Volume 36, Number 2 - Fall 1996


Ozarks/Ozarks:
Establishing a Regional Term
by Lynn Morrow

Millions of tourists now travel to the Ozarks, but it was not always so. Historically, the Ozark land as a great American region within these states did not attract large migrations for settlements and foundings of institutions, commerce, and society. In fact, the lack of these regional characteristics has provided for writers a context for descriptions of a "thin" society, that is, one without complex or diverse social and corporate organization.

But the Ozarks was "thick" with natural resources. It possessed a distinctive topography from all lands that surrounded it--upland prairie, park-like forests, deeply entrenched valleys, and widespread erosional features that geologists call karst. Karst features are what the rest of us call caves, springs, sinkholes, and natural arches. Ozark minerals and game, and later timber, were the region’s defining early characteristics and attractions for generations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Amidst nineteenth-century visionary designs for the exploitation of Ozark natural resources, state government employees and scholars--usually scientists--marched forth to survey, study, write, and publish about the Ozarks. Geologists and geographers have provided the primary paradigms for understanding the distinctions of the Ozarks, and still do. Geologists call the region the Ozark Uplift, geographers, the Ozark Plateau. Historians, coming very late to the study of the region, some "300 miles long by 170 miles wide," about the size of Tennessee, generally refer to it as the Ozarks, following foundational writing by journalists and folklorists.

Since the term Ozark(s) is essentially a place-name with a three-century history, it is interesting that in the late twentieth century writers and publications still stumble in trying to describe its origins and "proper use." The nationally significant Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in its Missouri, Quick-Fact Book, 1991, confessed that the name has an "obscure origin." Obviously, the Kansas City think tank failed to consult a standard geogra phy like Milt Rafferty, The Ozarks, Land and Life, 1980, or history like William Parrish et al., Missouri, The Heart of the Nation, 1980, or placename scholarship like Robert Ramsey, Our Storehouse of Missouri Place Names, 1973, or a good historical dictionary. These sources and others give the origin of the term, but a case can be made for a more complex history of use. One general observation is that during the eighteenth century Ozark was a noun that referred to Arkansas Post; in the nineteenth century, Ozark was normally a modifier or an adjective in a variety of two-word placenames until late in the century; and during the early twentieth century, journalists and commercial tourism needed a shorter, promotional term and the one-word Ozarks became common.

The following survey will briefly describe the on-gin, but more importantly the use, of Ozark(s) and suggest its special application to southwest Missouri especially the White River Hills; the discoveries of Marble Cave and other karst features in southwest Missouri played significant roles in the public perception of where the Ozarks was located.

The exact origin and diffusion of the term Ozark will be forever embedded in the hazy generations of colonial exploration in the Mississippi Valley. A variety of bogus explanations can be found that connect meaning to the term Ozark(s) as one of "bows" or "bends" or "bois d’arc/bois aux arcs" (reputedly "wood for bows"), "azoic arc mountains" from an old geologist’s term, a provincial composite of the rivers Osage and Arkansas, Os and the Ark, for Os-Ark, and more. However, Morris Arnold’s groundbreaking work in colonial Arkansas during the past fifteen years provides help. The geographic origin was in the lowland forests of the Arkansas Delta, a land where the White, St. Francois, and Arkansas rivers met camps of Indian families, adventurers, and backwoodsmen who hunted bear and deer for the regional economy of New Orleans.1

Arnold’s work indicates that "from the earliest times, the Frenchmen dated their letters ‘Aux

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Arcansas’ meaning at the Arkansas, i.e., where the Arkansas liQuapaw] Indians lived." Where they lived was near Arkansas Post, a colonial entrepot on the lower White River dating from 1686. There were at least three distinct locations for the Post in the Arkansas River Delta upriver from the mouth of White River with the Mississippi. The location in the colonial correspondence was shortened to "Aux Arcs" and pronounced "Ozarks" in French. The linguistic precedent, or corruption if you prefer, occurred in the decades prior to the French and Indian War, 1756-1763. The one-word Ozarks may well have been used in vernacular speech, but it is curiously absent in major writings on the region during the nineteenth century, giving way to two-word terminologies, e.g., Ozark Mountains.2

When the Spanish assumed military control of colonial Arkansas, the term began a history of generic use by the European powers contending for the lucrative fur trade of colonial Arkansas. For a time, travelers referred to a Spanish Ozark (the traditional Arkansas Post settlement on White River) and a British Ozark (c. 1768-1779) at Concordia. English traders had established Concordia across the Mississippi from the mouth of White River. The British used the post to supply liquor to the Quapaw Indians in the Britons’ attempt to harass the Spanish. The Quapaw, however, remained friendly with the Spanish as they had been with the French. A fire destroyed British Ozark in 1779 and its hunting families joined Spanish Ozark, i.e., Arkansas Post, on White River. By 1780, the Arkansas Post was also referred to in Anglo correspondence as Oasark (corrupted from Osark)--a specific place, the trading post on White River. Much later, in 1818, Thomas Nuttall wrote that the remnants of Quapaw Indians commonly referred to themselves as Osark.

The "Aux Arcansas" trade was much easier to pursue up the larger Arkansas River than its swampy tributaries to the north. Thus, the majority of Ozark trade came from the northwestern hinterlands of that great river valley. As the eighteenth century continued, hunters moved up the Arkansas River drainage and up the White River into the Little Red, the Black, and St. Francois rivers; a very few men entered the White River uplands (above modern Batesville) during the late eighteenth century, mostly after 1790. The White River drainage was still of secondary importance to the Arkansas River in the fur trade. By the close of the century, an undeclared

"Ozark Region" was the Arkansas River and its numerous watersheds penetrated by adventuresome traders, while the specific applications for Ozark included the Arkansas Post, the Quapaw Indians, and the Arkansas River.

By the 1790s eastern Indians and Americans were beginning to explore and settle further into the Arkansas uplands. Small camps moving up the rivers appeared at the mouths of tributaries. Traders met, worked, and did business at easily identified natural settings--river bottom barrens or prairies that settlers named like Oil Trough Bottom, mouth of Big North Fork River, mouth of Bear Creek (modern Boone County, Ark., currently under Bull Shoals Lake), and more. It is easy to speculate that the hunters and settlers diffused the term Ozark up White River as they entered ever deeper into the Ozark forest, i.e., the forest of Arkansas. Bear hunters, in particular, who camped to process the lucrative bear oil and bear products in addition to associated forest resources procured in bear hunting, deserve primary consideration as the cultural force who diffused the term Ozark. But, by 1800 there was no regional term commonly accepted by the literate for the uplands.

There were, however, some competing terms for the Trans-Mississippi interior uplands. They included usages of the Black Mountains and the Masserne Mountains in regions known to us now as the Ozarks; the origins of those terms are obscure, and their use was discontinued by the mid-nineteenth century. The older and more widespread use of Ozark remained current vernacular with traders, travelers and explorers, and finally settlers.

Explorers and writers continued using Ozark in a variety of ways. Fortescue Cuming in his TransMississippi tour of 1807-1809 referred to Arkansas Post as the "settlement of Arkansas or Ozark"; Christian Schultz in 1807-1808 mentioned the "Ozark or Arkansas" Indians; John Bradbury in 1809-18 11 wanted to travel from St. Louis to Ozark, i.e., the Arkansas River; Thomas Ashe in 1816 wrote about the "Ozark or Orkansas River" and the "post of Ozark on the Orkansas River"; and in 1818 Thomas Nuttall used "Osark" for the Post and the Indians. Henry R. Schoolcraft was unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the term Ozark and used "western country" as a significant geographic term in the title of his first book in 1819 and the "Interior of Missouri and Arkansas" in his second book in 1821.

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Major Stephen H. Long (1784-1864), United States Topographical Engineers, undertook explorations in 18 19-1820 of Trans-Mississippi regions in the Great Plains up the Missouri River into the Platte River, south across the Arkansas River, and into the Red River regions of the Southwest. One result of his expeditions was to place permanently the name Ozark Mountains on published maps. Edwin James, botanist and geologist, and later an army surgeon, was among several scholars on these expeditions, joining them in 1820, and was the principal author and compiler of data for these adventures. Long had already traveled extensively in the Southwest, founding Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1817.

The Long expedition of 1819 is the one that pronounced Ozark Mountains on the region, and James specifically credited Major Long in the naming as the first person to apply the term Ozark to the highlands of Missouri and Arkansas. As indicated on their map, these mountains stretched from near St. Louis southwestward into what we know today as the Ouachita Mountains to the Red River, or in the context of 1820, the Ozark Mountains extended from St. Louis to the Mexican territory of Texas (see map). In this first formal use of the term Ozark Mountains, James wrote that the source of the Osage River was on the north side of the Ozark Mountains, "opposite those [sources] of the White River" which were on the other side of the drainage to the Mississippi River. When James and the explorers were approaching Arkansas from the west, he said, "We were now at the western base of that interesting group of hills, to which we have attempted to give the name of the almost extinct tribe of Ozarks [Quapaws] ..." Major Stephen Long, an official of the historical antecedent of the federal Army Corps of Engineers, and his party, had finally named the Ozarks.3

For the next generation the status of Ozark Mountains as an official term employed by the Army Engineers in Edwin James’s formal account continued and could be found on a number of maps. George Featherstonaugh, another scholar in the Trans-Mississippi in 1834-1835, noted the penchant of French Canadians to shorten names. For example, he said that in going to the Arkansas Mountains they would go to "aux Arcs" and "thus these highlands have obtained the name Ozark from the American travelers." Sen. Lewis Linn of Ste. Genevieve addressed the U.S. Congress in 1836 saying that southeastern Missouri "is now better known under the appellation of Ozark," and St. Louisan Aiphonso Wetmore in 1837 published in his now famous Gazetteer of the State of Missouri that "the Ozark mountains are elevations of a reputable class." Scientist and physician George Engelmann (1809-1884) left St. Louis in 1837 for Little Rock, where he viewed the "Ozark forests" of the Little Red River. Josiah Gregg (1806-1850) in his famous The Commerce of the Prairies, 1844, wrote about the "craggy ridges about the Arkansas frontier--skirts of the Ozark Mountains." By 1853, when Schoolcraft published his revised and combined narratives on his journeys into the "western country" his title included the phrase Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas. Ever after, the term Ozark(s) as a geographical term has not been questioned, only debated as to geographical extent.

The late-nineteenth-century tradition of studying the natural and physical world of the Ozarks began a literature that would profoundly affect the use of the term Ozark(s) and fuel the discussions about its geographic extent, conversations that would continue late into the twentieth century. In 1853 the Missouri General Assembly formed the first Missouri Geological Survey, that is, tax-supported research to study natural resources in the state. Since legends of great mineral wealth in the Ozark Mountains permeated the oral and written traditions, George C. Swallow, the first state geologist, directed most of the Survey’s resources into southern Missouri. The scientists completed some mapping and a few reports until the Civil War began--the Survey did not resume until 1870. Then, another short era of work commenced with Garland Carr Broadhead becoming state geologist in 1873. Broadhead’s work in geology and as an author of Missouri and Ozark articles and reports for the next generation would be significant in state history in providing a popular and scholarly forum for the common use of the term Ozark.4 In 1874 the legislature discontinued the Survey and turned its property over to the School of Mines at Rolla. Scholars continued their work from Rolla and the University of Missouri, Columbia, until the Survey was reestablished in

1889.

H. R. Schoolcraft had come to the Ozarks to study minerals, make a name for himself, and secure a government position--a goal he eventually reached in the Great Lakes Region. Others followed him to the

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Ozarks, often looking for the fabled riches of colonial lore, while lead mining in southeast Missouri proved profitable for cautious investors. Travel in the interior Ozarks -- whether for the Indian trade of the 1820s or "prospecting tours" of settlers and mineral exploration -- resulted in the knowledge that the center of the region was high, or was a table land, while the outer edges sloped to lower elevations. Explorers, traders, and later scientists and journalists became acquainted with this ridge land that ran generally southwest from St. Louis into southwest Missouri. Nathan Parker, author of Missouri, As It Is in 1867, and state school superintendent, called this ridge the Ozark Chain and the Ozark Range, relying upon Schoolcraft for descriptions. He found the term Ozark Mountains upon "some of the first [nineteenth-century] maps of the State" and quoted G. C. Swallow, state geologist, for more of his general view of topographical Missoun.

Images on early and mid-nineteenth-century maps faithfully reflect this Ozark Ridge viewpoint; even the Lewis and Clark map of 1809 Louisiana contained the symbols--a southwesterly hatching--of the ridge. Cartographers placed hatchmarks to represent mountains that followed the high ground into southwest Missouri and beyond. Writers used the ridge to describe places, land or water, on either side of it. G. C. Broadhead in 1874 wrote about the "heavy growth of pine.. .south of the main Ozark ridge." In one of the numerous state promotional texts, John O’Neill in 1877, writing for the Missouri legislature, described Greene County extending "over the highest summits of the Ozark Mountains" while Douglas County lay on the "south side of the Ozark Mountains" or on the south side of the ridge.5

The Ozark sub-region we now know as the St. Francois Mountains in southeast Missouri, a land of Missouri’s fabled granite rocks, atop the Ozarks’ highest elevation, was the location of historic mineral lands and became the Ozark Center. It was a "center" as all other Ozark lands were lower in altitude. The proximity of this area to Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis, and the lucrative profits from minerals over a long period of time, made the geographical area well known. Familiarity with the lower southern Missouri counties, among writers living in Missouri’s major river towns, was not common.

Mineral investors in southwest Missouri stimulated the interest, survey, and exploration of Ozark topography. The federal Government Land Office

survey contracts led to fairly accurate representations of Ozark drainage patterns, but the last GLO survey contract let in Missouri was in 1852. Then it was up to private investors to examine the land more particularly--railroad and mining interests did just that. In 1857 the Granby Mining and Smelting Company led by state Senator Henry Blow (1817-1875) and brother Peter Blow, Jr., and Mayor Ferdinand Kennett, all of St. Louis, became a sensation. By 1859 with its some 8,000 population, Granby was by far the largest settlement in southwest Missouri.

Interrupted by the Civil War, Peter and Henry Blow reorganized their company in 1865 with engineer James B. Eads and two others. This new company specifically targeted their business operations for the counties of Jasper, Newton, McDonald, Lawrence, Barry, Stone, and Taney. The Blow family and their associates included scientists working in and out of government who discussed what and where Ozark minerals might be. Their curiosity and anxious spirit of gain would lead them into the White River country. And, the Blow family became principal voices for the promotion of the Pacific railroad from Rolla through Springfield and westward toward their mineral deposits in Newton County.

Ozark caves, because of their karst erosion, were good places to search for veins of ore; caves also became enormous attractions among "curiosity-seekers," i.e., early tourists who sought wilderness adventure. The Blow survey teams explored many square miles of southwest Missouri from Granby southeast into Stone and Taney counties. On the way in 1869, they visited a locally known sinkhole in Stone County--they only found high quality marble or limestone deposits, not commercially viable ore. Later, this karst opening became Marble Cave, while Stone County became known in state literature for its numerous caves to be explored. Promotional and scientific literature began to include "Ozark marbles" and Ozark lead deposits in their general descriptions. The southeasterly axis of mineral surveys from Granby to Lead Hill, Arkansas, became known as the "Ten O’Clock Run"--a large region wherein St. Louis mineral interests, and others with venture capital, speculated in "mineral lands" for a generation. Investors were encouraged by the Joplin area strikes on the northwest and later by the 1880s diggings on the southeast in Marion County, Arkansas. Surely, they thought, as the century wore on in a wake of dis

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coveries of caves and natural bridges, a great strike lay in between.6

During the 1880s, the combined efforts of the United States Geological Survey, the Missouri Geological Survey, and private capitalists began to produce the first systematic maps of the Ozarks and the rest of Missouri. The counties that received first attention were those of immediate economic promise, sometimes including scientific interest. The White River counties were not among these. However, the former state geologist, G. C. Swallow, and the current state geologist, G. C. Broadhead, and others began to discuss the various sandstone and limestone stratigraphy in the region, formalizing the vernacular "cotton rock" term used in construction, calling the strata collectively the Ozark Series in the larger region of the Ozark Highland. The scientists, by looking inward at Missouri’s resources , took an increasing inventory of natural benefits.7

This scholarly introspection increasingly used the vernacular Ozark term to modify additional phenomenon or concepts. Two Ozarkers who contributed significantly to the geological discussions were Curtis F. Marbut from Barry County -- who distinguished himself in statewide studies at the University of Missouri and beyond -- and Edward M. Shepherd from Greene County -- professor at Drury College. Geologists conceded in their scholarly reports that Ozark Mountains "has clung to the district ever since its earliest explorations," but preferred to use the more recent and more expressive term, a "domeshaped" Ozark Uplift, sculpted by erosion; scholars noted what travelers had long observed--"nearly all the ridges rise to about the same height," giving view to the ever-level horizon.

The sub-regions of the Ozarks had begun to attract specialized study. The scientific search for well-defined districts within the Ozark Mountains of Major Stephen Long that stretched all the way to Texas resulted in a smaller region. The Guachita Mountains of Arkansas became recognized in state and national journals as "materially distinct" from the hilly regions to the north, while the Shawnee Hills of southern Illinois were considered geologically kin. In the 1890s scholars walked across the Ozarks to study "ridges and knobs" and mineralized spring waters including those in Barry and Stone counties. Scientists representing the Missouri Geological Survey and the Missouri World’s Fair Commission in 1893 conducted an exploration and published an article about Marble Cave in Scientific American that brought more attention to the White River Hills. In June 1896 Missouri’s talented Luella A. Owen explored the cave and gave it and the region notoriety in her Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills, 1898. Owen’s book suggested that the Marble Cave area become a national park as her writing became the standard text on Ozark caves, caves "centered in southwest Missouri," for fifty years. Expanded articulation about the sub-regions of the Ozark Highland led to a recognition of several Ozarks, i.e., similar but different natural or physical expressions found throughout the greater region.

By the end of the nineteenth century, journalists used the geologists’ terms with frequency. Railroads touched most Missouri counties, allowing travel, commerce, settlement, and easy access to towns, except for the Missouri Ozark counties that did not have railroads. Newspaper stories included "local color" tales, especially dialect stories, that imitated themes in recent Appalachian writings about these rustic realms, often becoming Sunday features in the urban papers. Vernacular use of the term Ozark led to an extension in ever-widening commercial, ethnic, and cultural descriptions and in naming new civic organizations. Examples included the Ozark Range Mining Company in Lawrence County and the Ozark Battalion, a Union veteran’s organization (separate from the GAIR) created from south-central and southeast Missouri counties who began holding reunions in Rolla, Salem, Cuba, and elsewhere. Using Ozark became fashionable and was a complimentary sobriquet captured by promoters in Greene County for the county seat--the Queen City of the Ozarks.8

South of Greene County, journalists and promoters who saw opportunities in the embryonic White River tourism of the early twentieth century placed newspaper stories throughout Missouri and the Midwest. With the impoundment of White River and the creation of Lake Taneycomo in 1913, the traditional geographic descriptions that used two words, e.g., Ozark Uplift, Ozark Plateau, Ozark Mountains etc., began to give room to a shorter, punchier term more palatable in promotion -- the Ozarks. Meanwhile, a rash of new organizations using the modifier Ozark appeared, e.g., Ozark Power and Water Company (for electric transmission from Powersite dam), Ozark Trails Association (forerunner to Route 66 promotion),

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Ozark Plan (promotional real estate), the Ozark Bankers Development Committee, Ozark Dairy Association, Ozark Fruit Growers Association, Ozark Press Association (changed from the Southwest Missouri Press Association), and by 1919, the influential Ozark Playgrounds Association. The rapid appearance of these commercial organizations in southwest Missouri kept the public imagination focused upon a "Heart of the Ozarks" in the White River Hills. Government publications reinforced the "Heart of the Ozarks" location in southwest Missouri with phrases like "This is in one of the Ozark counties" when discussing White River drainage areas in Barry, Douglas, and other counties. In 1916 the statewide agricultural magazine, The Missouri Farmer, said plainly that Branson was in "the heart of the Ozarks" where Harold Bell Wright found the setting for his story, Shepherd of the Hills.9 Specific new placenames enlivened the usage with the appearance of Camp Ozark and later Ozark Beach along Lake Taneycomo.

Scientists increased their analysis and comparison of the Ozarks with other regions and began publishing more conclusive statements about the Ozarks. Fundamental were Curtis Marbut’s path-breaking studies, Soils of the Ozark Region in 1910, and his Soil Reconnaissance of the Ozark Region of Missouri and Arkansas in 1914. Marbut simply said, "The Ozark region of Missouri is unique. It is the only region of its kind in the world." Marbut’s summaries of the natural and cultural Ozarks stimulated Missourian Carl Sauer to publish The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri, 1920, the most influential monograph for academic study of the Ozarks in the twentieth century. Sauer’s benchmark examination was immediately used by journalists and scholars who wrote of the region and the subregions, called the Ozarks. Well before Sauer’s book, the term Ozark Mountains had even found its way into legal decisions of Missouri’s higher courts when discussions of economics, transportation, waterways, etc. were in order. By the end of the 192 Os some journalists, such as May S. Hillburn in southwest Missouri, began to claim the title of an "Ozark feature writer."10

The upper White River country was the first Ozark sub-region to become culturally associated with the Heart of the Ozarks because of the immense popularity of Harold Bell Wright’s Shepherd of the Hills, the new access via railroad, and the recre

ational catalyst, Lake Taneycomo. The widely touted "Galena to Branson Float," primarily a wilderness adventure for affluent urban tourists in the early twentieth century, received broad coverage in newspapers. The Arcadia image developed in the White River Hills, c. 1910-1930, established the area as synonymous with the Ozarks. When I questioned Missouri senior citizens during the late 1970s about "where is the Ozarks?," from as far away as Miller County to as close as Lawrence County the summary answer was always "down there on White River." The promoters had made their point, and still do.

Since the Lake of the Ozarks came into being in 1931, there has existed some debate over where the "true Ozarks" lie and continuing discussion over the boundaries of the Ozarks -- the arguments are over the distinctions in geology or ethnic origin or local pride in a particular place. These questions are not likely to subside as long as vigorous Ozarks tourism continues.11 But the term Ozark is also one of feeling, not precise boundaries. We do not have to agree exactly where we mean by the Ozarks.

In recent years, we occasionally hear the ludicrous notion that grammatical explanations justify, even demand, the omission of the "s" with any use of the word Ozark. Springfieldians, who are without a body of juried professional work on the Ozarks, have been vocal on this score; a commercial publisher of Ozark regional books in Arkansas is even guilty of this faux pas. However, the following brief look at selected professional work may be useful to those who are attracted to either the great "Ozark region" or the great "Ozarks region" and who are not sure of "correct" usage of the term.

Don Lance, emeritus professor of English linguistics at the University of Missouri, has considered the "s" issue. A national forum for the use of place-name discussion is the U. S. Board on Geographic Names. Their position for official names and traditional usage of English speakers is at the core of any proper usage, i.e., established, historical, and local usage, written and verbal. When considering such usage, the tradition of local residents must be taken into account. What is recorded on maps and in public documents is a primary documentary source for what is proper. Thus, Ozarks and Ozark Mountains parallel Adirondacks and Adirondack Mountains. In Missouri we have Lake Ozark and Lake of the Ozarks. The French cartographers used abbreviations in the Thans-Mississippi resulting in aux Os for

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the Osage. Are we to say, the Osages (les Osages), all the time? Hardly. We can properly say the Osage and the Osage Indians. Funny that Curtis Marbut, Carl Sauer, Vance Randolph, Robert L. Ramsay, W K McNeil, and others never had to field this deliberation! 12

The late Ernie Deane, placename specialist for Arkansas, commented over a decade ago about the widespread and diversified use of Ozark and Ozarks. He, too, recognized the legacy from regional history that gave the Fayetteville area the Ozark Barber Shop to Ozarks Electric Cooperative.

The Ozark Society, formed in 1962 by Dr. Neil Compton, apparently has not suffered from any loss of an "s" in their name. Dan Saults did not have trouble writing about the Ozark Highland Trail, a wilderness journey across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, that did not demand an "s". The University of Arkansas Press can publish Ozark Vernacular Houses studied in the Arkansas Ozarks,

S.C. Thrnho stories about the Ozarks Frontier, and Schoolcraft’s Ozark Journal about the interior of the Ozarks in making contributions to Ozarks history. Thus, any writer who wishes to use an"s," or not, can do so without fear of being "incorrect."

Notes

1. See Morris S. Arnold, Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836, 1985, and Colonial Arkansas 1 686-1804: A Social and Cultural History, 1991, both from the University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville.

2. Travelers and cartographers occasionally used a two-syllable expression, e.g., Oas Arke, referring to the Arkansas River, as Moses Austin did in 1801 in his voyage down the Mississippi River. See the Austin Papers, Annual Report of the Amen can Historical Association, Eugene C. Barker, ed., 1919. Thanks to Walter Schroeder, University of Missouri-Columbia for this citation. A Union soldier who had just encountered the Ozarks early in the Civil War used a two-word term, Ozark hills, when writing home about his adventures in 1861. See Council Bluffs Nonpareil, November 30, 1861, "From Rolla." This source was supplied by John Bradbury, manuscript specialist, University of Missouri-Rolla.

3. For decades many Ozarkers have referred to B.C.E., Before the Corps of Engineers, in describing life prior to the construction of the great reservoirs. It is ironic that Major Long’s crew, representing the Army Corps, was here almost before anyone else and provided the report that formalized the lasting name. Moreover, Schoolcraft, upon leaving Missouri in the Spring of 1819, met several members of Long’s expedition at Herculaneum, Mo. One wonders whether they used any Ozark term in their conversations.

4. By 1905 Broadhead’s wide-ranging intellect had produced some 168 reports, articles, and newspaper stories about the natural and historic past of Missouri; many included themes about the Ozarks. G. C. Broadhead Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-Columbia, f. 16.

5. In the twentieth century, one writer, wanting something different than the image of the hatching, or the term ridge, used the metaphor "an irregular vertebra column" that stretched southwesterly across Missouri. See The Missouri Yearbook of Agriculture (Columbia: State Board of Agriculture, 1915), p. 601.

6. In 1866, local exploration in Greene County led to the discovery of Knox or Lincoln Cave, now known as Fantastic Caverns. In 1868, G. C. Broadhead reported in the Third Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture the "large cave a few miles south of Ozark," the site now known as the Civil War cave. Then Broadhead noted that "Missouri has no such large and noted caves" in comparison to Virginia and Kentucky--the reports of the Granby surveyors were not yet in. In 1869, the discovery and workings of the Alma mines in Christian County signaled continued interest in the mineral future of the White River region. By 1874, G. C. Broadhead could reveal in the Report of the Geological Survey of 1873-1874 that "in southwest Missouri very extensive caverns"exist.

7. The Ozarks sedimentary rocks are by far the most important rocks in the modern economy. For a readable and scholarly narrative see A.G. Unklesbay and Jerry D. Vineyard, Missouri Geology (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992) and see G. C. Swallow’s, "Ozark Highlands" essay in the Fifteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture ... for the Years 1880 and 1881, pp. 309-3 14.

8. Springfieldians had used the Queen City term from at least the mid- 1870s following the arrival of the railroad in 1870.

9. See Raymond A. Young, Cultivating Cooperation: A History of the Missouri Farmers Association (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 29-30, and the Missouri Red Book or Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics ... (Jefferson City: Hugh Stephens Printing Co., 1912). This popular series was the Red Book of state economics to distinguish it from the Blue Book, the state manual of politics and bureaucracy. Out-of-state real estate companies contributed to the currency of the term Ozark, such as the Ozark Plateau Land Company of Buffalo, New York.

10. Highlands and their highlanders were popular terms in the early twentieth century. They were brought into prominence by several books including Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, 1913, Sauer’s Ozark Highland book, and John Campbell’s The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, 1921. In the Ozarks, "Highlander" clubs or associations were popular for a generation.

11. In 1967 the Missouri General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 216 that made the rock Ozarkite, commonly called chert, the official rock and lithologic emblem of Missouri.

12. Professor Lance, longtime editor of the Missouri Folklore Society Journal, has much more to say on this subject. For now, I thank him and Ellen Massey for their comments. Letters from Ellen Massey to Don Lance, June 29, July 2, and August 15, 1994; Lance to Massey, July 27, 1994; Morrow to Lance, April 29, 1996; and Lance to Morrow, August 14, 1996.

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