Levi Morrill was a graduate of Bowdoin College, but he spent the major portion of his life as postmaster in a tiny office at Notch, Missouri. Harold Bell Wright made his home near the forks of the road which gave Notch its name. He and Morrill became great friends. When The Shepherd of the Hills came from the press, the old postmaster had stepped into literature as Uncle Ike. He was known to thousands of people by this name until his death in 1929.
William Henry Lynch was a pioneer of the Ozark awakening. He was a man with an international mind, born in Quebec, Canada. He was a scientist, lecturer, and traveler. He became interested in Marvel Cave in Stone County, Missouri, and helped explore the twenty-two passages and three rivers of the mammoth cavern. In 1889 he bought the cave property and devoted a large part of the remaining thirty-eight years of his life to it.
Lynch possessed a strange passion for his cave. Its vast interior was a challenge to his genius. He was a poet, and subterranean beauty was his theme. He traveled widely, lecturing at home and abroad, but the lost rivers and strange formations of Marvel Cave always called him back to the Ozark hills.2
William Hope “Coin” Harvey selected Monte Ne in Benton County, Arkansas, as the site for his Pyramid of Civilization. Early in the present century he began building a structure to house evidences of our modern civilization. Harvey opposed our present financial system and was firm in his opinion that civilization would fall and chaotic conditions follow. His pyramid was planned to preserve the achievements in literature, art, and science for a future age. His immediate purpose was to attract the attention of the world to the inequities of our present monetary systems.
Harvey planned to build a concrete structure with a base or pedestal sixty feet square. On top of this was to be the pyramid proper. It was to be a shaft-like formation, 130 feet high, ending in a summit six feet square. It would contain several thousand square feet of room space and cost $100,000.
The pyramid was to be a storehouse of civilization. Volumes on science, history, religion, and industry, and the literary masterpieces of the ages, would be placed in containers, hermetically sealed. All types of articles used in domestic and industrial life, from pins to automobiles and airplanes, would be stored to record our industrial achievement.
Work began on the foundation of the pyramid in the late twenties and in August 1931, the national convention of the newly organized American Liberty Party was held in a stadium adjacent to the project. Harvey founded the party and was honored with the nomination as its presidential candidate.
Coin Harvey attracted attention on the lecture platform. He would invariably close his talks with a lengthy catechism. He would state a question and its answer and then have the audience repeat it with him. I have heard him bore a sleepy audience almost to distraction with his monetary theories.
William Hope Harvey did not live to build his Pyramid of Civilization, but should you visit Monte Ne you will see the foundation stones of his vast dream. It is a monument to the strange, bizarre passion of this unusual man.3
A man is usually known by his achievements. Beethoven lives in his sonatas and symphonies; Shakespeare in his immortal dramas; Raphael in the frescoes he painted on the walls of the Vatican. In a tiny but still important orbit, Elmer J. Bouher lives in the community church he built at Kingston-in-the-Ozarks.
Kingston’s reputation as a cultural and educational center is partially due to its rural isolation. Had the village been located on a railroad, or even a main motor highway, it is highly probable that the people would have been contented with their lot and made no effort to better conditions. But Kingston is thirty miles from a railroad and off the beaten path of motor traffic. Until recent years, it was hemmed in by a turbulent mountain stream without bridge or ferry.
A year or two before the first World War, the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church sent the Reverend Elmer J. Bouher into the hills of Madison County, Arkansas, to make a social survey. At Kingston, Bouher found a solid, God-fearing, law-abiding people. They had schools and churches, but the visiting preacher thought them inadequate to the social needs of the community. He saw hundreds of sterling young people growing into manhood and womanhood without adequate educational advantages. In his report to the board of missions, Bouher stressed the cultural need of the people and the unusual opportunity for service. Concrete action followed this report. Bouher was assigned to shepherd the flock at Kingston.
The building program began soon after the World War. Bouher’s first thought was for a church, a place of solemn assembly where the people might worship. It took four years to build what is considered to be one of the most beautiful church buildings in rural Arkansas. Almost everyone in the community helped in the building program, quarrying stone for the foundation, cutting logs in the forest and transporting them to the community sawmill, and assisting in the construction of the building. The board of missions assisted by supplying funds for foreign building material. The church was formally dedicated in June 1926.
The atmosphere of the sanctuary, as intended by the minister-architect, is one that leads to worship. The chancel is painted white. The wine-colored pipe organ in the background adds the necessary contrast to harmonize the scene. On the speaker’s platform in front of the organ are comfortable oak chairs and a beautifully hand-carved pulpit stand. Choir stalls for twenty-four singers are set in at the sides of the platform.
The auditorium has a seating capacity for four hundred people and the pews are of solid oak, spacious and comfortable. The minister established an orderly method of seating the congregation—the old New England method in which a pew is assigned to each family. The minister’s pew, two seats back, is labeled with a silver plate. The floor is of finest hardwood from the neighboring forest. With the exception of the doors and windows, practically the entire building was constructed of native materials.
The place of worship, or church proper, is only a part of the project on Community Hill at Kingston. The community building contains twenty rooms which include an auditorium, classrooms for school purposes, and a library of 5,000 volumes. It is a center for community meetings and activities of all kinds.4
In 1929, the Sky Pilot, as the minister was called, retired from this work after fifteen years of devoted service. He came to the hills with a dream which lengthened into a vast reality. Other workers now carry on the activities of the project, but it will always be recognized as the lengthened shadow of one man—Elmer J. Bouher.
Rose Wilder Lane’s statement that the valleys grow corn, but the hills grow men is aging into a proverb. Out of the solitudes of the hills come individuals to carve their names in the halls of civilization. Thomas Elmore Lucy, the old trooper, is an example of this class whose first social nourishment was in a stern pioneer environment.
Thomas Elmore Lucy is a member of a North Carolina family who followed wilderness trails to the Ozarks many years ago and settled in Pope County, Arkansas. Thomas Elmore stretched into six feet of manhood in the sylvan hills near Russellville. His talent asserted itself even in his barefoot days and his fingers were dabbled with printer’s ink by the time his feet were imprisoned in shoes. He developed into an artistic printer and a forceful writer. He studied elocution and dramatics and became an outstanding impersonator of historical characters. It is in this role that he has circled the globe and gained the reputation of Arkansas’s most widely traveled man. Seven books and hundreds of miscellaneous poems and articles have come from his facile pen. He has the upward vision of the pioneer, the sinew of the native tiller of the soil, and the grace of his Elizabethan ancestors. He is “a hijacker of happiness on the world’s hikeway.”
Through the obscure history of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains stalks the shadow of the illustrious Albert Pike, soldier-poet, philosopher, and Masonic authority. He was a native of Massachusetts, but came to Arkansas in 1832 to write his name in song and story throughout the Middle West. His first job was that of a schoolmaster in the Boston Mountains, with half of his meager
salary paid in pigs. He was famous as a soldier, serving as a captain in the Mexican War and heading an Indian regiment in the service of the Confederacy in the sixties. He lived at the border town of Fort Smith for a number of years.
Pike’s sojourn in the Ouachita Mountains of Montgomery County, Arkansas, is one of the strange interludes of history. His Masonic associates, and even his relatives, ridicule the idea that he ever lived in this wilderness region, but the tradition is firmly established in the minds of the people of Montgomery County. Ira C. Hopper, onetime secretary of state for Arkansas, grew to manhood at Caddo Gap, which is about eighteen miles from the site of Pike’s mountain retreat. He makes this statement:
Among the mountains of a certain secluded and almost unknown region of Arkansas may be seen today the place where Albert Pike lived and worked during the unknown period of his life. Old settlers of the neighborhood remember the time when he lived in their midst, and how he conducted himself, wrote and studied, and the story has been handed down as a tradition of the settlement.
This obscure neighborhood is Greasy Cove in the southwestern part of Montgomery County. It is thought that Pike entered this section from the Indian Territory in 1862. He came to do some creative writing and the solitude of the place appealed to him. It is said that he wrote three books during the two years spent at Greasy Cove, one of them being the famous Morals and Dogma.
Pike’s entry into the hills is vividly described by Ida Sublette Cobb in The Silver Shuttle. She has given me permission to use the following extract from her story of the illustrious Mason:
General Albert Pike arrived in Caddo Gap like a monarch, in a beautiful shiny buggy, his white hair falling over his shoulders, his snowy beard billowing over his chest. To the buggy were harnessed two of the most superb white horses the mountain people had ever beheld. In front of the horses marched the vanguard of twenty Negroes. Behind the buggy came a heavily loaded wagon of the prairie schooner type. To this wagon were hitched four prancing horses. Following in the wake of the wagon, their eyes whitely rolling, marched twenty solemn stalwarts forming a rear guard. It being wartime made the incident far more interesting than it would have been in time of peace.
Pike bought forty acres of land from John Berry Vaught, paying him four hundred dollars in gold for it. In 1863, he erected a beautiful log house and brought furniture from Little Rock. He lived in style and comfort on the banks of the Little Missouri River in backhill seclusion. But his arcadian experiment soon came to an end. Marauding jayhawkers discovered his retreat and laid plans to destroy it. The destruction came in 1864 when they burned his house and threw his books into the river. According to the story, he escaped ahead of the freebooters with his trunk of gold and a few personal belongings, and never came back to the Ouachita Mountains.5
“Bring me men to match my mountains,” chants the poet and the call is filled with volunteers of unquestioned integrity. Granville Jones was a man of the mountains who wrote the golden rule upon the table of his heart. He had vision and intellect consistent with great leadership and might have been a statesman with a powerful influence. But if he had political ambitions, he kept them to himself. His mission was to inform and inspire the general public from the lecture platform and his work was stamped with a trademark of completeness.
Granville Jones grew to manhood in a pocket of the Ouachita hills at Caddo Gap. He was a self-made man with a talent for oratory. The Chautauqua platform was the medium through which he reached the people. The patriotic vision of this man of the mountains is revealed in a lecture he gave at Chickasha, Oklahoma, in October 1922. One pertinent paragraph shows his faith in American democracy:
I hear men talk of dangers that surround us, of the difficulties that confront us like mountains, of the problems that overshadow us like dark storms; but, ladies and gentlemen, I am an American. Our fathers had problems and they solved them; they had enemies and they met them breast to breast and put them to flight; they had difficulties that rose before them like mountains, but they scaled their mountains of difficulty. We are the sons of our fathers with the same old fighting blood, and the same old fighting spirit. I say tonight that Americans under God can do anything that ought to be done. We can meet our enemies and put them to flight; we can face our problems and solve them; we can come to our difficulties and surmount them. Some people may have lost faith in this Republic, in what the flag stands for. I am not among those. I not only believe in the history of my country, but I believe in its present, and I believe in my country’s future.
My residence in Ozark land has been rewarded by personal acquaintance with hundreds of stalwart men of the mountains, men who knew the privations of oxcart days, but lived to herald the new age of the twentieth century. They have not had great roles in the world’s affairs, but they have played the part of the common man in the drama of living, and played it well. The older ones have passed on, but a few remain with us as bulwarks of integrity in a restless age. I think the Ozark region has been greatly enriched by the lives of such Missourians as William Edward Howard, A. M. Haswell, W. S. Strong, George W. Clark, B. W. Rice, Truman Powell, B. F. Carney, and W. S. White. Arkansas has produced many mountain men who have spent their lives memorably in the Ozark and Ouachita hills as teachers, preachers, statesmen, businessmen, and farmers. A few of them are: Fountain Lycurgus White, Charles Henry Buerklin, Thomas Smith Evans, Sam Leath, Hamp Williams, Claude L. Jones, W. T. Martin, Joe Caldwell, Andy Johnson, Roy Milum, Joel Bunch, and Payne McCracken. Some of these men are not known beyond the borders of their respective communities; others spread their influence throughout their state; each one gave or is giving himself in service in a large way to his fellow men.
Most of the honor for pioneering in the Ozarks is given to men. The pioneer mothers are revered in the memory of their descendants, but their names are not so well known as are those of the fathers, husbands, and sons. But this does not lessen the importance of the women who stood by their men through a crucial period of history. When the complete story of the Ozarks is written, the names and deeds of many illustrious women will be included. One of them will be Elizabeth Pettigrew Robberson for whom Robberson Prairie, ten miles north of Springfield, Missouri, was named.
Elizabeth Robberson was a true pioneer mother—a courageous widow who brought her fourteen children over wilderness roads from Tennessee in 1830. Her husband had died the year before and she decided to go west to permit her children to grow up with the country. A few of the older ones had already married and they with their families joined the trek. The Robberson wagon train passed through Springfield a year after the first log cabin was built and drove on to the broad open prairie which now bears their name. Large tracts of land were settled by these immigrants and a community started. The pioneer woman who led the way died in 1868. Her grave is marked by a weather-beaten monument in Robberson Cemetery, named for her, and not far from her original home in the Ozarks.
CHAPTER XVI
Traits and Trends
The Woman Who Waits
A casual observer might conclude that sentiment is dead in the Woodville neighborhood, but close scrutiny would convince him that romance still lives on the granite ridges and gully-washed farms of this backhill Ozark community. Especially would it be so if he were lucky enough to see Ludie, “the dream girl,” walking from the spring with a bucket of water.
It is a tradition with the lovelorn that the words of Mercury are harsh to the feminine ear after the songs of Apollo. Perhaps that is the reason Ludie Evans spends so much time by the old signal oak, trysting place of yesteryears, dreaming the hours away.
I first saw this mountain maid a year before our country entered the maelstrom of the first World War. I was idling away my time fishing in the river near the big spring above the village. Bruce Evans had built his gristmill by the spring thirty years before. The Evans clan was a race of millers who liked to set wheels turning in new lands. Bruce’s grandfather had moved into the Missouri Ozarks from Tennessee in 1
840, bringing his milling machinery with him. Bruce had a good location for business and prosperity blessed his efforts. Folks would ride or drive from the Bug Tussle neighborhood on the north and from Sassafras Pone on the south to have their grinding done at the Evans mill.
It was a bright June morning in the James River Ozarks, the fog having lifted on a glorious day of mellow sunshine. I had caught a string of smallmouth bass and goggle-eye in the vicinity of the mill and was resting on a rock by the spring, smoking my pipe. The laziness of the hour spread satisfaction such as defies pursuit but often comes in moments of relaxation. The world looked rosy as I tied a handsome spinner on my line for a cast. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the reflection of a pretty girl appeared in the clear water of the spring at my elbow. When I turned my head and saw the maiden in flesh and blood, I had to blink my eyes before reality asserted itself.
I answered the girl’s smile with a cordial greeting and continued my fishing. She filled the bucket she carried with cool water from the spring and then followed the path up and over the hill toward a wreath of smoke that emerged from a clump of maples. It was Ludie Evans, known as Woodville’s dream girl. A week later I met her in a more formal way at a community play party. I also made the acquaintance of her dashing lover, Wade Spillman.
At that time, pretty girls were quite easily numbered at Woodville. The party revealed that fact to me. Few of them had the comely grace of Emily Freeman of White River and Joyce Delmar of the Posey neighborhood. There was Millie Adams, cheeks painted like a barn door; Drusilla Bullock, giggling her unattractiveness; and a dozen more girls neatly dressed in ginghams and percales, swinging in the whirl of “Tideo.” It took but a single glance to see that Ludie Evans was queen of the circle. Young Spillman seemed proud of her, too, and when they started playing “Skip t’ My Lou,” and he was the skipper, he didn’t hesitate to show his favoritism, but promptly skipped to Ludie and led her to his place in the ring.
Ozark Country Page 27
