August 7, 2024 • 64 mins
In 1972, the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas was designated the nation's "First National River" - a celebrated act of Utilitarian Conservation. But in the process, 2,000 families along the river were stripped of their generational land by eminent domain. In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, listen along as Clay Newcomb tells the story of these people consigned to oblivion and the sacrifices forced on them to create these public lands. Follow 78-year-old local Willard Villines on a mule ride through the wilderness as he shows Clay the forgotten homesteads of family members, and even the remains of the home that was his birthplace.
Clay speaks with Misty Langdon, a descendant of these families and creator of The Remnants Project, which documents the history of Newton County, and Dr. Brooks Blevins, Ozark historian, author, and hillbilly, describes the dirty work of "progress."
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
There are people all up and down the Buffalo River
who feel like that they have lost something, that something
has been taken from them that they are never going
to be able to get back. This is never going
to be restored.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
In this series, we'll be examining the great American doctrine
utilitarian conservation, the greatest good for the greatest number, through
the lens of the formation of the Buffalo National River
in the Ozarks of Arkansas, touted as our nation's first
national river and celebrated without question, but will be looking
(00:41):
at a different side of the story, one rarely told
or understood, as we focus on the families who got
the short end of the stick on this utilitarian doctrine
and had to give up their lands, being displaced by
the strong arm of the government. In this episode, we'll
talk about human self interest. Take a mule ride with
(01:04):
Willard Vlynes, meet grassroots historian Misty Langdon, and interview our
longtime Bear Grease favorite historian and author and hillbilly doctor
Brooks Blevins about how the heck all this happened. The
water is ice cold and the story complex and windy.
(01:25):
Hang with us for a while, because I really doubt
that you're gonna want to miss this one. Where was
your house from right here?
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Well? Let it for just about fifty yeards no foundation,
John left? Is it?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Park till it down.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:13):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore. I'm in the saddle atop my
trusty eight year old paint mule, Izzy, and we're following
behind another, perhaps even flashier sorrel a red paint mule.
(02:39):
Willard's mule, Rosy, is about fifteen hands tall. She's good sized.
I feel like I'm following a glowing led light fifty
feet below the surface of a forested sea of hickory,
sweet gum, and walnut. We're completely under the shade until
the mule's hoofs the water as we entered the bright
(03:02):
sunlight crossing the river. Now, did y'all have y'all had
parts of the farm on both sides of the river. Right,
How did you how did you manage crossing it? Just
you just didn't.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
If it was real high, couldn't. If it was real high,
it couldn't.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Get across the river.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, we said.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Willard the lines is seventy eight years old, born February twentieth,
nineteen forty six. He and eight siblings were born down
on this river, and two other siblings were born what
he calls up on the mountain, all in Newton County, Arkansas.
We're heading towards his old home place, but first we've
(03:44):
got another home place to stop at.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Grandma's maiden name was shown the line. It's nine a
year to tell about in a few short lines, down
in Newton County, down in Arkansham. And in nineteen one
she married Grandpa. That's where.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Grandma's maiden name was Zone Blimes. There's ninety years to
tell about in a few short lines. Barn in Newton County,
down in Narkansas. Then in nineteen one she married Grandpa.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
We lead her soul resting son in the morning.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
And that greadbody new she tunner barn where that barn.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Don't get that barn is in pretty good shape.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, we always knowed this old Harper place. Merle Haggard's
grandma lived here. Her maiden name was Zone Vliines. Huh
she married a heart.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Some of y'all skin.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah. She had been my probably great great ants in
the real Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You know he's got a criminal background.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Right, Well, I have too, in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Doing life with U Bro. That was Merle Haggard's song
Grandma Harp. Her maiden name was Vlyines, just like Willard's.
She was born in eighteen seventy six and died in
nineteen sixty nine at the age of ninety three in
Newton County. Haggard released this song in nineteen seventy two,
(05:29):
three years after her death, and it talks about her
way of life dying, Which is an odd coincidence because
that year, nineteen seventy two would be significant for this
river and the people who lived near it. For most,
it would be a year of the celebration of a
conservation success. But for the people who had land that
(05:52):
actually touched this river, for many of them, it's a
year of infamy. Here's Willard telling us about his so
called criminal record. Remember we're on mules standing in front
of an old barn.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Matter of fact, I paid my first fine right here
to the park rangers. Is that right? Right?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
What happened?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
There's about ten of us come in down here and camped. Now,
the eight of them was preachers. Well, the next morning
the park rangers come up the creek. There's some horseback
riders down here. Where's all riding mules. There's some horseback riders.
They made fun of her mules. They went back up
still creek and told the park ranger we's camped here.
(06:40):
And the next morning they met us down here, and
you weren't a camp here, that's what he said. We
slept in the old barn. He said, we wasn't supposed to.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
How that's it with you?
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well, not very good.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
The real question is why was he making fun of
your mules?
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I don't know. They just made light of her mules.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh man, that gets under my skin quick.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
But I told that park ranger, I said, I want
you to just look here. I said, when my folks
lived here, I said, this was all clared land. I
said a rabbit couldn't get through here. Now, man, I said,
I'll take the blame. I said, these are other people
didn't know. I asked him. I said, well, what's to
find thee and he said, be twenty five dollars. He
(07:20):
looked in his book and he said no, said he'll
be fifty dollars. I said, you look in that book
and find something for twenty five dollars, and he did.
He charged me twenty five. That's honest. True. Of course
he left. They took up a donation. I've come out
of ahead and all the preachers pitched it.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I don't want to make light of breaking the law,
but this story captures something that's eluded ninety nine percent
of people, including me, who've enjoyed this area, which is
now public land. Many of the families who had to
sell their land to the government against their will are
wiel sore about the whole deal, though it took place
(08:03):
over fifty years ago. You see today Grandma Harp's land
sits in the upper portion of a ninety five thousand,
seven hundred and thirty acre block of land designated as
the Buffalo National River in nineteen seventy two. Advertised as
America's first national River, the government acquired over ninety thousand
(08:24):
acres of private land from over two thousand property owners,
some of whose families had been in the region since
this place was homesteaded. At one time, you could have
driven a car in here, but since nineteen seventy two
the nearest road is well over an hour's ride on
a mule. The fields once cleared by Willard's kinfolks have
(08:46):
grown up into secondary succession brambles en route in the
next seventy five years to return to the Ozarks Climax
forest of oak and hickory. When you ride down the
river with Willard and you hear the stories of his child,
childhood and what used to be his community, it's kind
of spooky. It might be what it's like to visit
(09:06):
Chernobyl in Ukraine. It's like a civilization erased off the map,
engulfed by the subtle violence of natural reclamation cycles, collapsing
barns and smoke houses, dilapidated homes in various stages of decay,
hayfields turned into cedar groves decay in nineteen forties, model
(09:26):
forward trucks laying around, and footprints of rock foundations of
buildings are scattered all down the river. But it didn't
happen because of a nuclear disaster. Or industry moving. It
happened because the place was so stinking beautiful that the
government decided to turn it into a national park. And
(09:49):
trust me, you don't want to be in the government
sites when they want your land. They've proven that from
the perspective of a human, nature's takeover of this place
seems sluggish and slow, but by how the earth measures,
it's as hot, tempered, and swift as a tornado. The
(10:11):
soil is an insatiable savage, engulfing dead organic matter. Above
it houses barns and flesh, while shooting rockets of living
cells to the sky. Jealous for sunlight. Anything in its
path be dead gummed. Its strategy is to outlast anything
in everything. The earth knows that in time it will
(10:34):
beat you, and in some ways, so does the government.
This story is about the modern American people, not just here,
who sacrifice their homelands for quote, the greater good of society,
slain by our utilitarian land use doctrine the greatest good
(10:55):
for the greatest number, which we including I hold so dear.
But if you've never had your land taken and your
family uprooted, then it's hard to understand our national parks
are celebrated in our culture, and we're proud that our
nation had the idea to lead the world in preserving
such places of natural beauty. But the truth is that
(11:16):
the stories of land acquisition for the Great Smoky Mountain
National Park, the Shenandoah Valley National Park, and many many
others were downright brutal. The story of the Buffalo is
a lesser known story. Also, much like the hundreds of
thousands of acres of land taken for recreational lakes in
(11:36):
this country between the nineteen thirties and seventies, these are
not glamorous stories celebrated in our culture. But there was
a time when this country was hungry for land and
somebody had to fork it up. Ozark historian doctor Brooks
Blevins wrote that the land acquisition process of the National
Park Service when inquiring land for the Buffalo was at
(12:00):
best confusing and at worst deceptive. Before we get into
the details of how this river came to be America's
first national river, I want to talk with Misty Langdon,
a Newton County native whose mother was of Alliones related
to Willard. But Misty's a grassroots community leader who created
(12:22):
the Remnants project, designed to document the history of Newton County.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
People ask me all the time why I do this,
because it is so much work. And Richard, I know,
he pulls his hair out all the time at me
because I'm I'll go down a rabbit hole and I
might not come up for a day or so, and
and people will call in. He says, she's looking for
dead people. Just you know, let her be. But there
are people all up and down the Buffalo River who
(12:52):
feel like that they have lost something, that something has
been taken from them that they are never going to
be able to get back. It's never to be restored.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's really interesting and kind of makes my head spin
backwards to hear someone talk about the Buffalo River this way,
because this is a place I've only heard celebrated. But
it turns out there's a lot of stories I didn't know.
I first floated this river in nineteen ninety eight, and
after I got married in two thousand, my wife and
(13:23):
I spent a lot of time here. We even named
our middle daughter River. I asked Misty, from the community's perspective,
how all this went from private farmland back in the
seventies into a national park.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
I mean, you hear rumors that something's, you know, a foot,
but to actually get a notice of condemnation of your
property and have no formal letter or anything before that,
I think it was the shock and awe factor of
how it was.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
And this would have been in the late sixties, early
seventies before there was i mean, any kind of internet
or the communication was just way different back then. And
so you're saying some of these people on the river
were just totally caught off. They are totally because it
had been embroiled in like at least twenty years of
murmurs of this is going to be damned, This is
(14:19):
not going to be damned, This is going to be
a wild and scenic river. This is going to be
and it probably just kind of after a decade or
so of that, it was just kind of like, what
is going to happen? Is it ever going to happen?
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Well, it kind of goes back to that thing talking
about isolated communities too, because in Fayetteville, the way that
their town and everything was structured, they had all the amenities.
By the sixties, the late sixties and early seventies, there
were people in Boxley that didn't have phones, and some
probably still didn't have along the river. I know still
didn't have you know, electricity, They were running off generators.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Fatdeville is the largest town in the region, about fifty
miles from the buffer. Low Boxley is a small community
at the head of the river. Interestingly, people from the
Fayedville area would play a big role in having the
river nationalized. Newton County was truly the backwoods of Arkansas.
And I can say this because I is one that
(15:18):
most of the people that lived here were white folks
of low financial means and what the world would call
hillbilly's people rich in land, love of country, family and hardship,
not money, education or political power. Later we'll see where
I believe the socio economic status would come into play.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So that isolation was a real, a real hardship for them,
and that was something I think tactically that the locals
could not get over, was the lack of organization. I
know in one of the oral histories that I had
listened to, the interviewer asks the lady, did you ever
sign petitions? Did you ever go to meetings? And the
(16:05):
answer was they had signed a petition once the word
had started to spread, but they never had meetings. You know,
those are the type of things that we look at
as a culture as being bad. You know, that's something
that against your government. You don't have secret meetings. And
I mean it's like, these are people who were complete patriots.
(16:26):
They had fought in, you know, World War Two, they
had a Korea, World War One, and to think about
setting up a meeting to talk about your government, I
mean that was And especially you think about what went
through during the fifties about communism and how everybody was
so nervous about being, you know, branded as a communist.
(16:50):
I think that was just a little bit too far
outside their realm of comfort.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
They weren't really comfortable using the tools of the time
period RCT that would have been able to combat it.
It's not like these people would have been like, oh, well,
here's what we do to stop a major government action, right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Like a town hall or a you know or whatever.
They just did not utilize that because and I'm putting
words in their mouths because I don't know, but in
my opinion, they didn't utilize it because that was just
a step too far against their against their own government.
And I think that by the time, because I spoke
with one guy down in Boxley and he's about my parents' age.
(17:30):
And I said, or how in the world did nobody
get killed over this? Because I know how hot tempered
I am. I'm a breed loving of the lines. That
is a terrible combination. And I can't imagine in the
time period that they were living, I don't know how
it skirted around and somebody didn't get killed.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Let's stop for just a second here. It's interesting that
this conversation starts from the angle that this government action
and to quote preserve the Buffalo is negative And if
you're from this part of the country, you'd be hard
pressed to hear anybody say, narry a negative word about
this place. This Buffalo National River is the crown jewel
(18:13):
of our state. But I'm learning that perspective can turn
the whole narrative one hundred and eighty degrees, So being
your doctrine into the hypocritical ditch, And that's what makes
this story so interesting. We love public lands and national parks,
but do we like how they make the sausage in
the back room? Are you a fan of displacement so
(18:35):
that our society will have a place to recreate? That's
a harsh question, but it's one we asked our society
and they said yes to. It's what we asked the
American people before displacing the families in the Shenandoah in
Great Smoking Mountains National Park. And it's the question we
asked America before the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty.
(18:56):
It's just interesting what as a society we're able to
justify now. The Indian Removal Act was pure wickedness. Even
David Crockett thought so. But the questions about national parks
are much more nuanced. Landowners were paid, and some got
market value for their land, and in many cases simply
moved right down the road out of the park. But nonetheless,
(19:20):
the question of heavy handed government power and property owner
rights is a big one. But let's get back to
the river. Willard Vilnes was born down here. We've passed
Merle Haggard's grandma's place and we're riding down the rivers
(19:42):
edged the land Willard's father used to own and farm.
He's taking me to another barn. So tell me about
this barn.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Well, my dad and two brothers colder in me and
mister Daniels, they built his barn and they used a
handshaw to cut the rash prison. He didn't have no
electric tool to talk, but he'd be a load that
was born with handhol.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
What year you think of this built?
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Uh? We moved. We moved out of here in fifty six,
probably probably then fifty.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I say you remember as little kid this barn?
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah I remember? Yeah, I member, Well, yeah, we would
we cut hay off down in there and Dad would
he would rake it and shock it and put it
on the wagon. I was just about I don't know,
ship seven year old shummers in there. But he let
me drive the mules while they loaded the wagon.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
What's it? What's it like coming to barn like this
that your dad built, that's now just like engulfed in
forest and all right, it's kind of it's kind of
a unique situation.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Will Yeah, here I visited. I probably want your class
here and KYI remind this a little bit. Yeah, I'm
brought the kids over here and took pictures with them
over here.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
And now where was your house from here?
Speaker 3 (21:08):
HiT's old trufher mitch cruching.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, we was able to go to your old home place.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Oh yeah, with crousty river.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yell, is there anything still there, no shler.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Small custure there. Yeah, no foundation jo left of it. Yeah,
park tore it down.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
The park tore down his old house. The Vilnes left
in nineteen fifty six, and I assumed by seventy two
the old house was in disrepair and not deemed historically significant.
Some of the buildings of this civilization were left, while
others destroyed. How the heck did all this come about?
(21:44):
We're heading to Willard's home place where he was born,
delivered by his grandmother. We're going to have to cross
what the Ozarkians call the Buffalo kind of leaving out
the US Sound in Buffalo, it's a gravel bedstream with
headwaters bird in the highest elevations of the Ozark Mountains
in northwest Arkansas, the Boston Range, which reaches about twenty
(22:08):
five hundred feet. The Eurogeny of the Ozarks is the
work of incomprehensible time and erosion on an uplifted plateau
that was once the bed of a shallow ocean. Fossils
of fish and crustaceans are common here. Geologists and psychologists
agree that humans are incapable of understanding deep geologic time
(22:30):
beyond a shallow intellectual regurgitation of huge, meaningless numbers. It's
kind of like trying to explain to a grasshopper the
life span of a wide oak. The beasts of the
Earth only understand time and segments congruit to their lifespans.
Geologists believe the Ozarks are older than the Appalachians, with
origins reaching back one point six billion years, but even
(22:55):
to the world's top geologists, things are hazy back that far.
The Ozark Highlands or Mountains are in the central United States,
encompassing southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and a small portion in
eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and it roughly encompasses fifty thousand
square miles. There are no natural lakes in the Ozarks.
(23:19):
In the rugged regions, we call them mountains, and I'd
challenge any outsider to come here, hike em afoot and
tell me they aren't mountains. But if you want to
talk about the epicenter of beauty and ruggedness the Ozarks,
it's hard to deny that the Buffalo River country is
its lifeblood. Starting in Newton County, the meandering River flows
(23:42):
through Cercy and Marion Counties until it enters the White
River in Baxter County one hundred and fifty three miles
from its head but as the crow flies, from its
headwaters to its termination is only sixty miles. The river
is known for its pristine aqua blue green water towering limestone, sandstone,
(24:03):
and dolomite bluffs some four hundred feet above the water's surface.
It's known for its caves and its incredible wet weather waterfalls.
A couple hundred yards off the river, uphimned in Hollow
is America's largest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies,
which plunges two hundred and nine feet to the valley floor. However,
(24:26):
by the calculations of men when they judge wildness based
upon lack of human footprint, this river is one of
America's few remaining free flowing, undamned rivers. And this is
truly something worth celebrating. They're over ninety thousand dams in America,
(24:47):
and they dang there, damned the buffalo put in all
these houses, barns and bluffs underwater. Doctor Brooks Blevins is
(25:17):
a professor at Missouri State University and a prolific author
about the Ozarks. In twenty twenty two, he published a
book called up south in the Ozarks. In it, he
has an essay called against the Current. I want to
get into the deeper history of how the Buffalo was
saved from being damned and how it became a national river.
(25:39):
Here's myself and doctor Brooks Blevins well in your interest,
particularly in the Buffalo. In the essay that you wrote
in your book. It's interesting. When I first contacted you,
I believe you said you felt like you were the
only historian that had written about this from the perspective
(26:01):
of the people that had been displaced, and that kind
of links back to your story about your grandparents, and
that was a story the world was not interested in
hearing of these oftentimes not that well to do, impoverish
people living in these rural places getting displaced. Like that's
(26:23):
not the story that America wanted to tell, and America
wanted to hear.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Yeah, that was not a story that was told and
wouldn't be for you know, another generation. And there was
no Gorilla press at that time. It was something that
mostly was just just forgotten and remained forgotten. And I think,
as far as I know, I am the only person
(26:48):
on the for the Buffalo River story. I'm the only
person who's ever approached it. I should say I'm the
only person who's ever published anything that approaches it from
the kind of the perspective of the landowners. But there's
as far as the published record what the public, you know,
has access to, there's very little from the perspective of
(27:11):
the people who lost their land, the people who really
made the sacrifice that the rest of us now enjoy
the fruits of We.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Mentioned a story about doctor Blevin's grandparents. It's a family
story that led him to be interested in the displaced
landowners on the river. Though they didn't live on the Buffalo,
but rather in the White River watershed just to the northwest.
I want to hear what happened to them.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
My great great grandparents lived on Pigeon Creek, which is
a tributary of the North Fork of the White River,
and my great great grandpa was born there just a
year or two before the Civil War, and so they
were still there in the early nineteen forties when the
Army Corps of Engineers started building the Damn Norfolk Dam.
(28:02):
But they were one of the families who had to
sell their land to the government and they were moved.
I don't know a few miles south of Mountain Home
and kind of a rocky hillside down there somewhere. And
I found out not too many years ago what happened.
(28:22):
I was able to contact one of my grandpa's own cousins,
as we say in the Ozarks, first cousins, and she
told me the story of when the authorities, whoever the
authorities were, I don't know if it was the sheriff's officer,
but when they came out, you know, they'd been given
the final warning that they had to vacate their farm.
(28:43):
This was before they shut the floodgates and you know,
flooded the valleys and all that kind of stuff. And
she said her grandparents, my great great grandparents, refused to leave.
They were in their eighties and they had lived there,
you know, practically all the or adult lives, so they,
you know, they didn't didn't want to go, like a
(29:05):
lot of other landowners there, and a lot of other
farmers there. She said that they refused to leave and
the authorities came out and physically carried them off the premises. No,
I don't know, you know, in my mind, I see
two old timers planking or something. You know, there's stiff
as a board that been carried out. But they may
have carried them off in chairs or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
But that received no statewide press, no national press.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
No, no, it didn't. The local weekly newspaper, the Baxter Bulletin,
was operated by an editor named Tom Shiris, and Shyris
was one of the premier damn promoters in the state
of Arkansas.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
And it's not a story he would no, No, this is.
Speaker 5 (29:49):
Not It's not a story that was likely to show
up in the Baxter Bulletin.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
It's interesting the government land condemnation, whether for a lake
her national park, rarely made big headlines back in the day.
There's a famous photo of a pregnant woman named Lessie
Jenkins being carried out of her home in a rocking
chair in nineteen thirty seven when her family, including her
(30:15):
seven children, were evicted from their home by the National
Park Service to make Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. And
books have been written about the process of land acquisition
for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and
North Carolina, and all the stories are eerily similar. I
(30:36):
now want to get to the deep history with doctor
Blevins about the buffalo and surprisingly we're gonna have to
go back to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
twenty seven. But if you're a Bear Grease listener, you
remember our Mississippi River series which started at episode one
twenty six, and if you listen, you'll have a head start.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
To really dig into the into the heart of this matter,
you have to go back even before the Great Depression,
at least to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
twenty seven. That was the event that really altered the
trajectory of what the Army Corps of Engineers was expected
(31:19):
to do. Before that, the Army Corps of Engineers was
an organization that mainly built levees and dikes along big rivers,
But the Army Corps Engineers was not a dam building agency.
And because of the tremendous destruction the economic impact of
that flood in nineteen twenty seven, all of a sudden,
(31:43):
politicians had in the Mississippi Valley had tremendous pressure put
on them to do something to prevent another devastating flood
like this. Because you've got to remember, in the Mississippi Valley,
the flood of nineteen twenty seven was basically what led
us into the Great Depression, and then you get into
(32:03):
the heart of the Great Depression, and then FDR takes
office in nineteen thirty three, and you have a completely
new way of looking at the way the government handles
crises in a way that we've never done before, where
they just try to spend your way out of it.
You spend money, you put it in the hands of
(32:25):
people who don't have it, and you expect them to
turn around and spend it and try to prime the
pump of the economy that way. And so it's kind
of that one two punch of the nineteen twenty seven
flood and the Great Depression leading into the New Deal
that all of a sudden puts dams front and center
(32:45):
on the radar for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Dams came on the radar of America. They were all
the rage. As we follow this story chronologically, it's also
relevant to note that in nineteen thirty six there was
a four thousand acre Buffalo River State Park formed, which
was the first indication that this place was a special
place for recreation. But let's get back to talking about
(33:11):
the long periods of time that all this stuff took.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
So these flood control acts they plant the seed for
these dams. Now, just because a dam is mentioned in
one of these flood control acts doesn't mean it's going
to get built. What they do is they authorize these dams.
Then the Army Corps of Engineers has to go out
finalize its plans. They have to do public hearings to
gauge responses from the public, and then if they decide
(33:41):
that the benefit cost analysis is favorable, then they go
back to Congress and they present their case and they say,
you know, can we have the money to build this?
And so that's why it's such a long process. That's
why you know, these Buffalo dams are first mentioned as
early as Night teen thirty eight, but the battle for
(34:02):
the Buffalo doesn't even heat up really till the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
So what really they talked about a dam on the
Buffalo River in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 5 (34:10):
Yeah, there's an extensive White River dam plan, a reservoir
plan that's first presented in thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
It's interesting to look back the big swings in government
ideology around what the job of the government actually is
and as author and bear grease guest John Barry said
in his book Rising Tied, the nineteen twenty seven flood
truly changed America, and oddly we'll see how it affected
the Buffalo River. The Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty
(34:43):
eight was an extensive plan to build dams that included
stuff on all the tributaries of the Mighty Mississippi to
hold back water during major floods. And that's right. Old
Willard Vilnes Buffalo River in Arkansas was on there so
decades before the National River was ever imagined. They were
(35:05):
wanting to damn this spectacular river valley. It seems like
that could have an effect on the way people handled it.
With this like slow burn of kind of government bureaucracy
and rumors. I mean, that's like a generation and a
half of oh rumors, and finally people are just I
mean it kind of just gets in their mind that well,
(35:28):
this is going to be damned or it feels like
that could play a role as opposed to just someone
showing up and knocking on your door and being like
we're damning the river. It's like, well, we've been hearing
about this for thirty years and it's never happened.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Yeah, that was you know there there's definitely a psychological
angle to that, because I've studied a lot of the
newspaper coverage and letters and things like that, not just
from the Buffalo, but from other damn projects, and some
of them that never got done, but that they dragged
on for years and years, I mean for a generation
(36:03):
or more. Yeah, And every every three or four years,
here comes the Army Corps Engineers with another hearing. And
over time, one thing that can happen is, like you say,
people might just become complacent and think, well, it's it's
this is never gonna happen. They're never going to build anything.
Or they might just decide, well, there's nothing we can do.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah, you know that seems like yeah, or in some.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Cases people just got madder and madder and madder, and
and so you you know, you kind of this crescendo
of anger at the Army Corps Engineers builds up.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
It seems like governments in the Earth have something in common.
Neither are hemmed into short time spans that humans are
comfortable operating in. They'll wait you out. Rumors of long
term land use plans affect how people plan their lives.
I want to read something from doctor Neil Compton's nineteen
(37:01):
ninety two book Battle for the Buffalo, because it gives
a picture of the times. Compton writes, the rough, mountainous
country of much of the Ozarks in the Boston Mountains
has failed to sustain the initial population of white settlers.
The numbers of white pioneers had peaked about nineteen hundred,
(37:21):
after which an exodus began. Between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty.
Arkansas lost two hundred and fifty thousand people in one
congressman as a result. But that was not necessarily a calamity. Cutover,
eroded and impoverished uplands were going back to nature. Opportunity
for productive, long term civil culture and wildlife restoration existed.
(37:46):
End of quote. The emigration that happened is beyond dispute. However,
I get the sense this became part of the justification
of making this land into a park, as in, people
don't want to live here. People were leaving rural America
to go to the cities for work. Rural communities needed help,
(38:08):
and they said, let's build some lakes, which wasn't a
bad idea and may have even been a good one,
but some were destined for the raw end of this deal.
The times were tough, but they didn't push everybody out,
and there was a thriving community along the Buffalo River
that never left. Nobody told them that times were hard,
(38:29):
and doctor Neil Compton would be the major player in
nationalizing the river. He's even known as the park's father.
I'd never heard him referred to as anything but a
conservation hero until I started talking to folks whose families
had to sell because of the park. There'll be more
about this on the next episode, but there were multiple
(38:51):
big damn projects in northern Arkansas and all across the country.
They were touted for producing the electricity, increasing tourism, and
increasing real estate value, in which in most cases they delivered,
and because of it, there was surprisingly little coordinated public
protest until they started talking about the Buffalo.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
There's not a lot of There's not a lot of
public protest against any of these dams that get built
in the White River basin until you know, until you
get to like Buffalo and Water Valley.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Then why wasn't there more public protests? Because it's I
read that the Buffalo was one of the corp of
engineers even in d C was like, what the people
are upset about this dam. They hadn't received a lot
of opposition.
Speaker 5 (39:40):
Yeah, that is something that I've that I've spent a
long time trying to figure out the sociology and the
psychology of the timing of public protests. There were always
protests from landowners who didn't want to go. But one
of the things that that may be surprised in certainly
upset these landowners was that they found that most of
(40:03):
their neighbors, who didn't have land in the flood basin
were usually in favor of the dams. I mean, that's
that's just the way almost every almost every case, and
a lot of that just has to do with human
self interest. You know. It stands the reason that if
you're going to lose your farm, you're going to be
against this. If you're not, it's probably what's probably gonna happen.
(40:27):
Is Land values are going to go up. You're in
most cases where these dams are built, prosperity to a
certain degree follows in these areas. And all the politicians
are pro damned because they're money. This is port barrel politics,
you know, I am, I am bringing money and lots
of millions of dollars back to my district, and you're
(40:50):
hurting just a small portion of your constituents one percent
of your constituents maybe right, and all the rest of
them are probably for it.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Yeah, And that's you.
Speaker 5 (41:00):
You even see in the like in the hearings and stuff,
the argument the greatest good for the greatest number.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
The great American land ethic, the utilitarian conservation of our
beloved Teddy Roosevelt, the greatest good for the greatest number.
It's brilliant unless you're the one that's having to pay
so that others can have your stuff. And honestly, when
you put it like that, it kind of sounds like communism.
Speaker 5 (41:28):
And so there's there's very little concern for that kind
of insignificant minority of people who are who are going
to lose their homes and going to lose their farms.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Is that just the cost of having a prosperous nation,
because that.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
Could be I mean, you know, you look at the
interstate highway system. You know, you have a similar thing
that happens there is especially in cities where there have
been studies that show that especially low income neighborhoods, often
we're just completely obliterated or part of it is, yeah, somebody,
(42:04):
somebody's got somebody's got to make a sacrifice if you're
gonna do any of this stuff. Now today, a lot
a lot of people with the more environmentalist ethic and
a more kind of naturalist ethic would say, well, did
we even need the dams in the first place? I mean,
is that that's that would be a question. But nobody
was asking that question back then, because it was all
(42:26):
about priming the pump, getting damn building jobs, and then
the economic benefits that were expected to accrue from those
damns being built.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
So and the hydro electric power was a big cell.
I mean, that was that was like today's modern energy
independence and and and maybe even renewable energy and all
this like this is the way of the future. I mean,
they were preaching hydro electricity.
Speaker 5 (42:54):
That's a big thing, Clay.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
That was.
Speaker 5 (42:57):
And it's it's hard for us to understand because today
hydro power is just a tiny little percentage of our
national power grid. But in those days, hydropower a major
selling point.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's kind of disheartening to see how little was gained
from all these dams, and to see the empty wishes
of the government on energy production it has echoes of
the renewable energy headlines of today. But don't take this
as me knocking renewable energy. I ain't again it, but
I don't trust any side short sighted energy propaganda. When
(43:33):
all you care about is the next four years, you're
bound to make bad decisions. We do well to learn
from the Chinese and think of building our nation in
one hundred year segments. Whoo, we are growing deep into
parra greas boys. I want to step out of this
(44:01):
conversation and get back on the river with Willard. We've
crossed the river and are headed towards where he was born.
He turns his mule around in the trail to face me.
He wants to tell me a story.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
My two older brothers had two cousins about their age,
he's teenagers. They'd meet right here every morning to walk
to school together. My two cousins lived on down the creek,
about half a mob. Well, they found them a yellow
jacket and thesh and they got to back in each
other out see which one could fight them the longest.
(44:40):
They stripped their clothes off, naked, and they cut them
a switch and they'd get in there and they'd fight
them yellow jackets and see who says, see who cas
standing the longest. They said that young our ball boy.
He was their first cousin. They said, that youngest our
ball b If you stay there long in any of them,
(45:01):
here's a younger, but he stay longer.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
He was.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Yeah, he's the toughest one. But now they had a
lot to do, didn't it. That was their entertainment Back then.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
We ride and cross the river one more time. I
see a stone structure built into the hillside.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yes, there's the old old fruit seller right here.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
And he describe to me what this looks like.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Well, the fruit cellar is what the that's what you
put your canned food in. It kept be cool. Our
cellar stays about the same temperature about year round, with
a door on it.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Kind of dug into the hillside, probably ten or twelve
feet and it's got a concrete front on it, but
kind of dry laid stone around, and that just looks
like a cave.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
They used it for a storm shellar too. When you
become a stone.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Where was your house from.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Right there, well, just about fifty yellards, no foundation joll
left of it. Yeah, Park tore it down.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Willard and his family have deep roots on this river
that's now public land. I want to get back to
doctor Blevin's and see how the community reacted in the
nineteen sixties to the prospect of damning this river.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
But part of it too is you know, if you
if you're talking about why there's no public protest and
I and I used the phrase public protest on purpose,
because again, there's plenty of protests, just just doesn't make
it to the public level. And a lot of that's
because most of the newspapers, at least through the nineteen
(46:48):
fifties were champions of damn building. This was seen as
a progressive thing that any booster of a of a
town or a state or anything with that, you've got
to be for damn building because of the the economic impact.
And if you're not, you're just stuck in the past.
You know, you're just you're you're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Be like fighting a fighting a tide.
Speaker 5 (47:12):
Yeah, we don't want the internet, you know today? You know, yeah,
get get it out of here. That was going on.
And then in Arkansas, all to a person, all the
politicians were damn advocates.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Well, that's what's so interesting about this story, Like we're
highlighting the Buffalo River. But this thing happened all over
the place. Oh really, I mean nationwide and so but
it's not. It's just not a story that you that
you hear that much about because it's it's not. It's
the unglamorous part of nation building. Stories of displacement aren't glamorous.
(47:50):
And in the forties, fifties, and sixties damns were hot,
but peaked after World War Two. The Army Corps of
Engineers was the most powerful of all the Euros and
had ambitions to damn every river in America. But now
we'll enter the phase we'll call the Battle for the Buffalo,
which at this point is primarily a fight to keep
(48:13):
it from being damned.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
The Battle for the Buffalo really starts in the early
nineteen sixties. You had an attempt in the late fifties
to get money appropriated for a couple of dams. Eisenhower
vetos the bill and sort of goes away until JFK
takes office in sixty one. And for the most part
in that era, Democrats were tended to be bigger proponents
(48:39):
of damn building and the activities the Army Corps Engineers
than Republicans and so that's when everything kind of breaks loose,
is in sixty two when this Gilbert Damn proposal comes online.
At the same time, in the background, you've got you
got bill Fulbright, Senator from Arkansas. He's already talking to
the National Park Service. They're already doing their surveys and
(49:03):
things in the Buffalo Valley, trying to decide if this
would be a valuable and worthy addition to the National
Park Service. So that's all going on in the background.
So you got in the late fifties, the National Park
Service starts this initiative they call Mission sixty six, and
nineteen sixty six is going to be the fiftieth anniversary
(49:26):
of the founding of the National Park Service. So what
they're doing, they're trying to for about a decade, they're
going to really really build things up and do a
lot of loud, splashy things to add to the National
Park Service. And part of the new stuff is lake
shores and seashores and even rivers, so you've got a
(49:47):
lot of water stuff. It's not just these massive Western parks.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
It's like a new way to think about the National park.
Speaker 5 (49:54):
Yeah, and it's not just it's not just Western stuff.
And a handful of things in Appalachia. So they first
do Cape Cod in the early sixties. That's the first
of these modern kind of watery you know, National park things,
and then they get into the river business. So that's
what's happening. You've got this change of directions a little
(50:16):
bit for the National Park Service in the late fifties
and early sixties.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Interestingly, the first person to plant the seed for the
Buffalo region as national park worthy was a writer named
Glenn Green in nineteen forty six who published a story
about the region. But it wouldn't be until nineteen sixty
one when the first money seven thousand dollars was appropriated
for the National Park Service to do a survey of
(50:41):
the river. The first drawings of this potential park included
over four hundred thousand acres, but it would later be
whittled down to about ninety five thousand. So now there
are two stakeholders with their site set on the river,
the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a dam, and
the National Park Service who wanted a park.
Speaker 5 (51:02):
So in sixty two, the Army Corps Engineers comes to
Marshall and they have a public hearing and it turns
into basically a pro damn public hearing. As a lot
of those early Army Corps of Engineers hearings, did you know,
just the boosters showed up. And so it's in sixty
two when you have the creation of a local booster group.
(51:22):
It's called the Buffalo River Improvement Association the BRIA, and
they're basically just the damn boosters, is what they know.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
They're not the people, primarily, not the people who are
living down there.
Speaker 5 (51:33):
They are not landowners. Probably not a one of them
in the BRIA is a landowner. It's led by a
local newspaper editor. And in reaction to that, you get
the creation of the Ozark Society with Neil Compton, who's
a medical doctor from Bentonville in far northwestern.
Speaker 2 (51:50):
Probably fifty miles from the headwaters of the Buffalo.
Speaker 5 (51:53):
And what the Ozark Society represents their canoeist and you know,
just people recreation people pe who were interested in the Buffalo.
And Compton was a guy who for years had been
canoeing the Buffalo. So that's the Ozark Society. And then
around the same time you get the Buffalo River Landowners Association,
So you get a third organization in the mix. And
(52:15):
these are the actual landowners. These are the people who
own the land up and down the Buffalo River who
are initially against the dam, and then ultimately they will
be against the National Park Service idea as well when
they realized well, either way we're you know, we're in
danger of losing their lanes.
Speaker 2 (52:36):
So these to lay out the players in the field,
the b ri I these people that were pro damn
did known land on the river. Then the Ozark Society
came in and wanted to They were anti dam, right,
but their interest in the river was recreation. And then
the Buffalo River Landowners Association, which would have been people
(52:58):
that ultimately wanted no of it, right.
Speaker 5 (53:00):
Yeah, yeah, if they had had a motto, it would
have been leave us alone. I guess.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (53:05):
Really, for the most part, it becomes a two person
five because the Buffalo River Landowners Association they're way back there.
You know, if this is a race, they're almost out
of side, and.
Speaker 2 (53:17):
They don't have a big constituens. It's like picking teams
for a game and you've got ten options where the
other team has one hundred thousand options. I mean, right,
there's only so many landowners. There's only so many people
that on the county records have a deed that touches
that river. Right.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Yeah, Like I think I mentioned in that story. At
one of the hearings they do in Marshall, the speaker
for the Buffalo River Landowners Association is the scheduled at
very last, at the very end of the hearing. By
that time, most of the reporters had left, you know,
they were just. They didn't have any political cloud, any
political pull, and everybody knew it. The corp of Engineers
(53:56):
knew it, The Ozark Society knew it, you know it
just and they were mostly most of the landowners were
ignored throughout that process.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
This idea of the landowners being ignored is really the
whole point of this story, and if nothing else, our
efforts here are a hat tip to them. But the
truth is, I'm not sure where I would have landed
if I'd been around in this time. Historical revision is
really easy and deceptive and often pains a false sense
(54:27):
of righteousness in us. The truth is that people were
all over the board. There were some landowners that had
just moved into the region, had no real roots here,
and they weren't bothered by a damn or a park.
Some folks were real estate people and they loved the
idea of a dam It was a relatively small group
of people who didn't want either, and in a democracy,
(54:51):
small numbers of people get squashed, period.
Speaker 5 (55:02):
But that's you know that all starts in about sixty
two is when the sides are drawn up and you
really get the beginnings this battle for the Buffalo. And
that's when you start getting hard feelings and between neighbors
and and there's a fight that breaks out at a
high school basketball game and some guys are arrested, and
so you get It's also right around the same time
(55:24):
that Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, William Douglas
comes and floats the buffalo in a very public way.
Speaker 2 (55:31):
Supreme Court Justice Douglas was anti damn, but in nineteen
sixty five, the table's turn and the pro damn people
gain some major steam, and it looks like the river's
going to be damned until an unlikely hero arises.
Speaker 5 (55:48):
And so it's looking like sixty five might be the
year when they finally get this passed. And then in
late sixty five, the Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faulbus, who
is much known in a Erican history for other you know,
more unfortunate circumstances. He steps in and in effect saves
(56:09):
the Buffalo from being damned.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
If you don't know the name Orville Fabas, he became
the face of racism and segregation in nineteen fifty seven when,
as governor of Arkansas, he ordered the National Guard to
block nine African American students from entering Little Rock High School.
These students became known as the Little Rock Nine and
(56:32):
are rightfully celebrated today as heroes. However, when it comes
to his natural resource policies, I think Fabas did as
a solid He wrote a lengthy and eloquent letter about
the natural beauty of the Buffalo River and how it
was unacceptable for it to be damned, and that he
supported a national park.
Speaker 5 (56:53):
You know, Fabas's letter really puts the Army Corps of
Engineers back on their heels. And then John Paul Hammerschmidt
takes office in sixty seven, and one of the first
things that this new representative for Northwest Arkansas does is
he proposes a Buffalo River National Park bill. And it
(57:13):
takes five years for it to go through the political
process and eventually be signed by Richard Nixon.
Speaker 2 (57:20):
It does March first, nineteen seventy two. Yeah, remember that
we said seventy two was a year of celebration and infamy.
It's all the matter of perspective, which will really explore
deeply on the next episode when we talk about a
lady named ev or Granny Henderson. That's some foreshadowing for you.
Speaker 5 (57:44):
It does eventually get passed. I guess from a landowner's perspective,
this all happens. Really, it just flips, and you know,
you go from fearing that your land is going to
be drowned and you're sort of elated, I guess when
you defeat that threat and then you turn around and here's,
you know, here's this National park.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
It was. It's kind of portrayed as if it was
either one or the other, or like the National Park
is what saved it from being damned? Was that ever
really true?
Speaker 5 (58:17):
You could certainly be justified in portraying the battle that way.
And here's why. When the Army Corps of Engineers backed
off a project, they usually didn't back off of it permanently.
A permanent backoff would have to They would have.
Speaker 2 (58:31):
To actually wait till a new governor came in, or
the sentiment was different politically.
Speaker 5 (58:36):
They could do that. What to to permanently get something,
To get a Damn project off the books, it would
have to be de authorized by Congress, and that rarely
ever happened. What they would usually do is they would
just just sort of put it on a back burner
and say this is not a priority.
Speaker 2 (58:52):
And we know that they'll wait decades. Yeah, we know
that from from even this It's not it's not. If
it goes away for a year, that means nothing. Your
grandchildren might have that light in their backyard.
Speaker 5 (59:05):
Yeah. And and if you follow a lot of the
as I've done a lot of the newspaper coverage of
these various Damn projects through time, from the from the
forties into the seventies, you can go a dozen years
without a Damn being mentioned in the press, and then
all of a sudden, here we are, you know, ten
(59:25):
or twelve years later, here's a new hearing on a
Damn that I'd completely forgotten about. As I think it
in volume three, I compared it the Army Corps Damn
plans to like a monster out of a horror film.
You know, you think it's gone, but it's not really,
you know, it's it's it's just gonna it's gonna pop
back up when you don't expect it to. And so
(59:47):
that was the justification for the Ozark Society and yeah
and the people like that was we can't trust the
Army Corps engineers. They're not going to go away. So
the only the only safe way to keep this river
free flowing is to turn it into a national park.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
In the next episode we'll learn if that was actually true,
and going back to our odd coincidence at the start.
In March of nineteen seventy two, Merle Haggard also released
his song Grandma Harp, which told about how her way
of life had gone. The region was now under control
of the National Park Service, which now had money appropriated
(01:00:28):
to buy land from the private citizens who owned the
ninety thousand acres that would become the park.
Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
We later sold the restaurant signing in Morning, and everybody
knew she'd done her part.
Speaker 5 (01:00:44):
Don't get sucked here, no hidden let.
Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Just a song about the lives Grandma heart, just to
think about the times as she lived through.
Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
I want to get back to the river with Willard.
Do you want to walk up to the old home place.
Speaker 3 (01:01:07):
Yeah, those smoke caps up. We can ride it forady.
We get through here if you want to.
Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Oh okay, Yeah, we're at the fruit cellar and we
ride up the hill to the old home place.
Speaker 5 (01:01:21):
So this year was where is.
Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
Boring those smoke caps? The old house place was right
back over here, just behind us.
Speaker 5 (01:01:29):
What did the house look like?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
It was a just a three room house. H had
out of one bedroom in the kitchen and the dining room.
Speaker 5 (01:01:39):
Was it made of oak?
Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
Is made of oak? Yeah? Board? Yeall?
Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Did it Did it have a rock foundation that went
to the ground or did it set up like set
up on rocks? No?
Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
He had had a rock foundation, then wood forward and
wood floor was right?
Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
And you were you were delivered by your grandmother, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
My grandmother Hamson. Actually you were born right here, right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
What's it like coming back in here? You ride this
stretch of river a couple times a week.
Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Heah, I come in here and reminiation show people around sometime.
You know, some of the free answers talk to them, y'all.
Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Yeah, I guess in some ways it's better that it's
like this than if it were under a lake. Somewhere.
Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
I've enjoyed it all my life, so yeah, I've been blessed.
Yeah sure, hey, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
This is the first episode on the formation of the
Buffalo National River, but this story is really about something
much bigger. I'm sure many of you have family stories
of people being forced from their land because of lakes, parks,
or highways. The irony we wrestle with today is how
(01:02:44):
seemingly happy many of us are that it happened to
someone else, or at least it didn't happen in our generation.
On the next episode, we'll go back in time and
hear an original interview with the Buffalo Rivers first lange,
who was featured in National Geographic in nineteen seventy four,
Eva Barnes Henderson, or Granny Henderson as we know her,
(01:03:08):
and will continue to discuss one of America's most valued
public land doctrines, the greatest good for the greatest number.
And let me tell you it's gonna get really personal.
I'd like to take a minute and thank my friends
Justin House and Kaylin Belions, both lifelong residents of Newton
(01:03:29):
County who had lots of family on the river. Both
helped me immensely in setting up these interviews and inspiring
me with their family stories. I can't thank you enough
for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast.
Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and
(01:03:49):
I look forward to talking with all those hillbillies on
the Render next week
There are people all up and down the Buffalo River
who feel like that they have lost something, that something
has been taken from them that they are never going
to be able to get back. This is never going
to be restored.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
In this series, we'll be examining the great American doctrine
utilitarian conservation, the greatest good for the greatest number, through
the lens of the formation of the Buffalo National River
in the Ozarks of Arkansas, touted as our nation's first
national river and celebrated without question, but will be looking
(00:41):
at a different side of the story, one rarely told
or understood, as we focus on the families who got
the short end of the stick on this utilitarian doctrine
and had to give up their lands, being displaced by
the strong arm of the government. In this episode, we'll
talk about human self interest. Take a mule ride with
(01:04):
Willard Vlynes, meet grassroots historian Misty Langdon, and interview our
longtime Bear Grease favorite historian and author and hillbilly doctor
Brooks Blevins about how the heck all this happened. The
water is ice cold and the story complex and windy.
(01:25):
Hang with us for a while, because I really doubt
that you're gonna want to miss this one. Where was
your house from right here?
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Well? Let it for just about fifty yeards no foundation,
John left? Is it?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Park till it down.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:13):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore. I'm in the saddle atop my
trusty eight year old paint mule, Izzy, and we're following
behind another, perhaps even flashier sorrel a red paint mule.
(02:39):
Willard's mule, Rosy, is about fifteen hands tall. She's good sized.
I feel like I'm following a glowing led light fifty
feet below the surface of a forested sea of hickory,
sweet gum, and walnut. We're completely under the shade until
the mule's hoofs the water as we entered the bright
(03:02):
sunlight crossing the river. Now, did y'all have y'all had
parts of the farm on both sides of the river. Right,
How did you how did you manage crossing it? Just
you just didn't.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
If it was real high, couldn't. If it was real high,
it couldn't.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Get across the river.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, we said.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Willard the lines is seventy eight years old, born February twentieth,
nineteen forty six. He and eight siblings were born down
on this river, and two other siblings were born what
he calls up on the mountain, all in Newton County, Arkansas.
We're heading towards his old home place, but first we've
(03:44):
got another home place to stop at.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Grandma's maiden name was shown the line. It's nine a
year to tell about in a few short lines, down
in Newton County, down in Arkansham. And in nineteen one
she married Grandpa. That's where.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Grandma's maiden name was Zone Blimes. There's ninety years to
tell about in a few short lines. Barn in Newton County,
down in Narkansas. Then in nineteen one she married Grandpa.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
We lead her soul resting son in the morning.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
And that greadbody new she tunner barn where that barn.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Don't get that barn is in pretty good shape.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, we always knowed this old Harper place. Merle Haggard's
grandma lived here. Her maiden name was Zone Vliines. Huh
she married a heart.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Some of y'all skin.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah. She had been my probably great great ants in
the real Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You know he's got a criminal background.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Right, Well, I have too, in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Doing life with U Bro. That was Merle Haggard's song
Grandma Harp. Her maiden name was Vlyines, just like Willard's.
She was born in eighteen seventy six and died in
nineteen sixty nine at the age of ninety three in
Newton County. Haggard released this song in nineteen seventy two,
(05:29):
three years after her death, and it talks about her
way of life dying, Which is an odd coincidence because
that year, nineteen seventy two would be significant for this
river and the people who lived near it. For most,
it would be a year of the celebration of a
conservation success. But for the people who had land that
(05:52):
actually touched this river, for many of them, it's a
year of infamy. Here's Willard telling us about his so
called criminal record. Remember we're on mules standing in front
of an old barn.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Matter of fact, I paid my first fine right here
to the park rangers. Is that right? Right?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
What happened?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
There's about ten of us come in down here and camped. Now,
the eight of them was preachers. Well, the next morning
the park rangers come up the creek. There's some horseback
riders down here. Where's all riding mules. There's some horseback riders.
They made fun of her mules. They went back up
still creek and told the park ranger we's camped here.
(06:40):
And the next morning they met us down here, and
you weren't a camp here, that's what he said. We
slept in the old barn. He said, we wasn't supposed to.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
How that's it with you?
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well, not very good.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
The real question is why was he making fun of
your mules?
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I don't know. They just made light of her mules.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh man, that gets under my skin quick.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
But I told that park ranger, I said, I want
you to just look here. I said, when my folks
lived here, I said, this was all clared land. I
said a rabbit couldn't get through here. Now, man, I said,
I'll take the blame. I said, these are other people
didn't know. I asked him. I said, well, what's to
find thee and he said, be twenty five dollars. He
(07:20):
looked in his book and he said no, said he'll
be fifty dollars. I said, you look in that book
and find something for twenty five dollars, and he did.
He charged me twenty five. That's honest. True. Of course
he left. They took up a donation. I've come out
of ahead and all the preachers pitched it.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I don't want to make light of breaking the law,
but this story captures something that's eluded ninety nine percent
of people, including me, who've enjoyed this area, which is
now public land. Many of the families who had to
sell their land to the government against their will are
wiel sore about the whole deal, though it took place
(08:03):
over fifty years ago. You see today Grandma Harp's land
sits in the upper portion of a ninety five thousand,
seven hundred and thirty acre block of land designated as
the Buffalo National River in nineteen seventy two. Advertised as
America's first national River, the government acquired over ninety thousand
(08:24):
acres of private land from over two thousand property owners,
some of whose families had been in the region since
this place was homesteaded. At one time, you could have
driven a car in here, but since nineteen seventy two
the nearest road is well over an hour's ride on
a mule. The fields once cleared by Willard's kinfolks have
(08:46):
grown up into secondary succession brambles en route in the
next seventy five years to return to the Ozarks Climax
forest of oak and hickory. When you ride down the
river with Willard and you hear the stories of his child,
childhood and what used to be his community, it's kind
of spooky. It might be what it's like to visit
(09:06):
Chernobyl in Ukraine. It's like a civilization erased off the map,
engulfed by the subtle violence of natural reclamation cycles, collapsing
barns and smoke houses, dilapidated homes in various stages of decay,
hayfields turned into cedar groves decay in nineteen forties, model
(09:26):
forward trucks laying around, and footprints of rock foundations of
buildings are scattered all down the river. But it didn't
happen because of a nuclear disaster. Or industry moving. It
happened because the place was so stinking beautiful that the
government decided to turn it into a national park. And
(09:49):
trust me, you don't want to be in the government
sites when they want your land. They've proven that from
the perspective of a human, nature's takeover of this place
seems sluggish and slow, but by how the earth measures,
it's as hot, tempered, and swift as a tornado. The
(10:11):
soil is an insatiable savage, engulfing dead organic matter. Above
it houses barns and flesh, while shooting rockets of living
cells to the sky. Jealous for sunlight. Anything in its
path be dead gummed. Its strategy is to outlast anything
in everything. The earth knows that in time it will
(10:34):
beat you, and in some ways, so does the government.
This story is about the modern American people, not just here,
who sacrifice their homelands for quote, the greater good of society,
slain by our utilitarian land use doctrine the greatest good
(10:55):
for the greatest number, which we including I hold so dear.
But if you've never had your land taken and your
family uprooted, then it's hard to understand our national parks
are celebrated in our culture, and we're proud that our
nation had the idea to lead the world in preserving
such places of natural beauty. But the truth is that
(11:16):
the stories of land acquisition for the Great Smoky Mountain
National Park, the Shenandoah Valley National Park, and many many
others were downright brutal. The story of the Buffalo is
a lesser known story. Also, much like the hundreds of
thousands of acres of land taken for recreational lakes in
(11:36):
this country between the nineteen thirties and seventies, these are
not glamorous stories celebrated in our culture. But there was
a time when this country was hungry for land and
somebody had to fork it up. Ozark historian doctor Brooks
Blevins wrote that the land acquisition process of the National
Park Service when inquiring land for the Buffalo was at
(12:00):
best confusing and at worst deceptive. Before we get into
the details of how this river came to be America's
first national river, I want to talk with Misty Langdon,
a Newton County native whose mother was of Alliones related
to Willard. But Misty's a grassroots community leader who created
(12:22):
the Remnants project, designed to document the history of Newton County.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
People ask me all the time why I do this,
because it is so much work. And Richard, I know,
he pulls his hair out all the time at me
because I'm I'll go down a rabbit hole and I
might not come up for a day or so, and
and people will call in. He says, she's looking for
dead people. Just you know, let her be. But there
are people all up and down the Buffalo River who
(12:52):
feel like that they have lost something, that something has
been taken from them that they are never going to
be able to get back. It's never to be restored.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
It's really interesting and kind of makes my head spin
backwards to hear someone talk about the Buffalo River this way,
because this is a place I've only heard celebrated. But
it turns out there's a lot of stories I didn't know.
I first floated this river in nineteen ninety eight, and
after I got married in two thousand, my wife and
(13:23):
I spent a lot of time here. We even named
our middle daughter River. I asked Misty, from the community's perspective,
how all this went from private farmland back in the
seventies into a national park.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
I mean, you hear rumors that something's, you know, a foot,
but to actually get a notice of condemnation of your
property and have no formal letter or anything before that,
I think it was the shock and awe factor of
how it was.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
And this would have been in the late sixties, early
seventies before there was i mean, any kind of internet
or the communication was just way different back then. And
so you're saying some of these people on the river
were just totally caught off. They are totally because it
had been embroiled in like at least twenty years of
murmurs of this is going to be damned, This is
(14:19):
not going to be damned, This is going to be
a wild and scenic river. This is going to be
and it probably just kind of after a decade or
so of that, it was just kind of like, what
is going to happen? Is it ever going to happen?
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Well, it kind of goes back to that thing talking
about isolated communities too, because in Fayetteville, the way that
their town and everything was structured, they had all the amenities.
By the sixties, the late sixties and early seventies, there
were people in Boxley that didn't have phones, and some
probably still didn't have along the river. I know still
didn't have you know, electricity, They were running off generators.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Fatdeville is the largest town in the region, about fifty
miles from the buffer. Low Boxley is a small community
at the head of the river. Interestingly, people from the
Fayedville area would play a big role in having the
river nationalized. Newton County was truly the backwoods of Arkansas.
And I can say this because I is one that
(15:18):
most of the people that lived here were white folks
of low financial means and what the world would call
hillbilly's people rich in land, love of country, family and hardship,
not money, education or political power. Later we'll see where
I believe the socio economic status would come into play.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So that isolation was a real, a real hardship for them,
and that was something I think tactically that the locals
could not get over, was the lack of organization. I
know in one of the oral histories that I had
listened to, the interviewer asks the lady, did you ever
sign petitions? Did you ever go to meetings? And the
(16:05):
answer was they had signed a petition once the word
had started to spread, but they never had meetings. You know,
those are the type of things that we look at
as a culture as being bad. You know, that's something
that against your government. You don't have secret meetings. And
I mean it's like, these are people who were complete patriots.
(16:26):
They had fought in, you know, World War Two, they
had a Korea, World War One, and to think about
setting up a meeting to talk about your government, I
mean that was And especially you think about what went
through during the fifties about communism and how everybody was
so nervous about being, you know, branded as a communist.
(16:50):
I think that was just a little bit too far
outside their realm of comfort.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
They weren't really comfortable using the tools of the time
period RCT that would have been able to combat it.
It's not like these people would have been like, oh, well,
here's what we do to stop a major government action, right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Like a town hall or a you know or whatever.
They just did not utilize that because and I'm putting
words in their mouths because I don't know, but in
my opinion, they didn't utilize it because that was just
a step too far against their against their own government.
And I think that by the time, because I spoke
with one guy down in Boxley and he's about my parents' age.
(17:30):
And I said, or how in the world did nobody
get killed over this? Because I know how hot tempered
I am. I'm a breed loving of the lines. That
is a terrible combination. And I can't imagine in the
time period that they were living, I don't know how
it skirted around and somebody didn't get killed.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Let's stop for just a second here. It's interesting that
this conversation starts from the angle that this government action
and to quote preserve the Buffalo is negative And if
you're from this part of the country, you'd be hard
pressed to hear anybody say, narry a negative word about
this place. This Buffalo National River is the crown jewel
(18:13):
of our state. But I'm learning that perspective can turn
the whole narrative one hundred and eighty degrees, So being
your doctrine into the hypocritical ditch, And that's what makes
this story so interesting. We love public lands and national parks,
but do we like how they make the sausage in
the back room? Are you a fan of displacement so
(18:35):
that our society will have a place to recreate? That's
a harsh question, but it's one we asked our society
and they said yes to. It's what we asked the
American people before displacing the families in the Shenandoah in
Great Smoking Mountains National Park. And it's the question we
asked America before the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty.
(18:56):
It's just interesting what as a society we're able to
justify now. The Indian Removal Act was pure wickedness. Even
David Crockett thought so. But the questions about national parks
are much more nuanced. Landowners were paid, and some got
market value for their land, and in many cases simply
moved right down the road out of the park. But nonetheless,
(19:20):
the question of heavy handed government power and property owner
rights is a big one. But let's get back to
the river. Willard Vilnes was born down here. We've passed
Merle Haggard's grandma's place and we're riding down the rivers
(19:42):
edged the land Willard's father used to own and farm.
He's taking me to another barn. So tell me about
this barn.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Well, my dad and two brothers colder in me and
mister Daniels, they built his barn and they used a
handshaw to cut the rash prison. He didn't have no
electric tool to talk, but he'd be a load that
was born with handhol.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
What year you think of this built?
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Uh? We moved. We moved out of here in fifty six,
probably probably then fifty.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I say you remember as little kid this barn?
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah I remember? Yeah, I member, Well, yeah, we would
we cut hay off down in there and Dad would
he would rake it and shock it and put it
on the wagon. I was just about I don't know,
ship seven year old shummers in there. But he let
me drive the mules while they loaded the wagon.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
What's it? What's it like coming to barn like this
that your dad built, that's now just like engulfed in
forest and all right, it's kind of it's kind of
a unique situation.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Will Yeah, here I visited. I probably want your class
here and KYI remind this a little bit. Yeah, I'm
brought the kids over here and took pictures with them
over here.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
And now where was your house from here?
Speaker 3 (21:08):
HiT's old trufher mitch cruching.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, we was able to go to your old home place.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Oh yeah, with crousty river.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yell, is there anything still there, no shler.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Small custure there. Yeah, no foundation jo left of it. Yeah,
park tore it down.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
The park tore down his old house. The Vilnes left
in nineteen fifty six, and I assumed by seventy two
the old house was in disrepair and not deemed historically significant.
Some of the buildings of this civilization were left, while
others destroyed. How the heck did all this come about?
(21:44):
We're heading to Willard's home place where he was born,
delivered by his grandmother. We're going to have to cross
what the Ozarkians call the Buffalo kind of leaving out
the US Sound in Buffalo, it's a gravel bedstream with
headwaters bird in the highest elevations of the Ozark Mountains
in northwest Arkansas, the Boston Range, which reaches about twenty
(22:08):
five hundred feet. The Eurogeny of the Ozarks is the
work of incomprehensible time and erosion on an uplifted plateau
that was once the bed of a shallow ocean. Fossils
of fish and crustaceans are common here. Geologists and psychologists
agree that humans are incapable of understanding deep geologic time
(22:30):
beyond a shallow intellectual regurgitation of huge, meaningless numbers. It's
kind of like trying to explain to a grasshopper the
life span of a wide oak. The beasts of the
Earth only understand time and segments congruit to their lifespans.
Geologists believe the Ozarks are older than the Appalachians, with
origins reaching back one point six billion years, but even
(22:55):
to the world's top geologists, things are hazy back that far.
The Ozark Highlands or Mountains are in the central United States,
encompassing southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and a small portion in
eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and it roughly encompasses fifty thousand
square miles. There are no natural lakes in the Ozarks.
(23:19):
In the rugged regions, we call them mountains, and I'd
challenge any outsider to come here, hike em afoot and
tell me they aren't mountains. But if you want to
talk about the epicenter of beauty and ruggedness the Ozarks,
it's hard to deny that the Buffalo River country is
its lifeblood. Starting in Newton County, the meandering River flows
(23:42):
through Cercy and Marion Counties until it enters the White
River in Baxter County one hundred and fifty three miles
from its head but as the crow flies, from its
headwaters to its termination is only sixty miles. The river
is known for its pristine aqua blue green water towering limestone, sandstone,
(24:03):
and dolomite bluffs some four hundred feet above the water's surface.
It's known for its caves and its incredible wet weather waterfalls.
A couple hundred yards off the river, uphimned in Hollow
is America's largest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies,
which plunges two hundred and nine feet to the valley floor. However,
(24:26):
by the calculations of men when they judge wildness based
upon lack of human footprint, this river is one of
America's few remaining free flowing, undamned rivers. And this is
truly something worth celebrating. They're over ninety thousand dams in America,
(24:47):
and they dang there, damned the buffalo put in all
these houses, barns and bluffs underwater. Doctor Brooks Blevins is
(25:17):
a professor at Missouri State University and a prolific author
about the Ozarks. In twenty twenty two, he published a
book called up south in the Ozarks. In it, he
has an essay called against the Current. I want to
get into the deeper history of how the Buffalo was
saved from being damned and how it became a national river.
(25:39):
Here's myself and doctor Brooks Blevins well in your interest,
particularly in the Buffalo. In the essay that you wrote
in your book. It's interesting. When I first contacted you,
I believe you said you felt like you were the
only historian that had written about this from the perspective
(26:01):
of the people that had been displaced, and that kind
of links back to your story about your grandparents, and
that was a story the world was not interested in
hearing of these oftentimes not that well to do, impoverish
people living in these rural places getting displaced. Like that's
(26:23):
not the story that America wanted to tell, and America
wanted to hear.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
Yeah, that was not a story that was told and
wouldn't be for you know, another generation. And there was
no Gorilla press at that time. It was something that
mostly was just just forgotten and remained forgotten. And I think,
as far as I know, I am the only person
(26:48):
on the for the Buffalo River story. I'm the only
person who's ever approached it. I should say I'm the
only person who's ever published anything that approaches it from
the kind of the perspective of the landowners. But there's
as far as the published record what the public, you know,
has access to, there's very little from the perspective of
(27:11):
the people who lost their land, the people who really
made the sacrifice that the rest of us now enjoy
the fruits of We.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Mentioned a story about doctor Blevin's grandparents. It's a family
story that led him to be interested in the displaced
landowners on the river. Though they didn't live on the Buffalo,
but rather in the White River watershed just to the northwest.
I want to hear what happened to them.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
My great great grandparents lived on Pigeon Creek, which is
a tributary of the North Fork of the White River,
and my great great grandpa was born there just a
year or two before the Civil War, and so they
were still there in the early nineteen forties when the
Army Corps of Engineers started building the Damn Norfolk Dam.
(28:02):
But they were one of the families who had to
sell their land to the government and they were moved.
I don't know a few miles south of Mountain Home
and kind of a rocky hillside down there somewhere. And
I found out not too many years ago what happened.
(28:22):
I was able to contact one of my grandpa's own cousins,
as we say in the Ozarks, first cousins, and she
told me the story of when the authorities, whoever the
authorities were, I don't know if it was the sheriff's officer,
but when they came out, you know, they'd been given
the final warning that they had to vacate their farm.
(28:43):
This was before they shut the floodgates and you know,
flooded the valleys and all that kind of stuff. And
she said her grandparents, my great great grandparents, refused to leave.
They were in their eighties and they had lived there,
you know, practically all the or adult lives, so they,
you know, they didn't didn't want to go, like a
(29:05):
lot of other landowners there, and a lot of other
farmers there. She said that they refused to leave and
the authorities came out and physically carried them off the premises. No,
I don't know, you know, in my mind, I see
two old timers planking or something. You know, there's stiff
as a board that been carried out. But they may
have carried them off in chairs or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
But that received no statewide press, no national press.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
No, no, it didn't. The local weekly newspaper, the Baxter Bulletin,
was operated by an editor named Tom Shiris, and Shyris
was one of the premier damn promoters in the state
of Arkansas.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
And it's not a story he would no, No, this is.
Speaker 5 (29:49):
Not It's not a story that was likely to show
up in the Baxter Bulletin.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
It's interesting the government land condemnation, whether for a lake
her national park, rarely made big headlines back in the day.
There's a famous photo of a pregnant woman named Lessie
Jenkins being carried out of her home in a rocking
chair in nineteen thirty seven when her family, including her
(30:15):
seven children, were evicted from their home by the National
Park Service to make Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. And
books have been written about the process of land acquisition
for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and
North Carolina, and all the stories are eerily similar. I
(30:36):
now want to get to the deep history with doctor
Blevins about the buffalo and surprisingly we're gonna have to
go back to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
twenty seven. But if you're a Bear Grease listener, you
remember our Mississippi River series which started at episode one
twenty six, and if you listen, you'll have a head start.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
To really dig into the into the heart of this matter,
you have to go back even before the Great Depression,
at least to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen
twenty seven. That was the event that really altered the
trajectory of what the Army Corps of Engineers was expected
(31:19):
to do. Before that, the Army Corps of Engineers was
an organization that mainly built levees and dikes along big rivers,
But the Army Corps Engineers was not a dam building agency.
And because of the tremendous destruction the economic impact of
that flood in nineteen twenty seven, all of a sudden,
(31:43):
politicians had in the Mississippi Valley had tremendous pressure put
on them to do something to prevent another devastating flood
like this. Because you've got to remember, in the Mississippi Valley,
the flood of nineteen twenty seven was basically what led
us into the Great Depression, and then you get into
(32:03):
the heart of the Great Depression, and then FDR takes
office in nineteen thirty three, and you have a completely
new way of looking at the way the government handles
crises in a way that we've never done before, where
they just try to spend your way out of it.
You spend money, you put it in the hands of
(32:25):
people who don't have it, and you expect them to
turn around and spend it and try to prime the
pump of the economy that way. And so it's kind
of that one two punch of the nineteen twenty seven
flood and the Great Depression leading into the New Deal
that all of a sudden puts dams front and center
(32:45):
on the radar for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Dams came on the radar of America. They were all
the rage. As we follow this story chronologically, it's also
relevant to note that in nineteen thirty six there was
a four thousand acre Buffalo River State Park formed, which
was the first indication that this place was a special
place for recreation. But let's get back to talking about
(33:11):
the long periods of time that all this stuff took.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
So these flood control acts they plant the seed for
these dams. Now, just because a dam is mentioned in
one of these flood control acts doesn't mean it's going
to get built. What they do is they authorize these dams.
Then the Army Corps of Engineers has to go out
finalize its plans. They have to do public hearings to
gauge responses from the public, and then if they decide
(33:41):
that the benefit cost analysis is favorable, then they go
back to Congress and they present their case and they say,
you know, can we have the money to build this?
And so that's why it's such a long process. That's
why you know, these Buffalo dams are first mentioned as
early as Night teen thirty eight, but the battle for
(34:02):
the Buffalo doesn't even heat up really till the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
So what really they talked about a dam on the
Buffalo River in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 5 (34:10):
Yeah, there's an extensive White River dam plan, a reservoir
plan that's first presented in thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
It's interesting to look back the big swings in government
ideology around what the job of the government actually is
and as author and bear grease guest John Barry said
in his book Rising Tied, the nineteen twenty seven flood
truly changed America, and oddly we'll see how it affected
the Buffalo River. The Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty
(34:43):
eight was an extensive plan to build dams that included
stuff on all the tributaries of the Mighty Mississippi to
hold back water during major floods. And that's right. Old
Willard Vilnes Buffalo River in Arkansas was on there so
decades before the National River was ever imagined. They were
(35:05):
wanting to damn this spectacular river valley. It seems like
that could have an effect on the way people handled it.
With this like slow burn of kind of government bureaucracy
and rumors. I mean, that's like a generation and a
half of oh rumors, and finally people are just I
mean it kind of just gets in their mind that well,
(35:28):
this is going to be damned or it feels like
that could play a role as opposed to just someone
showing up and knocking on your door and being like
we're damning the river. It's like, well, we've been hearing
about this for thirty years and it's never happened.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Yeah, that was you know there there's definitely a psychological
angle to that, because I've studied a lot of the
newspaper coverage and letters and things like that, not just
from the Buffalo, but from other damn projects, and some
of them that never got done, but that they dragged
on for years and years, I mean for a generation
(36:03):
or more. Yeah, And every every three or four years,
here comes the Army Corps Engineers with another hearing. And
over time, one thing that can happen is, like you say,
people might just become complacent and think, well, it's it's
this is never gonna happen. They're never going to build anything.
Or they might just decide, well, there's nothing we can do.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah, you know that seems like yeah, or in some.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Cases people just got madder and madder and madder, and
and so you you know, you kind of this crescendo
of anger at the Army Corps Engineers builds up.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
It seems like governments in the Earth have something in common.
Neither are hemmed into short time spans that humans are
comfortable operating in. They'll wait you out. Rumors of long
term land use plans affect how people plan their lives.
I want to read something from doctor Neil Compton's nineteen
(37:01):
ninety two book Battle for the Buffalo, because it gives
a picture of the times. Compton writes, the rough, mountainous
country of much of the Ozarks in the Boston Mountains
has failed to sustain the initial population of white settlers.
The numbers of white pioneers had peaked about nineteen hundred,
(37:21):
after which an exodus began. Between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty.
Arkansas lost two hundred and fifty thousand people in one
congressman as a result. But that was not necessarily a calamity. Cutover,
eroded and impoverished uplands were going back to nature. Opportunity
for productive, long term civil culture and wildlife restoration existed.
(37:46):
End of quote. The emigration that happened is beyond dispute. However,
I get the sense this became part of the justification
of making this land into a park, as in, people
don't want to live here. People were leaving rural America
to go to the cities for work. Rural communities needed help,
(38:08):
and they said, let's build some lakes, which wasn't a
bad idea and may have even been a good one,
but some were destined for the raw end of this deal.
The times were tough, but they didn't push everybody out,
and there was a thriving community along the Buffalo River
that never left. Nobody told them that times were hard,
(38:29):
and doctor Neil Compton would be the major player in
nationalizing the river. He's even known as the park's father.
I'd never heard him referred to as anything but a
conservation hero until I started talking to folks whose families
had to sell because of the park. There'll be more
about this on the next episode, but there were multiple
(38:51):
big damn projects in northern Arkansas and all across the country.
They were touted for producing the electricity, increasing tourism, and
increasing real estate value, in which in most cases they delivered,
and because of it, there was surprisingly little coordinated public
protest until they started talking about the Buffalo.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
There's not a lot of There's not a lot of
public protest against any of these dams that get built
in the White River basin until you know, until you
get to like Buffalo and Water Valley.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Then why wasn't there more public protests? Because it's I
read that the Buffalo was one of the corp of
engineers even in d C was like, what the people
are upset about this dam. They hadn't received a lot
of opposition.
Speaker 5 (39:40):
Yeah, that is something that I've that I've spent a
long time trying to figure out the sociology and the
psychology of the timing of public protests. There were always
protests from landowners who didn't want to go. But one
of the things that that may be surprised in certainly
upset these landowners was that they found that most of
(40:03):
their neighbors, who didn't have land in the flood basin
were usually in favor of the dams. I mean, that's
that's just the way almost every almost every case, and
a lot of that just has to do with human
self interest. You know. It stands the reason that if
you're going to lose your farm, you're going to be
against this. If you're not, it's probably what's probably gonna happen.
(40:27):
Is Land values are going to go up. You're in
most cases where these dams are built, prosperity to a
certain degree follows in these areas. And all the politicians
are pro damned because they're money. This is port barrel politics,
you know, I am, I am bringing money and lots
of millions of dollars back to my district, and you're
(40:50):
hurting just a small portion of your constituents one percent
of your constituents maybe right, and all the rest of
them are probably for it.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Yeah, And that's you.
Speaker 5 (41:00):
You even see in the like in the hearings and stuff,
the argument the greatest good for the greatest number.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
The great American land ethic, the utilitarian conservation of our
beloved Teddy Roosevelt, the greatest good for the greatest number.
It's brilliant unless you're the one that's having to pay
so that others can have your stuff. And honestly, when
you put it like that, it kind of sounds like communism.
Speaker 5 (41:28):
And so there's there's very little concern for that kind
of insignificant minority of people who are who are going
to lose their homes and going to lose their farms.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Is that just the cost of having a prosperous nation,
because that.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
Could be I mean, you know, you look at the
interstate highway system. You know, you have a similar thing
that happens there is especially in cities where there have
been studies that show that especially low income neighborhoods, often
we're just completely obliterated or part of it is, yeah, somebody,
(42:04):
somebody's got somebody's got to make a sacrifice if you're
gonna do any of this stuff. Now today, a lot
a lot of people with the more environmentalist ethic and
a more kind of naturalist ethic would say, well, did
we even need the dams in the first place? I mean,
is that that's that would be a question. But nobody
was asking that question back then, because it was all
(42:26):
about priming the pump, getting damn building jobs, and then
the economic benefits that were expected to accrue from those
damns being built.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
So and the hydro electric power was a big cell.
I mean, that was that was like today's modern energy
independence and and and maybe even renewable energy and all
this like this is the way of the future. I mean,
they were preaching hydro electricity.
Speaker 5 (42:54):
That's a big thing, Clay.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
That was.
Speaker 5 (42:57):
And it's it's hard for us to understand because today
hydro power is just a tiny little percentage of our
national power grid. But in those days, hydropower a major
selling point.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's kind of disheartening to see how little was gained
from all these dams, and to see the empty wishes
of the government on energy production it has echoes of
the renewable energy headlines of today. But don't take this
as me knocking renewable energy. I ain't again it, but
I don't trust any side short sighted energy propaganda. When
(43:33):
all you care about is the next four years, you're
bound to make bad decisions. We do well to learn
from the Chinese and think of building our nation in
one hundred year segments. Whoo, we are growing deep into
parra greas boys. I want to step out of this
(44:01):
conversation and get back on the river with Willard. We've
crossed the river and are headed towards where he was born.
He turns his mule around in the trail to face me.
He wants to tell me a story.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
My two older brothers had two cousins about their age,
he's teenagers. They'd meet right here every morning to walk
to school together. My two cousins lived on down the creek,
about half a mob. Well, they found them a yellow
jacket and thesh and they got to back in each
other out see which one could fight them the longest.
(44:40):
They stripped their clothes off, naked, and they cut them
a switch and they'd get in there and they'd fight
them yellow jackets and see who says, see who cas
standing the longest. They said that young our ball boy.
He was their first cousin. They said, that youngest our
ball b If you stay there long in any of them,
(45:01):
here's a younger, but he stay longer.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
He was.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Yeah, he's the toughest one. But now they had a
lot to do, didn't it. That was their entertainment Back then.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
We ride and cross the river one more time. I
see a stone structure built into the hillside.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yes, there's the old old fruit seller right here.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
And he describe to me what this looks like.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Well, the fruit cellar is what the that's what you
put your canned food in. It kept be cool. Our
cellar stays about the same temperature about year round, with
a door on it.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Kind of dug into the hillside, probably ten or twelve
feet and it's got a concrete front on it, but
kind of dry laid stone around, and that just looks
like a cave.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
They used it for a storm shellar too. When you
become a stone.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Where was your house from.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Right there, well, just about fifty yellards, no foundation joll
left of it. Yeah, Park tore it down.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Willard and his family have deep roots on this river
that's now public land. I want to get back to
doctor Blevin's and see how the community reacted in the
nineteen sixties to the prospect of damning this river.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
But part of it too is you know, if you
if you're talking about why there's no public protest and
I and I used the phrase public protest on purpose,
because again, there's plenty of protests, just just doesn't make
it to the public level. And a lot of that's
because most of the newspapers, at least through the nineteen
(46:48):
fifties were champions of damn building. This was seen as
a progressive thing that any booster of a of a
town or a state or anything with that, you've got
to be for damn building because of the the economic impact.
And if you're not, you're just stuck in the past.
You know, you're just you're you're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Be like fighting a fighting a tide.
Speaker 5 (47:12):
Yeah, we don't want the internet, you know today? You know, yeah,
get get it out of here. That was going on.
And then in Arkansas, all to a person, all the
politicians were damn advocates.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Well, that's what's so interesting about this story, Like we're
highlighting the Buffalo River. But this thing happened all over
the place. Oh really, I mean nationwide and so but
it's not. It's just not a story that you that
you hear that much about because it's it's not. It's
the unglamorous part of nation building. Stories of displacement aren't glamorous.
(47:50):
And in the forties, fifties, and sixties damns were hot,
but peaked after World War Two. The Army Corps of
Engineers was the most powerful of all the Euros and
had ambitions to damn every river in America. But now
we'll enter the phase we'll call the Battle for the Buffalo,
which at this point is primarily a fight to keep
(48:13):
it from being damned.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
The Battle for the Buffalo really starts in the early
nineteen sixties. You had an attempt in the late fifties
to get money appropriated for a couple of dams. Eisenhower
vetos the bill and sort of goes away until JFK
takes office in sixty one. And for the most part
in that era, Democrats were tended to be bigger proponents
(48:39):
of damn building and the activities the Army Corps Engineers
than Republicans and so that's when everything kind of breaks loose,
is in sixty two when this Gilbert Damn proposal comes online.
At the same time, in the background, you've got you
got bill Fulbright, Senator from Arkansas. He's already talking to
the National Park Service. They're already doing their surveys and
(49:03):
things in the Buffalo Valley, trying to decide if this
would be a valuable and worthy addition to the National
Park Service. So that's all going on in the background.
So you got in the late fifties, the National Park
Service starts this initiative they call Mission sixty six, and
nineteen sixty six is going to be the fiftieth anniversary
(49:26):
of the founding of the National Park Service. So what
they're doing, they're trying to for about a decade, they're
going to really really build things up and do a
lot of loud, splashy things to add to the National
Park Service. And part of the new stuff is lake
shores and seashores and even rivers, so you've got a
(49:47):
lot of water stuff. It's not just these massive Western parks.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
It's like a new way to think about the National park.
Speaker 5 (49:54):
Yeah, and it's not just it's not just Western stuff.
And a handful of things in Appalachia. So they first
do Cape Cod in the early sixties. That's the first
of these modern kind of watery you know, National park things,
and then they get into the river business. So that's
what's happening. You've got this change of directions a little
(50:16):
bit for the National Park Service in the late fifties
and early sixties.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Interestingly, the first person to plant the seed for the
Buffalo region as national park worthy was a writer named
Glenn Green in nineteen forty six who published a story
about the region. But it wouldn't be until nineteen sixty
one when the first money seven thousand dollars was appropriated
for the National Park Service to do a survey of
(50:41):
the river. The first drawings of this potential park included
over four hundred thousand acres, but it would later be
whittled down to about ninety five thousand. So now there
are two stakeholders with their site set on the river,
the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a dam, and
the National Park Service who wanted a park.
Speaker 5 (51:02):
So in sixty two, the Army Corps Engineers comes to
Marshall and they have a public hearing and it turns
into basically a pro damn public hearing. As a lot
of those early Army Corps of Engineers hearings, did you know,
just the boosters showed up. And so it's in sixty
two when you have the creation of a local booster group.
(51:22):
It's called the Buffalo River Improvement Association the BRIA, and
they're basically just the damn boosters, is what they know.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
They're not the people, primarily, not the people who are
living down there.
Speaker 5 (51:33):
They are not landowners. Probably not a one of them
in the BRIA is a landowner. It's led by a
local newspaper editor. And in reaction to that, you get
the creation of the Ozark Society with Neil Compton, who's
a medical doctor from Bentonville in far northwestern.
Speaker 2 (51:50):
Probably fifty miles from the headwaters of the Buffalo.
Speaker 5 (51:53):
And what the Ozark Society represents their canoeist and you know,
just people recreation people pe who were interested in the Buffalo.
And Compton was a guy who for years had been
canoeing the Buffalo. So that's the Ozark Society. And then
around the same time you get the Buffalo River Landowners Association,
So you get a third organization in the mix. And
(52:15):
these are the actual landowners. These are the people who
own the land up and down the Buffalo River who
are initially against the dam, and then ultimately they will
be against the National Park Service idea as well when
they realized well, either way we're you know, we're in
danger of losing their lanes.
Speaker 2 (52:36):
So these to lay out the players in the field,
the b ri I these people that were pro damn
did known land on the river. Then the Ozark Society
came in and wanted to They were anti dam, right,
but their interest in the river was recreation. And then
the Buffalo River Landowners Association, which would have been people
(52:58):
that ultimately wanted no of it, right.
Speaker 5 (53:00):
Yeah, yeah, if they had had a motto, it would
have been leave us alone. I guess.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (53:05):
Really, for the most part, it becomes a two person
five because the Buffalo River Landowners Association they're way back there.
You know, if this is a race, they're almost out
of side, and.
Speaker 2 (53:17):
They don't have a big constituens. It's like picking teams
for a game and you've got ten options where the
other team has one hundred thousand options. I mean, right,
there's only so many landowners. There's only so many people
that on the county records have a deed that touches
that river. Right.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Yeah, Like I think I mentioned in that story. At
one of the hearings they do in Marshall, the speaker
for the Buffalo River Landowners Association is the scheduled at
very last, at the very end of the hearing. By
that time, most of the reporters had left, you know,
they were just. They didn't have any political cloud, any
political pull, and everybody knew it. The corp of Engineers
(53:56):
knew it, The Ozark Society knew it, you know it
just and they were mostly most of the landowners were
ignored throughout that process.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
This idea of the landowners being ignored is really the
whole point of this story, and if nothing else, our
efforts here are a hat tip to them. But the
truth is, I'm not sure where I would have landed
if I'd been around in this time. Historical revision is
really easy and deceptive and often pains a false sense
(54:27):
of righteousness in us. The truth is that people were
all over the board. There were some landowners that had
just moved into the region, had no real roots here,
and they weren't bothered by a damn or a park.
Some folks were real estate people and they loved the
idea of a dam It was a relatively small group
of people who didn't want either, and in a democracy,
(54:51):
small numbers of people get squashed, period.
Speaker 5 (55:02):
But that's you know that all starts in about sixty
two is when the sides are drawn up and you
really get the beginnings this battle for the Buffalo. And
that's when you start getting hard feelings and between neighbors
and and there's a fight that breaks out at a
high school basketball game and some guys are arrested, and
so you get It's also right around the same time
(55:24):
that Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, William Douglas
comes and floats the buffalo in a very public way.
Speaker 2 (55:31):
Supreme Court Justice Douglas was anti damn, but in nineteen
sixty five, the table's turn and the pro damn people
gain some major steam, and it looks like the river's
going to be damned until an unlikely hero arises.
Speaker 5 (55:48):
And so it's looking like sixty five might be the
year when they finally get this passed. And then in
late sixty five, the Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faulbus, who
is much known in a Erican history for other you know,
more unfortunate circumstances. He steps in and in effect saves
(56:09):
the Buffalo from being damned.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
If you don't know the name Orville Fabas, he became
the face of racism and segregation in nineteen fifty seven when,
as governor of Arkansas, he ordered the National Guard to
block nine African American students from entering Little Rock High School.
These students became known as the Little Rock Nine and
(56:32):
are rightfully celebrated today as heroes. However, when it comes
to his natural resource policies, I think Fabas did as
a solid He wrote a lengthy and eloquent letter about
the natural beauty of the Buffalo River and how it
was unacceptable for it to be damned, and that he
supported a national park.
Speaker 5 (56:53):
You know, Fabas's letter really puts the Army Corps of
Engineers back on their heels. And then John Paul Hammerschmidt
takes office in sixty seven, and one of the first
things that this new representative for Northwest Arkansas does is
he proposes a Buffalo River National Park bill. And it
(57:13):
takes five years for it to go through the political
process and eventually be signed by Richard Nixon.
Speaker 2 (57:20):
It does March first, nineteen seventy two. Yeah, remember that
we said seventy two was a year of celebration and infamy.
It's all the matter of perspective, which will really explore
deeply on the next episode when we talk about a
lady named ev or Granny Henderson. That's some foreshadowing for you.
Speaker 5 (57:44):
It does eventually get passed. I guess from a landowner's perspective,
this all happens. Really, it just flips, and you know,
you go from fearing that your land is going to
be drowned and you're sort of elated, I guess when
you defeat that threat and then you turn around and here's,
you know, here's this National park.
Speaker 2 (58:07):
It was. It's kind of portrayed as if it was
either one or the other, or like the National Park
is what saved it from being damned? Was that ever
really true?
Speaker 5 (58:17):
You could certainly be justified in portraying the battle that way.
And here's why. When the Army Corps of Engineers backed
off a project, they usually didn't back off of it permanently.
A permanent backoff would have to They would have.
Speaker 2 (58:31):
To actually wait till a new governor came in, or
the sentiment was different politically.
Speaker 5 (58:36):
They could do that. What to to permanently get something,
To get a Damn project off the books, it would
have to be de authorized by Congress, and that rarely
ever happened. What they would usually do is they would
just just sort of put it on a back burner
and say this is not a priority.
Speaker 2 (58:52):
And we know that they'll wait decades. Yeah, we know
that from from even this It's not it's not. If
it goes away for a year, that means nothing. Your
grandchildren might have that light in their backyard.
Speaker 5 (59:05):
Yeah. And and if you follow a lot of the
as I've done a lot of the newspaper coverage of
these various Damn projects through time, from the from the
forties into the seventies, you can go a dozen years
without a Damn being mentioned in the press, and then
all of a sudden, here we are, you know, ten
(59:25):
or twelve years later, here's a new hearing on a
Damn that I'd completely forgotten about. As I think it
in volume three, I compared it the Army Corps Damn
plans to like a monster out of a horror film.
You know, you think it's gone, but it's not really,
you know, it's it's it's just gonna it's gonna pop
back up when you don't expect it to. And so
(59:47):
that was the justification for the Ozark Society and yeah
and the people like that was we can't trust the
Army Corps engineers. They're not going to go away. So
the only the only safe way to keep this river
free flowing is to turn it into a national park.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
In the next episode we'll learn if that was actually true,
and going back to our odd coincidence at the start.
In March of nineteen seventy two, Merle Haggard also released
his song Grandma Harp, which told about how her way
of life had gone. The region was now under control
of the National Park Service, which now had money appropriated
(01:00:28):
to buy land from the private citizens who owned the
ninety thousand acres that would become the park.
Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
We later sold the restaurant signing in Morning, and everybody
knew she'd done her part.
Speaker 5 (01:00:44):
Don't get sucked here, no hidden let.
Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Just a song about the lives Grandma heart, just to
think about the times as she lived through.
Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
I want to get back to the river with Willard.
Do you want to walk up to the old home place.
Speaker 3 (01:01:07):
Yeah, those smoke caps up. We can ride it forady.
We get through here if you want to.
Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Oh okay, Yeah, we're at the fruit cellar and we
ride up the hill to the old home place.
Speaker 5 (01:01:21):
So this year was where is.
Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
Boring those smoke caps? The old house place was right
back over here, just behind us.
Speaker 5 (01:01:29):
What did the house look like?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
It was a just a three room house. H had
out of one bedroom in the kitchen and the dining room.
Speaker 5 (01:01:39):
Was it made of oak?
Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
Is made of oak? Yeah? Board? Yeall?
Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Did it Did it have a rock foundation that went
to the ground or did it set up like set
up on rocks? No?
Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
He had had a rock foundation, then wood forward and
wood floor was right?
Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
And you were you were delivered by your grandmother, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
My grandmother Hamson. Actually you were born right here, right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
What's it like coming back in here? You ride this
stretch of river a couple times a week.
Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Heah, I come in here and reminiation show people around sometime.
You know, some of the free answers talk to them, y'all.
Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Yeah, I guess in some ways it's better that it's
like this than if it were under a lake. Somewhere.
Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
I've enjoyed it all my life, so yeah, I've been blessed.
Yeah sure, hey, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
This is the first episode on the formation of the
Buffalo National River, but this story is really about something
much bigger. I'm sure many of you have family stories
of people being forced from their land because of lakes, parks,
or highways. The irony we wrestle with today is how
(01:02:44):
seemingly happy many of us are that it happened to
someone else, or at least it didn't happen in our generation.
On the next episode, we'll go back in time and
hear an original interview with the Buffalo Rivers first lange,
who was featured in National Geographic in nineteen seventy four,
Eva Barnes Henderson, or Granny Henderson as we know her,
(01:03:08):
and will continue to discuss one of America's most valued
public land doctrines, the greatest good for the greatest number.
And let me tell you it's gonna get really personal.
I'd like to take a minute and thank my friends
Justin House and Kaylin Belions, both lifelong residents of Newton
(01:03:29):
County who had lots of family on the river. Both
helped me immensely in setting up these interviews and inspiring
me with their family stories. I can't thank you enough
for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast.
Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and
(01:03:49):
I look forward to talking with all those hillbillies on
the Render next week
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