Introduction
At the annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Missouri in September 1978, Duane Meyer spoke about The Ozarks in Missouri History. He found that Missouri historians had largely ignored the Ozarks in describing the mainstream political, economic and social trends in Missouri. He believed that times are changing, accelerated by booming population growth. In turn, modern developments generated the need for a fresh examination of the hillbilly stereotype of the residents, as well as recognition of new research, writing, and publishing projects emerging in the Ozarks. Conversation about the region was common, professional research and writing was not. The Ozarks seemingly uniform cultural surface had grown complex.
Missouri writers have long described trends in state history, but not in its varied regions. Vernacular areas, like the Ozarks, the Booneslick, Little Dixie, and the Bootheel, are not institutions and do not have discrete political boundaries or official records. By contrast, Appalachian scholars have published a veritable library trying to define the boundaries of their region; and, geographic definitions of the Midwest that include the Ozarks continue to evolve, as well. The Ozarks unique upland location, between the Appalachians and Rocky Mountains, with a famous natural diversity, has attracted a parade of naturalists who ascribe fluid boundaries for interpreters and for government entities seeking to understand geographic space. Famed as a homeland dominated culturally by the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish, or, more inclusively, the Ulster migration (Scotch-Irish Protestant, Irish Catholic, and English descendants), even the immigrant population is not clearly understood, while no one doubts resident Ozarkers' ability to adapt to almost any circumstance. Writers must impose a notion of unity to make sense of human patterns in geographic spaces. What matters is a framework for discussing the past.
A survey of the Missouri Historical Review, for example, reveals that contributors rarely adopted an Ozarks or Ozark terminology until after Duane Meyer's 1978 address, in part, because authors writing about the Ozarksfolklorists, geologists, journalists, and novelistspublished elsewhere. Consequently, the body of Ozarks history represented in the Review is small when compared to that in the Missouri River Valley, but elsewhere in the serial, historians have touched on the region in studies of early travel and exploration, demography, immigration, slavery, the Civil War, Springfield, vigilantes, lead and iron mining, steamboats, and railroad ties floating down rivers. After World War Two historians began commenting on fiction, folklore, and Cherokees in the Ozarks.
The term Ozark deserves explanation. Used by colonial hunters as a descriptor for Arkansas Post, the Quapaw Indians, and the Arkansas River, the term migrated with them into the interior of Arkansas and Missouri. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft avoided the term in his famous 18181819 travel account, instead using the phrase western country. But, Major Stephen Long, who undertook explorations of trans-Mississippi lands in 18191820, labeled the uplands from the Missouri River into the modern Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas as the Ozark Mountains. The federal government, represented by Long, created the first, but far from the last boundary outline for the Ozarks. Writers such as Nicholas Hesse, an 1830s German immigrant to Osage County, used Long's map when describing Missouri: If one has crossed the Ozarks, stretching from Mexico through Arkansas to the Missouri [River] between the Gasconade and Osage Rivers, then the landscape becomes more pleasing. So, when Schoolcraft revised his travel accounts in 1853, he included Ozark Mountains in his title, as nineteenth-century cartographers had, by then, embraced the term.
After the Civil War, geologists spearheaded scholarly writing about the Ozark landscape. Garland C. Broadhead assumed the mantle of Missouri state geologist in 1873 and authored dozens of articles and reports helping to promote the popular and scholarly use of the term Ozark. Publishers printed maps with the label Ozark Mountains, showing a summit of land running from the northeast to the southwest, from Rolla to Springfield, and added to it the geologists' term Ozark Range or Ozark Ridge. The rivers generally flow north and south of the Ozark Ridge. Ironically, the relief along this corridor (i.e., the difference between lower and higher elevations) is gentler than most of the interior Ozarks, thus easier to traverse. The St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) followed this old interior pathway, formerly used by fur traders, as did surveyors
St. Louis's corporate institutions became modernization influences, moving into the historic Ozarks along the Frisco and into southeast Missouri via the St. Louis, Iron Mountain Railroad. Two Missourians, Curtis Marbut and Carl Sauer, rode the rails, in the process of publishing benchmark studies that firmly placed the moniker Ozarks on Missouri's upland. Marbut's scientifically based Physical Features of Missouri (1896), Soils of the Ozark Region (1910), and Soil Reconnaissance of the Ozark Region of Missouri and Arkansas (1914) set the stage for Sauer's classic, The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri (1920). Sauer offered boundaries for a historic Ozarks region and established a spatial model for subsequent work. Ozark boundaries for the physical and biological sciences, however, are more easily discerned than any cultural or historical borders, which remain fuzzy to this day. But, it was journalists, folklorists, and novelists who described a tradition-bound society in image-making portraits to entertain urban readers who revealed the vernacular region to large audiences, including historians. Through their local color writings, images of Ozarks backwoods hillbillies and rugged individualists were well established in the popular imagination by the 1940s.
General readers and professionals took notice of publications featuring the Ozarks. During the 1940s, Minnie Brashear surveyed Missouri literature and concluded that the national movement in regionalism had flowered in the Ozarks. Harold Bell Wright's novels set in southwest Missouri sold millions of copies. They achieved national fame for the region and stimulated an outpouring of fiction and verse in the 1920s and 1930s. Joe Kraus concluded that writings on the customs and folklore of the Ozarks, a sentimentalized rurality called an Arcadian myth, had caught the public's fancy. Playing to this audience, the State Historical Society of Missouri published Vance Randolph's landmark four-volume
This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.