stuff on all the tributaries of the Mighty Mississippi to
Speaker 2: hold back water during major floods. And that's right. Old
Speaker 2: Willard Vilnes Buffalo River in Arkansas was on there so
Speaker 2: decades before the National River was ever imagined. They were
Speaker 2: wanting to damn this spectacular river valley. It seems like
Speaker 2: that could have an effect on the way people handled it.
Speaker 2: With this like slow burn of kind of government bureaucracy
Speaker 2: and rumors. I mean, that's like a generation and a
Speaker 2: half of oh rumors, and finally people are just I
Speaker 2: mean it kind of just gets in their mind that well,
Speaker 2: this is going to be damned or it feels like
Speaker 2: that could play a role as opposed to just someone
Speaker 2: showing up and knocking on your door and being like
Speaker 2: we're damning the river. It's like, well, we've been hearing
Speaker 2: about this for thirty years and it's never happened.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was you know there there's definitely a psychological
Speaker 5: angle to that, because I've studied a lot of the
Speaker 5: newspaper coverage and letters and things like that, not just
Speaker 5: from the Buffalo, but from other damn projects, and some
Speaker 5: of them that never got done, but that they dragged
Speaker 5: on for years and years, I mean for a generation
Speaker 5: or more. Yeah, And every every three or four years,
Speaker 5: here comes the Army Corps Engineers with another hearing. And
Speaker 5: over time, one thing that can happen is, like you say,
Speaker 5: people might just become complacent and think, well, it's it's
Speaker 5: this is never gonna happen. They're never going to build anything.
Speaker 5: Or they might just decide, well, there's nothing we can do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know that seems like yeah, or in some.
Speaker 5: Cases people just got madder and madder and madder, and
Speaker 5: and so you you know, you kind of this crescendo
Speaker 5: of anger at the Army Corps Engineers builds up.
Speaker 2: It seems like governments in the Earth have something in common.
Speaker 2: Neither are hemmed into short time spans that humans are
Speaker 2: comfortable operating in. They'll wait you out. Rumors of long
Speaker 2: term land use plans affect how people plan their lives.
Speaker 2: I want to read something from doctor Neil Compton's nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two book Battle for the Buffalo, because it gives
Speaker 2: a picture of the times. Compton writes, the rough, mountainous
Speaker 2: country of much of the Ozarks in the Boston Mountains
Speaker 2: has failed to sustain the initial population of white settlers.
Speaker 2: The numbers of white pioneers had peaked about nineteen hundred,
Speaker 2: after which an exodus began. Between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: Arkansas lost two hundred and fifty thousand people in one
Speaker 2: congressman as a result. But that was not necessarily a calamity. Cutover,
Speaker 2: eroded and impoverished uplands were going back to nature. Opportunity
Speaker 2: for productive, long term civil culture and wildlife restoration existed.
Speaker 2: End of quote. The emigration that happened is beyond dispute. However,
Speaker 2: I get the sense this became part of the justification
Speaker 2: of making this land into a park, as in, people
Speaker 2: don't want to live here. People were leaving rural America
Speaker 2: to go to the cities for work. Rural communities needed help,
Speaker 2: and they said, let's build some lakes, which wasn't a
Speaker 2: bad idea and may have even been a good one,
Speaker 2: but some were destined for the raw end of this deal.
Speaker 2: The times were tough, but they didn't push everybody out,
Speaker 2: and there was a thriving community along the Buffalo River
Speaker 2: that never left. Nobody told them that times were hard,
Speaker 2: and doctor Neil Compton would be the major player in
Speaker 2: nationalizing the river. He's even known as the park's father.
Speaker 2: I'd never heard him referred to as anything but a
Speaker 2: conservation hero until I started talking to folks whose families
Speaker 2: had to sell because of the park. There'll be more
Speaker 2: about this on the next episode, but there were multiple
Speaker 2: big damn projects in northern Arkansas and all across the country.
Speaker 2: They were touted for producing the electricity, increasing tourism, and
Speaker 2: increasing real estate value, in which in most cases they delivered,
Speaker 2: and because of it, there was surprisingly little coordinated public
Speaker 2: protest until they started talking about the Buffalo.
Speaker 5: There's not a lot of There's not a lot of
Speaker 5: public protest against any of these dams that get built
Speaker 5: in the White River basin until you know, until you
Speaker 5: get to like Buffalo and Water Valley.
Speaker 2: Then why wasn't there more public protests? Because it's I
Speaker 2: read that the Buffalo was one of the corp of
Speaker 2: engineers even in d C was like, what the people
Speaker 2: are upset about this dam. They hadn't received a lot
Speaker 2: of opposition.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that is something that I've that I've spent a
Speaker 5: long time trying to figure out the sociology and the
Speaker 5: psychology of the timing of public protests. There were always
Speaker 5: protests from landowners who didn't want to go. But one
Speaker 5: of the things that that may be surprised in certainly
Speaker 5: upset these landowners was that they found that most of
Speaker 5: their neighbors, who didn't have land in the flood basin
Speaker 5: were usually in favor of the dams. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: that's just the way almost every almost every case, and
Speaker 5: a lot of that just has to do with human
Speaker 5: self interest. You know. It stands the reason that if
Speaker 5: you're going to lose your farm, you're going to be
Speaker 5: against this. If you're not, it's probably what's probably gonna happen.
Speaker 5: Is Land values are going to go up. You're in
Speaker 5: most cases where these dams are built, prosperity to a
Speaker 5: certain degree follows in these areas. And all the politicians
Speaker 5: are pro damned because they're money. This is port barrel politics,
Speaker 5: you know, I am, I am bringing money and lots
Speaker 5: of millions of dollars back to my district, and you're
Speaker 5: hurting just a small portion of your constituents one percent
Speaker 5: of your constituents maybe right, and all the rest of
Speaker 5: them are probably for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's you.
Speaker 5: You even see in the like in the hearings and stuff,
Speaker 5: the argument the greatest good for the greatest number.
Speaker 2: The great American land ethic, the utilitarian conservation of our
Speaker 2: beloved Teddy Roosevelt, the greatest good for the greatest number.
Speaker 2: It's brilliant unless you're the one that's having to pay
Speaker 2: so that others can have your stuff. And honestly, when
Speaker 2: you put it like that, it kind of sounds like communism.
Speaker 5: And so there's there's very little concern for that kind
Speaker 5: of insignificant minority of people who are who are going
Speaker 5: to lose their homes and going to lose their farms.
Speaker 2: Is that just the cost of having a prosperous nation,
Speaker 2: because that.
Speaker 5: Could be I mean, you know, you look at the
Speaker 5: interstate highway system. You know, you have a similar thing
Speaker 5: that happens there is especially in cities where there have
Speaker 5: been studies that show that especially low income neighborhoods, often
Speaker 5: we're just completely obliterated or part of it is, yeah, somebody,
Speaker 5: somebody's got somebody's got to make a sacrifice if you're
Speaker 5: gonna do any of this stuff. Now today, a lot
Speaker 5: a lot of people with the more environmentalist ethic and
Speaker 5: a more kind of naturalist ethic would say, well, did
Speaker 5: we even need the dams in the first place? I mean,
Speaker 5: is that that's that would be a question. But nobody
Speaker 5: was asking that question back then, because it was all
Speaker 5: about priming the pump, getting damn building jobs, and then
Speaker 5: the economic benefits that were expected to accrue from those
Speaker 5: damns being built.
Speaker 2: So and the hydro electric power was a big cell.
Speaker 2: I mean, that was that was like today's modern energy
Speaker 2: independence and and and maybe even renewable energy and all
Speaker 2: this like this is the way of the future. I mean,
Speaker 2: they were preaching hydro electricity.
Speaker 5: That's a big thing, Clay.
Speaker 3: That was.
Speaker 5: And it's it's hard for us to understand because today
Speaker 5: hydro power is just a tiny little percentage of our
Speaker 5: national power grid. But in those days, hydropower a major
Speaker 5: selling point.
Speaker 2: It's kind of disheartening to see how little was gained
Speaker 2: from all these dams, and to see the empty wishes
Speaker 2: of the government on energy production it has echoes of
Speaker 2: the renewable energy headlines of today. But don't take this
Speaker 2: as me knocking renewable energy. I ain't again it, but
Speaker 2: I don't trust any side short sighted energy propaganda. When
Speaker 2: all you care about is the next four years, you're
Speaker 2: bound to make bad decisions. We do well to learn
Speaker 2: from the Chinese and think of building our nation in
Speaker 2: one hundred year segments. Whoo, we are growing deep into
Speaker 2: parra greas boys. I want to step out of this
Speaker 2: conversation and get back on the river with Willard. We've
Speaker 2: crossed the river and are headed towards where he was born.
Speaker 2: He turns his mule around in the trail to face me.
Speaker 2: He wants to tell me a story.
Speaker 3: My two older brothers had two cousins about their age,
Speaker 3: he's teenagers. They'd meet right here every morning to walk
Speaker 3: to school together. My two cousins lived on down the creek,
Speaker 3: about half a mob. Well, they found them a yellow
Speaker 3: jacket and thesh and they got to back in each
Speaker 3: other out see which one could fight them the longest.
Speaker 3: They stripped their clothes off, naked, and they cut them
Speaker 3: a switch and they'd get in there and they'd fight
Speaker 3: them yellow jackets and see who says, see who cas
Speaker 3: standing the longest. They said that young our ball boy.
Speaker 3: He was their first cousin. They said, that youngest our
Speaker 3: ball b If you stay there long in any of them,
Speaker 3: here's a younger, but he stay longer.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's the toughest one. But now they had a
Speaker 3: lot to do, didn't it. That was their entertainment Back then.
Speaker 2: We ride and cross the river one more time. I
Speaker 2: see a stone structure built into the hillside.
Speaker 3: Yes, there's the old old fruit seller right here.
Speaker 2: And he describe to me what this looks like.
Speaker 3: Well, the fruit cellar is what the that's what you
Speaker 3: put your canned food in. It kept be cool. Our
Speaker 3: cellar stays about the same temperature about year round, with
Speaker 3: a door on it.
Speaker 2: Kind of dug into the hillside, probably ten or twelve
Speaker 2: feet and it's got a concrete front on it, but
Speaker 2: kind of dry laid stone around, and that just looks
Speaker 2: like a cave.
Speaker 3: They used it for a storm shellar too. When you
Speaker 3: become a stone.
Speaker 2: Where was your house from.
Speaker 3: Right there, well, just about fifty yellards, no foundation joll
Speaker 3: left of it. Yeah, Park tore it down.
Speaker 2: Willard and his family have deep roots on this river
Speaker 2: that's now public land. I want to get back to
Speaker 2: doctor Blevin's and see how the community reacted in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties to the prospect of damning this river.
Speaker 5: But part of it too is you know, if you
Speaker 5: if you're talking about why there's no public protest and
Speaker 5: I and I used the phrase public protest on purpose,
Speaker 5: because again, there's plenty of protests, just just doesn't make
Speaker 5: it to the public level. And a lot of that's
Speaker 5: because most of the newspapers, at least through the nineteen
Speaker 5: fifties were champions of damn building. This was seen as
Speaker 5: a progressive thing that any booster of a of a
Speaker 5: town or a state or anything with that, you've got
Speaker 5: to be for damn building because of the the economic impact.
Speaker 5: And if you're not, you're just stuck in the past.
Speaker 5: You know, you're just you're you're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2: Be like fighting a fighting a tide.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we don't want the internet, you know today? You know, yeah,
Speaker 5: get get it out of here. That was going on.
Speaker 5: And then in Arkansas, all to a person, all the
Speaker 5: politicians were damn advocates.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what's so interesting about this story, Like we're
Speaker 2: highlighting the Buffalo River. But this thing happened all over
Speaker 2: the place. Oh really, I mean nationwide and so but
Speaker 2: it's not. It's just not a story that you that
Speaker 2: you hear that much about because it's it's not. It's
Speaker 2: the unglamorous part of nation building. Stories of displacement aren't glamorous.
Speaker 2: And in the forties, fifties, and sixties damns were hot,
Speaker 2: but peaked after World War Two. The Army Corps of
Speaker 2: Engineers was the most powerful of all the Euros and
Speaker 2: had ambitions to damn every river in America. But now
Speaker 2: we'll enter the phase we'll call the Battle for the Buffalo,
Speaker 2: which at this point is primarily a fight to keep
Speaker 2: it from being damned.
Speaker 5: The Battle for the Buffalo really starts in the early
Speaker 5: nineteen sixties. You had an attempt in the late fifties
Speaker 5: to get money appropriated for a couple of dams. Eisenhower
Speaker 5: vetos the bill and sort of goes away until JFK
Speaker 5: takes office in sixty one. And for the most part
Speaker 5: in that era, Democrats were tended to be bigger proponents
Speaker 5: of damn building and the activities the Army Corps Engineers
Speaker 5: than Republicans and so that's when everything kind of breaks loose,
Speaker 5: is in sixty two when this Gilbert Damn proposal comes online.
Speaker 5: At the same time, in the background, you've got you
Speaker 5: got bill Fulbright, Senator from Arkansas. He's already talking to
Speaker 5: the National Park Service. They're already doing their surveys and
Speaker 5: things in the Buffalo Valley, trying to decide if this
Speaker 5: would be a valuable and worthy addition to the National
Speaker 5: Park Service. So that's all going on in the background.
Speaker 5: So you got in the late fifties, the National Park
Speaker 5: Service starts this initiative they call Mission sixty six, and
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty six is going to be the fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 5: of the founding of the National Park Service. So what
Speaker 5: they're doing, they're trying to for about a decade, they're
Speaker 5: going to really really build things up and do a
Speaker 5: lot of loud, splashy things to add to the National
Speaker 5: Park Service. And part of the new stuff is lake
Speaker 5: shores and seashores and even rivers, so you've got a
Speaker 5: lot of water stuff. It's not just these massive Western parks.
Speaker 2: It's like a new way to think about the National park.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's not just it's not just Western stuff.
Speaker 5: And a handful of things in Appalachia. So they first
Speaker 5: do Cape Cod in the early sixties. That's the first
Speaker 5: of these modern kind of watery you know, National park things,
Speaker 5: and then they get into the river business. So that's
Speaker 5: what's happening. You've got this change of directions a little
Speaker 5: bit for the National Park Service in the late fifties
Speaker 5: and early sixties.
Speaker 2: Interestingly, the first person to plant the seed for the
Speaker 2: Buffalo region as national park worthy was a writer named
Speaker 2: Glenn Green in nineteen forty six who published a story
Speaker 2: about the region. But it wouldn't be until nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: one when the first money seven thousand dollars was appropriated
Speaker 2: for the National Park Service to do a survey of
Speaker 2: the river. The first drawings of this potential park included
Speaker 2: over four hundred thousand acres, but it would later be
Speaker 2: whittled down to about ninety five thousand. So now there
Speaker 2: are two stakeholders with their site set on the river,
Speaker 2: the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a dam, and
Speaker 2: the National Park Service who wanted a park.
Speaker 5: So in sixty two, the Army Corps Engineers comes to
Speaker 5: Marshall and they have a public hearing and it turns
Speaker 5: into basically a pro damn public hearing. As a lot
Speaker 5: of those early Army Corps of Engineers hearings, did you know,
Speaker 5: just the boosters showed up. And so it's in sixty
Speaker 5: two when you have the creation of a local booster group.
Speaker 5: It's called the Buffalo River Improvement Association the BRIA, and
Speaker 5: they're basically just the damn boosters, is what they know.
Speaker 2: They're not the people, primarily, not the people who are
Speaker 2: living down there.
Speaker 5: They are not landowners. Probably not a one of them
Speaker 5: in the BRIA is a landowner. It's led by a
Speaker 5: local newspaper editor. And in reaction to that, you get
Speaker 5: the creation of the Ozark Society with Neil Compton, who's
Speaker 5: a medical doctor from Bentonville in far northwestern.
Speaker 2: Probably fifty miles from the headwaters of the Buffalo.
Speaker 5: And what the Ozark Society represents their canoeist and you know,
Speaker 5: just people recreation people pe who were interested in the Buffalo.
Speaker 5: And Compton was a guy who for years had been
Speaker 5: canoeing the Buffalo. So that's the Ozark Society. And then
Speaker 5: around the same time you get the Buffalo River Landowners Association,
Speaker 5: So you get a third organization in the mix. And
Speaker 5: these are the actual landowners. These are the people who
Speaker 5: own the land up and down the Buffalo River who
Speaker 5: are initially against the dam, and then ultimately they will
Speaker 5: be against the National Park Service idea as well when
Speaker 5: they realized well, either way we're you know, we're in
Speaker 5: danger of losing their lanes.
Speaker 2: So these to lay out the players in the field,
Speaker 2: the b ri I these people that were pro damn
Speaker 2: did known land on the river. Then the Ozark Society
Speaker 2: came in and wanted to They were anti dam, right,
Speaker 2: but their interest in the river was recreation. And then
Speaker 2: the Buffalo River Landowners Association, which would have been people
Speaker 2: that ultimately wanted no of it, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, if they had had a motto, it would
Speaker 5: have been leave us alone. I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Really, for the most part, it becomes a two person
Speaker 5: five because the Buffalo River Landowners Association they're way back there.
Speaker 5: You know, if this is a race, they're almost out
Speaker 5: of side, and.
Speaker 2: They don't have a big constituens. It's like picking teams
Speaker 2: for a game and you've got ten options where the
Speaker 2: other team has one hundred thousand options. I mean, right,
Speaker 2: there's only so many landowners. There's only so many people
Speaker 2: that on the county records have a deed that touches
Speaker 2: that river. Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like I think I mentioned in that story. At
Speaker 5: one of the hearings they do in Marshall, the speaker
Speaker 5: for the Buffalo River Landowners Association is the scheduled at
Speaker 5: very last, at the very end of the hearing. By
Speaker 5: that time, most of the reporters had left, you know,
Speaker 5: they were just. They didn't have any political cloud, any
Speaker 5: political pull, and everybody knew it. The corp of Engineers
Speaker 5: knew it, The Ozark Society knew it, you know it
Speaker 5: just and they were mostly most of the landowners were
Speaker 5: ignored throughout that process.
Speaker 2: This idea of the landowners being ignored is really the
Speaker 2: whole point of this story, and if nothing else, our
Speaker 2: efforts here are a hat tip to them. But the
Speaker 2: truth is, I'm not sure where I would have landed
Speaker 2: if I'd been around in this time. Historical revision is
Speaker 2: really easy and deceptive and often pains a false sense
Speaker 2: of righteousness in us. The truth is that people were
Speaker 2: all over the board. There were some landowners that had
Speaker 2: just moved into the region, had no real roots here,
Speaker 2: and they weren't bothered by a damn or a park.
Speaker 2: Some folks were real estate people and they loved the
Speaker 2: idea of a dam It was a relatively small group
Speaker 2: of people who didn't want either, and in a democracy,
Speaker 2: small numbers of people get squashed, period.
Speaker 5: But that's you know that all starts in about sixty
Speaker 5: two is when the sides are drawn up and you
Speaker 5: really get the beginnings this battle for the Buffalo. And
Speaker 5: that's when you start getting hard feelings and between neighbors
Speaker 5: and and there's a fight that breaks out at a
Speaker 5: high school basketball game and some guys are arrested, and
Speaker 5: so you get It's also right around the same time
Speaker 5: that Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, William Douglas
Speaker 5: comes and floats the buffalo in a very public way.
Speaker 2: Supreme Court Justice Douglas was anti damn, but in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five, the table's turn and the pro damn people
Speaker 2: gain some major steam, and it looks like the river's
Speaker 2: going to be damned until an unlikely hero arises.
Speaker 5: And so it's looking like sixty five might be the
Speaker 5: year when they finally get this passed. And then in
Speaker 5: late sixty five, the Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faulbus, who
Speaker 5: is much known in a Erican history for other you know,
Speaker 5: more unfortunate circumstances. He steps in and in effect saves
Speaker 5: the Buffalo from being damned.
Speaker 2: If you don't know the name Orville Fabas, he became
Speaker 2: the face of racism and segregation in nineteen fifty seven when,
Speaker 2: as governor of Arkansas, he ordered the National Guard to
Speaker 2: block nine African American students from entering Little Rock High School.
Speaker 2: These students became known as the Little Rock Nine and
Speaker 2: are rightfully celebrated today as heroes. However, when it comes
Speaker 2: to his natural resource policies, I think Fabas did as
Speaker 2: a solid He wrote a lengthy and eloquent letter about
Speaker 2: the natural beauty of the Buffalo River and how it
Speaker 2: was unacceptable for it to be damned, and that he
Speaker 2: supported a national park.
Speaker 5: You know, Fabas's letter really puts the Army Corps of
Speaker 5: Engineers back on their heels. And then John Paul Hammerschmidt
Speaker 5: takes office in sixty seven, and one of the first
Speaker 5: things that this new representative for Northwest Arkansas does is
Speaker 5: he proposes a Buffalo River National Park bill. And it
Speaker 5: takes five years for it to go through the political
Speaker 5: process and eventually be signed by Richard Nixon.
Speaker 2: It does March first, nineteen seventy two. Yeah, remember that
Speaker 2: we said seventy two was a year of celebration and infamy.
Speaker 2: It's all the matter of perspective, which will really explore
Speaker 2: deeply on the next episode when we talk about a
Speaker 2: lady named ev or Granny Henderson. That's some foreshadowing for you.
Speaker 5: It does eventually get passed. I guess from a landowner's perspective,
Speaker 5: this all happens. Really, it just flips, and you know,
Speaker 5: you go from fearing that your land is going to
Speaker 5: be drowned and you're sort of elated, I guess when
Speaker 5: you defeat that threat and then you turn around and here's,
Speaker 5: you know, here's this National park.
Speaker 2: It was. It's kind of portrayed as if it was
Speaker 2: either one or the other, or like the National Park
Speaker 2: is what saved it from being damned? Was that ever
Speaker 2: really true?
Speaker 5: You could certainly be justified in portraying the battle that way.
Speaker 5: And here's why. When the Army Corps of Engineers backed
Speaker 5: off a project, they usually didn't back off of it permanently.
Speaker 5: A permanent backoff would have to They would have.
Speaker 2: To actually wait till a new governor came in, or
Speaker 2: the sentiment was different politically.
Speaker 5: They could do that. What to to permanently get something,
Speaker 5: To get a Damn project off the books, it would
Speaker 5: have to be de authorized by Congress, and that rarely
Speaker 5: ever happened. What they would usually do is they would
Speaker 5: just just sort of put it on a back burner
Speaker 5: and say this is not a priority.
Speaker 2: And we know that they'll wait decades. Yeah, we know
Speaker 2: that from from even this It's not it's not. If
Speaker 2: it goes away for a year, that means nothing. Your
Speaker 2: grandchildren might have that light in their backyard.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And and if you follow a lot of the
Speaker 5: as I've done a lot of the newspaper coverage of
Speaker 5: these various Damn projects through time, from the from the
Speaker 5: forties into the seventies, you can go a dozen years
Speaker 5: without a Damn being mentioned in the press, and then
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, here we are, you know, ten
Speaker 5: or twelve years later, here's a new hearing on a
Speaker 5: Damn that I'd completely forgotten about. As I think it
Speaker 5: in volume three, I compared it the Army Corps Damn
Speaker 5: plans to like a monster out of a horror film.
Speaker 5: You know, you think it's gone, but it's not really,
Speaker 5: you know, it's it's it's just gonna it's gonna pop
Speaker 5: back up when you don't expect it to. And so
Speaker 5: that was the justification for the Ozark Society and yeah
Speaker 5: and the people like that was we can't trust the
Speaker 5: Army Corps engineers. They're not going to go away. So
Speaker 5: the only the only safe way to keep this river
Speaker 5: free flowing is to turn it into a national park.
Speaker 2: In the next episode we'll learn if that was actually true,
Speaker 2: and going back to our odd coincidence at the start.
Speaker 2: In March of nineteen seventy two, Merle Haggard also released
Speaker 2: his song Grandma Harp, which told about how her way
Speaker 2: of life had gone. The region was now under control
Speaker 2: of the National Park Service, which now had money appropriated
Speaker 2: to buy land from the private citizens who owned the
Speaker 2: ninety thousand acres that would become the park.
Speaker 4: We later sold the restaurant signing in Morning, and everybody
Speaker 4: knew she'd done her part.
Speaker 5: Don't get sucked here, no hidden let.
Speaker 4: Just a song about the lives Grandma heart, just to
Speaker 4: think about the times as she lived through.
Speaker 2: I want to get back to the river with Willard.
Speaker 2: Do you want to walk up to the old home place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those smoke caps up. We can ride it forady.
Speaker 3: We get through here if you want to.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, Yeah, we're at the fruit cellar and we
Speaker 2: ride up the hill to the old home place.
Speaker 5: So this year was where is.
Speaker 3: Boring those smoke caps? The old house place was right
Speaker 3: back over here, just behind us.
Speaker 5: What did the house look like?
Speaker 3: It was a just a three room house. H had
Speaker 3: out of one bedroom in the kitchen and the dining room.
Speaker 5: Was it made of oak?
Speaker 3: Is made of oak? Yeah? Board? Yeall?
Speaker 2: Did it Did it have a rock foundation that went
Speaker 2: to the ground or did it set up like set
Speaker 2: up on rocks? No?
Speaker 3: He had had a rock foundation, then wood forward and
Speaker 3: wood floor was right?
Speaker 2: And you were you were delivered by your grandmother, Yeah.
Speaker 3: My grandmother Hamson. Actually you were born right here, right.
Speaker 2: What's it like coming back in here? You ride this
Speaker 2: stretch of river a couple times a week.
Speaker 3: Heah, I come in here and reminiation show people around sometime.
Speaker 3: You know, some of the free answers talk to them, y'all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess in some ways it's better that it's
Speaker 2: like this than if it were under a lake. Somewhere.
Speaker 3: I've enjoyed it all my life, so yeah, I've been blessed.
Speaker 3: Yeah sure, hey, yeah.
Speaker 2: This is the first episode on the formation of the
Speaker 2: Buffalo National River, but this story is really about something
Speaker 2: much bigger. I'm sure many of you have family stories
Speaker 2: of people being forced from their land because of lakes, parks,
Speaker 2: or highways. The irony we wrestle with today is how
Speaker 2: seemingly happy many of us are that it happened to
Speaker 2: someone else, or at least it didn't happen in our generation.
Speaker 2: On the next episode, we'll go back in time and
Speaker 2: hear an original interview with the Buffalo Rivers first lange,
Speaker 2: who was featured in National Geographic in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 2: Eva Barnes Henderson, or Granny Henderson as we know her,
Speaker 2: and will continue to discuss one of America's most valued
Speaker 2: public land doctrines, the greatest good for the greatest number.
Speaker 2: And let me tell you it's gonna get really personal.
Speaker 2: I'd like to take a minute and thank my friends
Speaker 2: Justin House and Kaylin Belions, both lifelong residents of Newton
Speaker 2: County who had lots of family on the river. Both
Speaker 2: helped me immensely in setting up these interviews and inspiring
Speaker 2: me with their family stories. I can't thank you enough
Speaker 2: for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast.
Speaker 2: Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and
Speaker 2: I look forward to talking with all those hillbillies on
Speaker 2: the Render next week