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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252085499 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2020 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 388,396 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
THE PRIMITIVE OZARKS
Among the most beautiful and ephemeral creations of nature is something the pioneers of the old Ozarks referred to as "rabbit ice." Others have called the phenomenon "frost flowers" or "ice fringes." Venture out some late fall or early winter morning when the temperature has dipped below freezing and you may spot them — magnificent artworks of the most fragile ice imaginable scattered along the ground in old fields and fence rows. Emanating from tiny holes in the dead stems of plants sporting pronounced xylem rays — the dittany weed and the aptly named frostweed being perhaps the most common in the Ozarks — rabbit ice usually materializes in the early morning hours as water ascending the rays from the unfrozen underground pushes its way out into the open, turning into unique formations that resemble globs of ribbon candy made of fine cotton or silk. Few things in a stark, gray landscape are so alluring yet so short-lived. Just a few minutes of the sun's rays or a slight uptick in the ground temperature melts rabbit ice away, leaving no sign of its existence.
Of the phenomena we use to analogize the fragility and mortality of human life, we can do worse than rabbit ice. In the grand scheme of things, even the rise, transformation, and disappearance of human cultures and societies embody the randomness and ephemerality of rabbit ice. Even in this little place we have so recently labeled the Ozarks — a spot on the earth that contains only about one of every 1,142 square miles of land on the planet — humanity's obsession with our own mortality has been integral to our story, crucial to the conceptualization of a region's role in a continent's and nation's drama. By the early twentieth century novelists and travel writers introduced American readers to a place where time stood still, a remote and isolated region of people whose lifestyles and mind-sets had remained unchanged for what seemed to be generations. Such places satisfy some sense of longing in the modern, romantic mind. They provide a sense of Uncorrected Advance Proof stability in a world of constant evolution. In retrospect it is almost laughable that a place like the Ozarks — a region that was still home to thousands of Native Americans in the 1820s, an area that had undergone massive waves of immigration both before and after the Civil War — would strike people as a land of ancients. But we mortals have a low threshold for definitions of "ancient." It comes with the territory of inhabiting the planet for such a brief time.
Perhaps nothing so divests us of our myopia — of our own preoccupation with the ephemeral — than a brief trip back into geologic time. Consider for a moment our physical and temporal experience on this planet. If you compare the ratio of rabbit ice to human life span with that of our own encounter with human existence on this floating rock, the average rabbit ice formation exists for a significantly greater portion of our lives than the percentage of the earth's story to which we are privy. As I write this the average American lives almost eighty years, and we will generously credit a singular occurrence of rabbit ice with a fleeting four hours before it is banished by the sun. This means that we last, on average, about 175,000 times longer than a rabbit ice formation. Rounding off the earth's age to 4.5 billion years, we discover that for every one year we live, there are more than 56 million earth years that we did not experience. As far as the planet is concerned, then, you and I are indeed more ephemeral than the sleep-late-and-you've-missed-it rabbit ice seems to us.
My rabbit ice digression is not intended to make you take stock, though it is probably not the worst thing in the world should that happen. Nor is it meant to bring you to the Lord. Most of the Ozarks preachers I've known would quarrel with my math. I invoke the spirit of rabbit ice to illustrate the limitations of our own ephemeral perspectives, especially as they relate to geologic time and its significance for the earth as we get to see it. No one reading this book saw the Ozark uplift before the arrival of Homo sapiens, before the French came floating down the Mississippi, before white settlers and black slaves plowed under native grasses and felled virgin trees, before this same rush of humanity flushed bison and elk from their valley haunts. Most people now living in the Ozarks did not see the region before railroads, highways, power companies, and the Army Corps of Engineers drastically altered its landscape, before man-made dams and power generators altered entire ecosystems. These changes — and our species' occupation of this place — have spanned but a geologic blink of an eye.
As far as regional cultures are concerned, the place we call the Ozarks is an infant. Yet the land on which Ozarkers walk, farm, and play is by most measures ancient, "perhaps the oldest continuously exposed landmass in North America." The geologic story of the Ozark plateau began about a billion and a half years ago when volcanic eruptions "accompanied by blasts of steam, smoke, ash, and cinders, began piling debris that would eventually form the base of the Ozarks." Hundreds of millions of years of molten extrusions on the surface and intrusions beneath it formed in the midst of the primordial ocean a chain of islands of igneous rock, which survive today in the ancient core or dome of the uplift, the St. Francois Mountains of southeastern Missouri. These island mountains may have reached an elevation of ten thousand feet above the ocean floor, perhaps a mile above the surface of the water. What remains of our weathered St. Francois Mountains is unlikely to impress anyone who has looked upon infant ranges such as the Rockies or the Andes. A young man with a strong back and nothing better to do could probably lug an anvil to the peak of Taum Sauk, Missouri's highest point. Come see what the Himalayas have to look forward to in a couple of billion years or so.
It took hundreds of millions of years of rain, wind, and rising and falling ocean levels to smooth and round the domes of the St. Francois Mountains. Beginning more than half a billion years ago and continuing for some 300 million years, the ocean waters that helped wear down the mountains harbored sea creatures whose compressed remains gradually cemented into sedimentary rock such as dolomite and limestone, interlaid below the Ozark surface with layers of sandstone. Embedded among the dolomite and limestone was another type of sedimentary rock that geologists refer to as "chert." Composed of a silica compound, lumps of relatively insoluble chert littered the plateau after eons of water movement dissolved the limestone and dolomite. It is chert that gives the region its well-deserved reputation for rocky ground. And it is this plentiful rock that inspired the naming of Stone County, Arkansas, and ruined many a fine afternoon for farm kids who were instructed to haul rocks from pastures and freshly plowed fields.
Amid the rise and fall of ocean waters, the region's elevation and appearance underwent change as continental collisions and tectonic shifts brought about periods of uplift, followed by ages of erosion and leveling. One such uplift, occurring approximately 300 million years ago along what was once a southern continental coastline, created the subregion that today boasts the highest elevations in the Ozark uplift and the greatest relief of any landscape between the Appalachians and the Rockies. In spite of the favorable appellation and impressive vistas, the Boston Mountains are not mountains in a geologic sense but an uplift dissected by severe erosion. This fact differentiates the Boston Mountains from the actual mountains to the south, the Ouachitas, whose folded and faulted ridges were formed by orogenic processes stemming from the same continental collision.
In fact, with the exception of the ancient core area of the St. Francois Mountains, no landform in the entire region should be called a mountain. The hilly and "mountainous" terrain of the Ozark uplift was created by erosion — and, in the context of geologic time, comparatively recent erosion. At the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth some 66 million years ago, erosion had almost weathered the Ozark uplift out of existence. Its core mountains stood no more than a few hundred feet above sea level, and much of the Ozarks took on the same general appearance as the Everglades of modern Florida. The final uplift of the region began between 30 million and 25 million years ago, ceasing perhaps as recently as 5 million years ago. Roughly 25 million years of down-cutting streams and runoff created the hills and hollers that we see today. The gradual uplift preserved the meandering river and creek channels of a flatter, swampier version of the Ozarks, resulting in the majestic bluffs that greet canoeists and fishermen on the free-flowing streams that survived the twentieth century's era of dam building, such as the Buffalo, the Current, and the Gasconade. We also owe the region's karst geography of springs, caves, and sinkholes to this last great episode of uplift and erosion. So, no, the Ozarks are not mountains. It would be more accurate to refer to the "Ozark valleys." Given the hardscrabble heritage of the past 200 years of this hill country, perhaps a more modest, more plebian name might be in order. We could, as does Ozarks native and scholar Donald Holliday, simply call them "ditches."
Broadly speaking, the Ozark uplift has held its current shape and texture for at least 5 million years. This is due in part to its location to the south of North America's center, just far enough south to avoid the flattening effects of major continental glaciations. The Ozark uplift may have avoided direct contact with the most recent glacier, which blanketed northern Missouri 20,000 years ago, but it could not escape its effects. The Wisconsin ice had a pronounced cooling effect on the Ozarks, transforming the ecosystem into a boreal forest of spruce, fir, and jack pine supporting such large animals as the horse, musk ox, giant beaver, and even the mastodon. The warming trend that sent the glaciers into retreat more than 14,000 years ago produced, over the span of about two millennia, an Ozark landscape similar to the one the first European explorers encountered more than three centuries ago. The megafauna likely followed the glacier's chill northward before disappearing entirely, but the warmer Ozark uplift's mammals included the ever present whitetail deer along with other animals that would soon vanish from the continent or the planet: the ground sloth, horse, and tapir.
The Ozark uplift underwent a more subtle yet still significant change when, beginning about 8,500 years ago, the warmer and drier climatic conditions of the Hypsithermal interval prodded the gradual eastern encroachment of the prairie and oak savanna into a large portion of the Ozarks. At the height of the region's prairie phase, species such as the bison, pronghorn antelope, and prairie chicken occupied the Ozarks and lingered in smaller numbers into the early days of American expansion in the 1800s. Hypsithermal conditions came to an end about 5,000 years ago, around the time of the beginnings of Egyptian civilization, and the wetter climate prompted a return to a forest ecosystem of oak and hickory trees in which prairies and savannas remained prominent in some areas, especially in the western Ozarks. Eventually extensive pine forests also emerged in some Ozark locales, most notably the drainage areas of the Current and Gasconade rivers in southern Missouri. The reforestation of much of the region bolstered the population of animals such as deer, bears, raccoons, and turkeys, but shrinking grasslands reduced the number of bison and other prairie species.
Changing climatic conditions and shifting biomes also affected the activities and lifeways of another species that first entered the Ozarks before the Hypsithermal interval, Homo sapiens. The earliest humans to venture into the Ozark uplift, the Paleo-Indians, arrived about 12,000 years ago, at which time the boreal forest had largely given way to a deciduous one, and the megafauna of the old chilly Ozarks had mostly fled the region. Few in number, these nomadic Ozark dwellers were hunters and gatherers, pursuing nuts and berries and using stone weapons and tools to kill whitetail deer and smaller animals as well as occasional larger prey, such as the mastodon. By the Dalton period (10,000 to 9,000 years ago), the human population of the Ozark uplift had likely increased. The people of this era may have intensified their gathering activities — especially of walnuts and hickory nuts — but their diet remained heavily dependent on whitetail deer, supplanted by consumption of raccoons, beavers, rabbits, squirrels, turtles, fish, and birds. Advances in material culture — including development of the adz and tools for grinding vegetal materials — mirrored societal advancements such as trading, burial of the dead, and something akin to permanent settlement.
Following the Dalton era was the Archaic period, a span of roughly six millennia commencing about 9,000 years ago. Archaic peoples, like their predecessors, relied on hunting, fishing, and gathering, but their activities in the Ozarks reflect the advances of Archaic times in North America in general, the impact of climate change, and multiple local adaptations to the region's physiographic diversity. Over the millennia of the Archaic period, humans developed the atlatl (spear thrower) and an array of projectile points for it. They also crafted sandals, mats, and bags out of twined-fiber fabrics; made tools of stone, antler, and bone; fashioned ceremonial or decorative items such as gorgets and pendants of animal teeth; and began cultivating squash, gourds, and other plants. Evidence supports the common-sense notion that life in the Archaic period was no more monolithic than it is today, that humans adapted to life in the diverse subregions of the Ozark landscape.
The Woodland period, beginning some 3,000 years ago and spanning about two millennia, was differentiated from the Late Archaic by three primary developments: pottery, burial mounds, and horticulture. The invention of pottery proved a major catalyst for change. Pots revolutionized storage and cooking, and both of these advantages encouraged horticultural advances and the creation of permanent villages. The Woodland period also witnessed a substantial expansion of trade networks, linking the residents of the Ozarks with peoples as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and the Rockies. The latter years of the era saw the widespread adoption of the bow and arrow. Agriculture took hold gradually throughout the Woodland period but remained marginal to hunting and gathering until about the year 400 ce, when the cultivation of maize spread rapidly and widely on the continent. Grown alongside cucurbits such as squash, gourds, and pumpkins, maize eventually squeezed out older native species that had been cultivated for a few hundred years — lamb's-quarter, pigweed, goosefoot, and sunflowers.
Some of the earliest studies of Woodland period sites also generated one of the initial examples of a marginal interpretation of the region's story, a depiction of prehistoric Ozark society that likely owed a great deal to the era in which it was formulated. For years a variety of burial and ceremonial mounds, cave dwellings, and excavated prehistoric caches attracted relic hunters. One such man was W. C. Barnard, a southwestern Missouri physician who by the turn of the twentieth century had amassed a "famous Indian collection" in his home in the small town of Seneca. Some of Barnard's most unique items came from the floors of undisturbed rock shelters in the upper White River valley of northwestern Arkansas and along the Cowskin River of southwestern Missouri. Upon glimpsing these artifacts — unusual in that they were organic, not stone, materials — Mark R. Harrington, an anthropologist with New York's Heye Foundation, visited several rock shelter sites in 1922 and 1923.
In a summary of his findings published soon after in American Anthropologist, Harrington postulated the survival of an ancient, isolated people living in the western half of the Ozarks during the era now known as the Woodland period. The "Ozark Bluff-Dwellers," as Harrington labeled them, raised maize, squash, and other foodstuffs and manufactured intricate baskets of cane strands, but their sparse use of pottery, their maintenance of the atlatl in an age of the bow and arrow, and their continued dependence on hunting and gathering over farming suggested a unique perseverance of an antiquated culture. Subsequent excavations and publications by a number of scholars added nuance to the discussion without challenging the assumption of marginalization. Chief among these popularizers of the bluff- dweller thesis was Samuel C. Dellinger, curator of the University of Arkansas Museum, who conducted eighty-five rock shelter digs between 1928 and 1934 and whose writings and speeches did not deviate from the conclusion that the Ozarks had been home to a "primitive if not ancient people" in the not so ancient past.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A History of the Ozarks"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 The Primitive Ozarks 11
2 Natives and Newcomers 21
3 Americanizing the Ozarks 69
4 Domesticating the Ozarks 119
5 Markets, Merchants, and Manufacturers 155
6 American Society in the Old Ozarks 197
Notes 241
Index 283
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