The St. Louis Game Park: Experiments in Conversation and Recreation

Volume 36, Number 4 - Spring 1997

The St. Louis Game Park:
Experiments in Conservation and Recreation
by Lynn Morrow

The Gay Nineties society of St. Louis extended its interest far beyond the city limits. The remarkable growth of the city and its commercial reach into the Midwest and the nation sent its residents traveling the rails on business and excursions—pleasure trips to see friends, relatives, and new towns, or simply to enjoy the adventure of travel. Elites of the city had already established summer homes and retreats near the city, in the Meramec River Valley, and southward down the St. Louis Iron Mtn. Railway towns.¹ Sporting men in the tobacco industry, however, looked much farther away from home to found their sportmen’s gateway into the Ozarks.

St. Louis businessmen had known something of southwest Missouri, even if only by reputation, for many years. Brothers Henry and Peter Blow and their partners had made a fortune in Newton County at the Granby Mining and Smelting Company, before and after the Civil War. Their mineral surveys had included Stone and Taney counties, where in 1869, three miles north of White River, they explored a great cave later known as Marvel Cave. St. Louisans had speculated in mineral lands in Taney County, where several still hoped to strike it rich. In 1882 Springfield became the nexus for both the Frisco and Kansas City, Southern and Memphis railroads, while spur lines extended south into Christian County, ending at Chadwick and Ozark. From these railheads and along the several wagon roads leading south from Springfield into Arkansas came settlers, commerce, and a new immigrant—the corporation.

During the 1890s new faces arrived in the White River country who would forever change the look of the land and its reputation. Immigrants and visitors tried their luck in this region partly because it contained the largest block of government land left for sale in Missouri. The more famous of these new arrivals—Harold Bell Wright, J. K. Ross, and Walker Powell—are remembered in the romance and legend of Wright’s Shepherd of the Hills novel. Canadian

William H. Lynch, owner of Marble Cave, became a legendary promoter. But Democrats and industrialists Moses C. Wetmore (1846-1910) and George H. McCann (1848-1920) are rarely remembered. They represented a corporate immigrant to Taney County whose founding of a Democrat Playground, long before the Ozarks Playgrounds Association rose to champion the area for middle-class tourists, influenced the future of Taney County and Missouri conservation in general. Contrary to the traditional railroad tourists who hunted in the Ozarks, and to numerous resident hunters who shot game as mere targets, Wetmore and McCann were hunter/tourists who owned property and had visions for development. They were the new "true sportsmen," club members with an ideology contrary to market hunters, and champions for a conservation ethic that supported the propagation of big game in Missouri.²

In 1891, "a club of St. Louis gentlemen," officers of the Liggett and Meyers Tobacco Company (producers of Star Tobacco, the largest plug tobacco concern in the country), formed the St. Louis Park and Agricultural Company, known more commonly as the St. Louis Game Park.³Moses Wetmore, controlling stockholder in St. Louis, and George McCann, company representative in Springfield and owner of the Old Coon Tobacco Company, were ardent Democrats and the primary leaders in the enterprise. At the outset Wetmore and his associates had a vision to develop a large, fenced block of land for a private game preserve. Southerners and others had built deer parks since colonial America, but gentlemen sportsmen of the late nineteenth century had additional goals. Elites and their political allies all knew that the time had passed to save the large herds of buffalo and the passenger pigeon, and now deer and other big game were threatened across the United States. Affluent sportsmen across the country were interested in game parks that also experimented with propagating deer (for sport and food), exploring the recre-

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ational potential of the grounds, and developing amenities for social gatherings. This diversified approach set the St. Louis Game Park apart from the traditional deer parks.

The company purchased lands in south central Taney County, primarily on the west side of White River, southeast of Mincy, a crossroads trading hamlet. The land contained all the representative topography of the region—creeks, caves, an oak-hickory-pine and cedar-glade forest of steep ridges and hollows, and three miles of riverfront along White River. Taney County did not have any factories, brick buildings, electric lights, improved roads, or large corporate timber mills or mining towns. The population of 9,000 was dispersed, with a few hundred citizens living in the villages of Forsyth, Kirbyville and

Taneyville. George McCann, president and real estate broker for the game park corporation, purchased dozens of publicly and privately owned tracts, much of it non-resident, including his own speculative investments for the company⁴The park property, amidst a vast open range, was forty miles from the nearest railroad at Chadwick.⁵

Corporate secretary J. P. Litton announced in 1896 to the readers of Forest and Stream that the St. Louis Game Park had amassed 5,000 acres for their preserve and resort. The directors managed several species of deer—native, red, blacktail, and fallow— and Angora goats. They purchased elk in Illinois from a national authority on deer and a pair of deer from owners in Wisconsin. Several dozen Mongolian pheasants were released that year to join the resi

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dent turkey and quail. Earlier in 1893, the managers had surrounded 500 acres with an eight- or nine-foot deer-proof fence and enclosed the rest of the land with a stock fence.⁶

Moses Wetmore, a leading Missouri Democrat, worked hard in planning a grand opening to follow the November 1896 elections. That spring, in April, eighteen wagons left Taney County for Chadwick to pick up nineteen head of elk. However, four elk were killed in the roundup at Judge Caton’s park in Ottawa, Illinois, and four more died in transit, but seven wagons made it back to Forsyth with an elk apiece. William F. Hunt, the park ranger and guide who had originally taken the St. Louisans into the Taney woods, supervised the transportation and was the principal manager at the park. He protected the game from predators and resident poachers, gaining a reputation as a fearless enforcer. During 1896, the owners enclosed an additional 2,500 acres with deer-proof fence.⁷

By fall, the company was ready for VIPs to visit their new experiment. In October George McCann took seventeen people, including several from Forsyth; one was Jesse Tolerton, the future Missouri Game and Fish Commissioner under Gov. Herbert Hadley. They were able to witness the introduction of twelve new elk to the park, bringing the total to twenty-five. St. Louisans and Springfieldians joined Taney Countians, and many wives of the sportsmen participated in the deer feast and recreation.⁸

Wetmore, a great admirer and financial supporter of William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost a bid for the presidency, joined Bryan’s party in Springfield. McCann arranged for the Bryan party to travel by rail to Chadwick; hacks were brought on rail cars for the overland trip to Forsyth. The Democrats held a supper and entertained speeches at the Hilsabeck Hotel in Forsyth on an overnight stop on their way to the park.⁹

Wetmore had assembled an impressive number of political elites for this Democratic retreat into the Ozarks hinterland to show off his efforts in conservation. Joining Bryan were Gov. William J. Stone of Missouri, Missouri Democratic state chairman Sam

B. Cook, Sen. James K. Jones of Arkansas, and Midwestern political dignitaries from as far away as Michigan. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter recorded the event, and his article was later reprinted in the state’s House and Senate Journals in Jefferson City.’⁰The more than ten square miles of fenced compound amazed the journalist. He christened it a "hunter’s paradise of elk, antelope, wild goat, bear, squirrel, coon, ‘possum, catamount, turkey and quail in greater abundance than in any place in America," and if hunting was too challenging, the fishing in White River was superb.

The proprietors had constructed a frame, eight-room hunting lodge on top of one of the local balds, a knob overlooking White River, where 400 steps rose from the river to the lodge. Workmen removed the underbrush surrounding the grounds around the lodge, which allowed a large spread of grass to grow. The sportsmen arranged it so that one could purchase a flatbottom boat in Forsyth and float down White River, some twelve miles, and dock at the park. Standing at the lodge, a visitor could see the domestic cattle spread below in the parklands and peer southward into Arkansas. The St. Louis reporter concluded his description with a romantic poem,

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titled "White River," penned by Alonzo Prather, Taney County state representative. 11

Nearby, a north-south country wagon road ran through the game park. Over time, the lands west of the road became the "cattle park," and those east the "game park." Wetmore continued importing elk, twenty from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1898, and his herds grew dramatically. In 1906, however, the deer population suffered a decimating epidemic of black-tongue. The management later introduced controlled burning for woods pasture maintenance.

The proprietors relied upon local craftsmen for blacksmith work and traded at the general store in Mincy. The true sportsmen, however, did not readily invite locals into the park. But the Democrat Playground did allow for the usual playfulness associated with such informal gatherings for recreation. William J. Bryan, at ease with his friend Wetmore at the fall 1899 hunt, left a brief verse:

O Wetmore, ‘tis of thee,
Wetmore of Missouree
Of thee we sing.
Long may thy path be bright
With friendship’s holy light,
With stories of thy might,
Let Taney ring. 12

The fall 1899 hunt was the subject of a Sunday feature in the St. Louis Republic. A reporter accompanied the entourage of sportsmen, most of whom sported titles from their affiliations with state militias and their brief encounters with the Spanish-American War. Wetmore and Bryan bagged mountain goat, deer, turkey, squirrel, geese, duck, and quail, and they enjoyed fishing. On the return trip through Springfield, Bryan delivered a public address to raise proceeds for the local Confederate Monument Fund.¹³

Every fall, from the dramatic opening of the game park in 1896 until his death in 1910, Moses Wetmore and his associates held gala hunts and socials at the park. During the 1890s, Wetmore was president of the Liggett and Meyers Tobacco

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Company, the largest in St. Louis. He personally financed a regiment in the Missouri National Guard, gaining the sobriquet "Colonel." In 1908 he became W. J. Bryan’s campaign manager and served as chairman of the finance committee of the National Democratic Committee; for several years he was a national committeeman from Missouri. Bryan’s many trips to the game park with Wetmore became the occasion for various regional appearances of the great orator in the Ozarks.¹⁴

McCann, living in Springfield, had easier access throughout the year. He was a native of Ireland, settling in Springfield in 1867, where he soon chose the tobacco industry as his primary concern. His Old Coon Tobacco Works was affiliated with Liggett and Meyers. When Wetmore formed his own independent company in 1899, McCann became his vice-president, moving to St. Louis, until returning to Springfield in 1904. Then he founded the New Phoenix Foundry and Machinery Company, serving as president. In 1913 he and several game park associates organized the Southern Missouri Trust Company in Springfield.¹⁵

The Wetmore-McCann game park earned national attention from wildlife biologists and the federal government. Records kept by the owners and resident park rangers allowed scholars to include the game park in national surveys. For example, one pregnant pet doe in 1900 became the maternal ancestor for twenty-five deer by 1905, and in a survey published in 1910, Wetmore’s efforts were acclaimed as among the most significant in the country. 16

The publicity concerning the St. Louis Game Park may have encouraged other St. Louisans to establish another hunting/fishing/social club upriver from Wetmore’s. In 1905 the Maine Hunting and Fishing Club moved the Maine Building of the 1904 World’s Fair to a dramatic bluff site overlooking White River. Passenger service on the new White River Railroad opened in nearby Hollister in 1906, 50 visitors to the Maine Club could arrive easily, while those to the Game Park shortened their overland buggy trips from forty to only thirteen miles. Ten years later, the Maine Club building became the new home of the School of the Ozarks¹-⁷

The railroad brought other St. Louisans to invest in Taney County The Bagnell Timber Company, the largest manufacturer of railroad ties in the United States, bought lands and began one of their many tie operations as a major employer in newly founded Branson. The Hobart and Lee Timber and Tie Company, the largest tie company in southwest Missouri, which was managed by another combination of St. Louis and Springfield investors, joined the famous Bagnell Tie Company in competition for the regional tie markets. These commercial timber companies, however, remained in Taney County for only a few years in the early twentieth century. The forests of the White River Hills did not have the marketable density that those in southeast Missouri had. The timber companies created no giant timber mills in Taney County nor did they invest in resort properties. 18

The Bagnell company left Taney County on the eve of Republican Herbert Hadley’s election to the governor~s seat in 1908. The Hadley administration would become the most influential in the Missouri conservation movement until the Baker administration of the late 1920s. Hadley picked Taney Countian

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Jesse Tolerton as his Game and Fish Commissioner, a man familiar with the St. Louis Game Park. This merchant and banker from the Ozarks became Hadley’s close political confidant, and with the successful enactment of the "Walmsley-Hadley" game and fish regulations of 1909, Tolerton was pivotal in making the model game and preservation issues prominent in the Hadley government. In the new benchmark laws that regulated Missouri game, readers noticed that private investors in game parks had a special exemption that allowed the shipment of elk or deer when raised in captivity.¹⁹Tolerton introduced Hadley to George McCann, and all hunted at the game park. McCann afterwards sent boxed elk meat, elk head, and hide to the governors mansion. In 1910, Gov. Hadley established a state game farm near Jefferson City and built a much-heralded log cabin retreat of his own west of the city.²⁰

Hadley’s famous Ozark promotional tours on the railroads included returns to White River.

Government work in geology and agriculture had already established itself professionally throughout the state, and now the Game and Fish Department combined developmental visions in tune with growing commercial tourism. A locally famous publicity photograph, shot in 1911 for Missouri newspapers, was on a gravel bar near Forsyth where the ten-boat flotilla began its journey for the game park downriver. While there, the entourage dumped fish in White River in an attempt to promote stocking Missouri riverways.²¹

The St. Louis Game Park, with its big-game populations, always provided a marked contrast for sportsmen who hunted elsewhere in Missouri and the nation, and the difference was not lost on Hadley Even in Shannon County, famous historically for fall hunts, a Hadley supporter could only offer a local sighting of "5 or 6 deer out about 8 mile northwest of here liWinona] and also two nice bunch of turkey using the same woods."²²A lawyer in adjacent

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Jesse Tolerton as his Game and Fish Commissioner, a man familiar with the St. Louis Game Park. This merchant and banker from the Ozarks became Hadley’s close political confidant, and with the successful enactment of the "Walmsley-Hadley" game and fish regulations of 1909, Tolerton was pivotal in making the model game and preservation issues prominent in the Hadley government. In the new benchmark laws that regulated Missouri game, readers noticed that private investors in game parks had a special exemption that allowed the shipment of elk or deer when raised in captivity.¹⁹Tolerton introduced Hadley to George McCann, and all hunted at the game park. McCann afterwards sent boxed elk meat, elk head, and hide to the governor~s mansion. In 1910, Gov. Hadley established a state game farm near Jefferson City and built a much-heralded log cabin retreat of his own west of the city.²⁰

Hadley’s famous Ozark promotional tours on the railroads included returns to White River.

Carter County wrote that we "have heard of several deer, also several turkey having been killed this fall."²³Hadley supporters in Pettis and Johnson counties also invited the governor and his game commissioner. Hadley jokingly wrote Tolerton that before he went to the trouble to make the trip he would require the hosts to "furnish a bond with a surety company on it that we can find quail after we get there."²⁴All the while, Hadley and Tolerton were angling to attend the St. Louis Game Park with Major George McCann.

Where game used to be counted in the hundreds and thousands in outstate Missouri, a very few deer in 1910 gained local notice; at the St. Louis Game Park there were 400 elk and 1,000 deer.²⁵Although Hadley left the governor’s mansion in January 1913, he quickly joined Tolerton, McCann, and others in February to form the Missouri Southern Trust Company in Springfield. The Democrat park owner and his Republican sportsmen friends could play and do business together.²⁶

The Moses Wetmore funeral in November 1910 even prompted business elites to consider building an imitation of the St. Louis Game Park. Sen. William J. Stone delivered an emotional eulogy to Wetmore before representatives of the National Democratic Committee, Joseph Folk, Lon Stephens, James Reed, Edward Goltra, and a host of dignitaries. Perhaps reminiscenses by Adolphus Busch, a game park devotee, encouraged major brewers to consider the White River country for a resort. A preliminary party left for Stone County to set up camp. Following was an entourage of wealthy sportsmen including August Pabst of Milwaukee, Edward Lemp of St. Louis, and others who wanted to inspect some 5,000 acres for a game preserve. The sportsmen enjoyed their trip, but did not invest.²⁷

George McCann did continue to host sporting parties during the teens. One, in December 1914, included executives and jurists from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Springfield. They arrived by railroad in Branson and took carriages and guides to the park. Mter a week at the lodge they shipped deer and elk meat to their respective homes, a sure symbol of privileged access in a game-depleted Missouri environment.²⁸

By this time, McCann was president of his new banking business and deeply involved in his quarry works, and his friend Moses Wetmore was dead. Perhaps these and other circumstances led to a decreased use of the game park while a few Springfieldians and St. Louisans continued as guests in the fall months. For several years, however, the park went unkept. Fences were not maintained properly, elk and deer escaped, and locals managed to kill several of each.²⁹

McCann, perhaps feeling his sixty-nine years, or the press of his business investments in Greene County, sold his game park in 1917. The new corporate owners were W. J. Clemens, Springfield, and Paul T. Campbell, Kansas City, who later moved to Boston. The acquisition of the park, christened the Ozark Livestock and Game Company, consisted of 4,337 acres, all improvements, and "the deer, elk, cattle, feed, implements and other personal property belonging the company, and now on the premises."³⁰

The name "Ozark Livestock and Game Company" never achieved popular currency. Locals and

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observers statewide continued to refer to it as the "Wetmore preserve" or "the St. Louis Game Park." E.

Y. Mitchell, Jr., prominent Springfield Democrat, enjoyed some use in taking allies on hunting and fishing trips, and suggested to Gov. Frederick Gardner that the owners would be willing to sell it to the state. Clemens and Campbell, however, used the game park much differently than the St. Louisans. True, it was an investment for the future, but it was also a personal retreat and ranch for the Clemens family, who lived at the lodge and the Colonial Hotel in Springfield. They stocked the land with hogs, mules, and cattle and did not entertain an active sportsmen’s retreat, although resident game keepers continued to reside on the property. By 1920 most of the livestock was removed, and through the 1920s local stockmen leased grazing rights during the summer.³¹

During the 1920s the Game and Fish Department began to review Missouri properties for acquisition into its proposed state park system, and sportsmen recommended their favorite haunts. But popular places in any time command higher real estate costs, and it was no different with the old game park.³² Nevertheless, in 1924, Dr. T. M. Sayman, a wealthy St. Louis patent medicine and soap merchant, launched his own campaign to encourage the state to buy the old "Wetmore preserve." Sayman, noted for his eccentric ways, observed correctly that there were several hundred deer and elk and that the state could sell brood stock to other game preserves. He admitted, however, that there were no "gushing springs" that so attracted park supporters, but Sayman claimed he could solve this problem by walking over the land to observe the proper place, and then drilling holes for springs.³³St. Louisan Frank Wielandy, the governor’s Game and Fish Commissioner, suggested to Sayman that wealthy Izaak Waltonians in Kansas City might purchase the expensive park and donate it to the state, or better

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yet, Sayman could memorialize himself by doing the same.³⁴Finally, Wielandy wrote a blistering letter to Gov. Arthur Hyde railing about the doctor’s persistence. Wielandy had explained several times to Dr. Sayman that the state could not purchase the "Wetmore ranch" and concluded that "this illiterate ass" was a public nuisance.³⁵

W. J. Clemens, however, kept the game park in the eye of the public and the Missouri Game and Fish Department. In January 1925 Branson opened a new tobacco market and Clemens furnished an elk dinner for almost 900 people. In the fall of 1925 he donated fifteen deer as starter brood stock in the new state park system. Missouri, like other programs, was trying to establish game refuges and was encouraged by the recent success of Pennsylvania, where managers had re-established deer hunting seasons for the public.³⁶

By the end of the decade, in January 1929, M. B. Skaggs, owner of the Safeway Grocer chain, purchased the game park property, paying $40,000 more than Clemens and Campbell did in 1917. Skaggs, born in southwest Missouri, had a yearning for the Ozarks. He repaired the hunting lodge, constructed new buildings and fences, enclosed additional lands with a deer-proof fence, purchased additional bottomland farms to bring his unit to 9,000 acres, built and stocked a small lake, and added buffalo to the big-game park. Skaggs pastured hundreds of cattle until 1935, when they were removed in favor of limited grazing leases. Skaggs then began to rebuild the natural environment, concluding a management agreement with the Missouri Department of Conservation in 1939.

M. B. Skaggs, unlike previous and recent corporate owners of the game park, became a friendly and visible neighbor to the locals and a patron to the county and state. In the autumn, Skaggs held drawings at the Mincy general store for the division of elk among all the customers of the post office. The modern Missouri Department of Conservation has long considered Skaggs instrumental in restocking Missouri deer herds and turkey populations. Skaggs allowed trapping of both species by conservationists, which included some 750 deer during the 1940s, a one-third contribution toward the state’s total restoration program. Later, M. B. and Stella Skaggs endowed the Skaggs Community Hospital in Branson, while much of the Skaggs Ranch has become public lands. In Taney County the game park lands have been known and are still referred to as the Skaggs Ranch.³⁸

Travelers and temporary residents who have crossed the Ozarks have named the region and given it definition. Major Stephen Long’s expedition named it in 1820, and Carl Saner defined it in 1920; neither stayed in the region, but both left profound marks upon it. So it was with Wetmore and McCann. Their travel and transient residence in the White River country became a central force in its local historical transformations. Their brand of conservation in creating game parks which included sport and recreation has long been passe, but it did represent radical departures at the time, a digression that was also development for the future. M. B. Skaggs fulfilled the Wetmore vision of making a lasting contribution in the conservation of Missouri’s game populations, big and small. The forces of modern tourism are opening in late 1997 a new game park, the Beaver Creek Elk and Cattle Ranch, 3,000 acres and over 150 elk.

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Locally, mobility in and through Taney County continues to give it a unique historical seasoning that is now a taste sought by ever-increasing numbers.³⁹

Notes

1 See Lynn Morrow, "Estate Builders in the Missouri Ozarks: Establishing a St. Louis Tradition," Gateway Heritage, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Winter 1981-1982), pp. 42-48.

2 In 1896 there were 122,000 acres of available government land in Taney County, and state government already proclaimed that "as a health resort Taney is unequalled; many have visited the county to build up a run down constitution...." St. Louisans, especially, were resorting in the wilds of White River. See Eighteenth Annual Report of the Missouri Bureau of Labor Statistics (Jefferson City, Mo.: Tribune Printing Company, 1896), Part II, p. 350. From 1890 to 1895 county population increased 15% from 7,973 to 9,160. Ibid., Part III, p. 414.

3 In early 1891 the incorporation was for the St. Louis Park and Improvement Company, but in November the officers changed it to the St. Louis Park and Agricultural Company. See Corporation Papers, Missouri State Archives (MSA). The stated reason for incorporation on the charter included, ‘to maintain and conduct a pleasure and sporting park located in the county of Taney, State of Missouri, the main feature of which are to be a zoological collection, game and fish pleasure, shooting club and long distance range for rifle practice. Also in connection therewith the milling of lumber, grain, mineral paint, and other minerals, mining, the raising and sale of livestock, fruit and farm produce of every description and the buying and selling of minerals and for the purpose of the Corporation may buy, improve and sell real estate."

4 See a compilation by Linda Myers-Phinney of land acquisitions listed from the Taney County Deed Records, Forsyth, Mo., in possession of author. It is worth noting that the acquisitions included land occupied by Alexander Majors during 1839-4 1, where he lived

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as a young bear hunter and which he later wrote about in his autobiography. See Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier (Chicago and New York: Rand McNally and Co., 1893), pp. 209-14, and Taney County Deed Book 11, pp. 81-82, Taney County Courthouse, Forsyth.

5 Carl Sauer wrote that within the interior Ozarks the hunter/frontiersmen ranked the White River country first in their particular desires for hunting and fishing. Sauer, The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri (New York: Greenwood Press, 1920, rpt. 1968), p. 149.

6 J. P. Litton, "The St. Louis Park and Agricultural Company, Forest and Stream, vol. 47 (1896), p. 24. The leading authority was Judge John Dean Caton, whose individual work and writing in the general stocking of game parks were recognized nationally. See T. S. Palmer, "Private Game Preserves and Their Future in the United States," Bureau of Biological Survey, Circular No. 72 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture), p. 3. Fence statistics and Wisconsin elk source from Paul Dalke and David Spencer, "Development and Land Use on a Private Game Preserve in Southern Taney County, Missouri," The Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 8 (January 1944), pp. 2-3. Game park owner M. B. Skaggs made company records available to Dalke and Spencer; current owners denied any cooperation to the author and Society officers.

7 Taney County Republican, April 16 and 23, 1896, and for fence statistics, see Dalke and Spencer, p. 3. For background on Hunt, see Douglas Mahnkey, ‘The Game Park at Mincy," Ozarks Mountaineer, (May-June 1983), pp. 45-46.

8 Taney County Republican, October 22, 1896.

9 Taney County Republican, November 19, 1896. Wetmore, performing with wit and humor, spoke to the audience and "advised his hearers to chew Star tobacco and raise their boys to do the same.

10 See Appendix, Senate and House Journals, 39th General Assembly (Jefferson City: Tribune Printing Company, 1897), pp. 107- 112.

11 Prather, a Republican, wrote the poem in 1888. Later, during Gov. Hadley’s revision and passage of the Walmsley-Hadley game

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law in 1909, Prather served on the Game and Fish legislative committee.

12 The verse is on the back of sheet music, W J. Bryan to M. C. Wetmore, November 1899, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. The Wyoming and black-tongue references are in Dalke and Spencer, pp. 3-4.

13 St. Louis Republic, November 19 and 21, 1899. With Col. Wetmore and Maj. McCann were Maj. Harvey Salmon, Maj. James Hogan of Wisconsin, Capt. Fred Wishert of Joplin, Mo., Col. W J. Bryan, and more. Bryan traveled with state Democratic chairman Sam Cook. In Springfield, E. Y Mitchell, Jr., son of a Confederate general and brother-in-law of Richard P. Bland, introduced Bryan’s speech. In December 1904 then Secretary of State Sam Cook and others accompanied Wetmore to the park, but without Bryan. Galena News-Oracle, December 15, 1904.

14 Wetmore’s obituary is in the Necrology files, Nov. 10, 1910, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. Wetmore had extensive holdings in the Planter’s Hotel, Commonwealth Realty Company, and several St. Louis financial institutions. However, his once great personal fortune, apparently exceeding $5,000,000, had been reduced to less than $500,000 as a result of his trust-busting battle against the American Tobacco Company. See St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 28, 1910.

15 See McCann’s obituary in the Springfield Leader, March 3, 1920.

16 David Lantz, Raising Deer and Other Large Game Animals in the United States, USDA Biological Survey Bulletin No. 36 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), pp. 45 and 50. The T. S. Palmer survey, ‘Private Game Preserves and Their Future in the United States," USDA, Circular No. 72, May 4, 1910, missed the Wetmore game park. Had Palmer included it, the St. Louis Game Park would have ranked fourth in size among some 500 in the U.S.

17 St. Louisans resorted at the Maine Club for only a decade. It was sold at auction in 1913 to Harry Merritt of St. Louis, leased for a couple of seasons, and in 1915, it became the new school. See the Branson White River Leader, June 6 and 20, 1913, and descriptions of the Maine Club are in Helen and Townsend Godsey, Flight of the Phoenix: A Biography of The School of the Ozarks (Point Lookout, Mo.: S of 0 Press, 1984), pp. 638-39, and Kathleen Van Buskirk, "The Lodge that Traveled from Maine," Ozarks Mountaineer, Vol. 26, No. 2 (March 1978), pp. 20-2 1.

18 Hobart and Lee also founded the Branson Town Company for real estate speculation along the new railroad town. In 1907, however, they sold out to St. Louisans, Vernon Todd and Willard Heath, who were prime movers in establishing the Maine Club in Taney County. Todd founded a boating company, a bank, lumber yard, and became a principal promoter of Branson. Branson Town Company, Corporations Files, Missouri State Archives, and Kathleen Van Buskirk, "Branson and the Town Company," Ozarks Mountaineer (January-February 1988), pp. 40-45.

19 The Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri 1909, vol. 2 (Jefferson City, Mo.: The Hugh Stephens Printing Company, 1910), Chapter 49, Section 6591. The game market at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, interpreted by some as a display of unabandoned commercial plunder, signaled a public outcry that led, in part, to the first modern game law, the Walmsley bill in 1905. See Charles Callison, Man and Wildlife in Missouri (Harrisburg, Pa.: The Stackpole Company, 1953), p. 7.

20 Major George McCann to Herbert Hadley, Feb. 2, 1910, Hadley Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-Columbia. Model farms also attracted the attention of Hadley and it was in Taney County that land was chosen as a prize for the best plan to cultivate five acres. See "Who Will Win This Farm in Taney Co.?," Columbia University Missourian, June 22, and "To Award Five-Acre Farm Prize Thursday," ibid., June 28, 1910. Hadley’s log cabin still stands west of the country club in Jefferson City on private land.

21 The 1909 game laws, more popularly termed the WalmsleyHadley bills, were the foundation for regulations and collection of fees until the constitutional amendment of 1936 that established the Missouri Department of Conservation. Rep. Harry Walmsley, Kansas City, sponsored the foundation of the statute in 1905, which was then repealed in 1907, but reintroduced and strengthened in Hadley’s first legislative session, spring 1909. For extend-

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ed discussion of the cultural alliance of early conservation and tourism, see Richard Sellars, "Early Promotion and Development of Missouri’s Natural Resources," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1972, pp. 120-4 1.

22 Francis Jones, postmaster, to Jesse Tolerton, November 15, 1912, Herbert Hadley Papers, f. 366, WHMC, UMC.

23 Garry Yount to Jesse Tolerton, November 16, 1912, Hadley Papers, f. 366, WHMC, UMC.

24 Herbert Hadley to Jesse Tolerton, November 16, 1912, Hadley Papers, vol. 8, p. 318, WHMC, UMC.

25 David Lantz, Raising Deer and Other Large Game Animals in the United States, USDA Biological Survey, Bulletin No. 36 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), p. 33. This is all the more impressive when a decade later as the state imposed a five-year closed season on deer, Missouri newspapers reported that only some 140 deer remained in the Missouri wilds. See Branson White River Leader, November 12, 1925.

26 Jonathan Fairbanks and Clyde Edwin Tuck, Past and Present of Greene County, Missouri (Indianapolis: A. W. Bowen and Company, 1915), p. 516. Meetings at the game park may have influenced W J. Bryan to visit Hadley in Jefferson City. See Jerena Giffen, First Ladies of Missouri (Jefferson City, Mo.: Giffen Enterprises, 1970, rpt. 1996), p. 157.

27 ‘Brewers to Inspect Land for Ozark Game Preserve," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 29, 1910. Apparently, between 1906 and 1910 a number of St. Louis parties embarked from Branson by wagon for the park. The Busch family brought Harry B. Hawes and guests, Black domestics, and wooden barrels packed with Budwieser beer. On one outing these sportsmen did not have any luck killing deer. Bill Hunt, the caretaker, and Floyd Jones, wagon driver, went to the woeds and in a couple of hours brought back a wagon load of deer for eating and trophies. Floyd Jones ins., copy in possession of author.

28 White River Leader, Dec. 18, 1914.

29 Dalke and Spencer, p. 4. The Branson White River Leader tried to report guests to the park. See, for example, December 18, 1914, and December 10, 1915.

30 Taney County Deed Book 56, p. 9, Taney County Courthouse, Forsyth, Mo. In 1910 Clemons, a manager for the Reserve Loan Life Insurance Company of Indianapolis, Ind., moved to Springfield and located an office in the Woodruff Building. Springfield Republican, February 3, 1911.

31 Dalke and Spencer, p. 4, and Doug Mahnkey, "The Game Park at Mincy," Ozarks Mountaineer, Vol. 31, No. 4 & 5 (May-June 1983), p. 46, and E. Y. Mitchell, Jr., to Gov. F. D. Gardner, Oct. 11, 1919, E. Y Mitchell Papers, WHMC, UMC.

32 Other contenders who lost out to state acquisition because the price was too high included the large Ha Ha Tonka estate in Camden County, Roaring River in Barry County, Shepherd of the Hills properties in Taney County, the Shut-In Club at Lake Killarney in Iron County, and Onondaga Cave in Crawford County. The state, however, was convinced that the park system must be founded in the Ozarks. See, in part, "Report of Special Committee Appointed to Investigate Sites offered for a proposed State Park and Game Preserve," Appendix to House and Senate Journals, 48th General Assembly, State of Missouri, Vol. II, 1915.

33 Dr. T. M. Sayman to Gov. Arthur Hyde, July 30, 1924, Arthur Hyde Papers, f. 596, WHMC, UMC. Sayman was encouraged by Springfield realtor W. N. Veirs, who represented the owner, W J. Clemens.

34 Frank Wielandy to Dr. T. M. Sayman, August 5, 1924, and Wielandy to Gov. Arthur M. Hyde, September 9, 1924, Missouri Game and Fish Commission, State Parks Correspondence, 1924- 29, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Jefferson City.

35 Frank Wielandy to Arthur Hyde, Sept. 11, 1924, Hyde Papers, f. 597, WHMC, UMC. Sayman eventually purchased Roaring River and gave it to the state "without any strings tied to it." See "Dr. Sayman Gives Park," Game and Fish News, Vol. 5, No. 2 (February 1929), p. 43, and an overview of Sayman (1853-1937) by Senator Emory Melton, The First 150 Years in Cassoille, Missouri, 1845-1995 (Cassville, Mo.: Litho Printers, 1995), pp. 97-101. Wielandy and the Game and Fish Department wanted to create game refuges on a Pennsylvania model. The idea of these large expanses of controlled open range reminded many of the game park. See Branson White River Leader, February 27, 1925.

36 Branson White River Leader, January 16, 1925, and ‘Donation of Fifteen Deer Made by Taney County Game Preserve," Game and Fish News (November 1925), p. 3.

37 In 1933 Skaggs’ purchase of Frank Drury’s 1,400 acre ranch on the north side of the game park increased his holdings to 7,200 acres and gave him over six miles of White River frontage. Branson White River Leader, March 23, 1933. See also Dalke and Spencer, pp. 4-5, Mahnkey, "Game Park," p. 47, and Michael Woodring, "Drury-Mincy Wildlife Area," Missouri Conservationist (January 1992), p. 10. The Kansas City Star, January 12, 1941, ran a photo feature of the ‘Deer Roundup in a Missouri Woodland" managed by L. W. Hornkohl and A. Starker Leopold.

38 Mahnkey, "Game Park," p. 47. The current owner of the game park land that includes the old lodge and center of social activity since 1987 is James Keeter of Royal Oak Enterprises, manufacturers of charcoal briquets and activated carbon, headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. Skaggs entered into a long-term lease with the Department of Conservation, which created the Drury Refuge in 1939 and the subsequent Mincy Public Hunting Area. In 1987, following the death of M. B. Skaggs in 1976, the DOC purchased several thousand acres from the Skaggs Trust, and the Trust donated more land that currently surrounds the Keeter Ranch. See Woodring, "Drury-Mincy Wildlife Area," pp. 9-11, and Taney County Republican, August 27, 1987. M. B. Skaggs is an enrollee of the Greater Ozarks Hall of Fame, College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, Mo.

39 For a description of the modern elk ranch see the Taney County Times, December 18, 1996, and for growth of the elk economy inMissouri, Taney County 2lmes, March 5, 1997.

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The St. Louis Game Park: Experiments in Conservation and Recreation by Lynn Morrow

The St. Louis Game Park:
Experiments in Conservation and Recreation
by Lynn Morrow