For most of us, particularly those in mid-Missouri, the Lake of the Ozarks and all of its allure has always been here. It’s hard to imagine when the Osage River wound through the valleys of the ancient mountains and when generations of people lived and died along its banks. One long-ago summer night while going door-to-door selling encyclopedias in Columbia I knocked on the door of a man who had been a riverboat pilot on the Osage at a time when he could take his boat all the way to Warsaw. It was the only door I knocked on that night because of the stories he told me. It’s a shame the young encyclopedia salesmen didn’t carry a recorder in those days.
(Actually, there wasn’t such a thing as a portable recorder, at least not one that could record a couple of hours of storytelling back then.)
Let’s go farther back, to 1931, and a time when Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor best known for Mount Rushmore, came to Jefferson City to testify in the lawsuit of the Snyder family against Union Electric. The Snyder family owned Ha Ha Tonka, now a state park, and they charged UE had damaged the intrinsic beauty of their property to the tune of one-million dollars by building Bagnell Dam and backing up Osage River water into their area.
(Kansas City businessman Robert M. Snyder had fallen in love with the location early in the 20th Century and built the mansion. He never got to see if finished because be became one of Missouri’s first traffic fatalities, in 1906.)
Borglum came to Missouri to testify on behalf of the Snyder estate. “My first impression of Ha Ha Tonka was that it was more like some of the ancient estates in England than anything I had seen in this country…I don’t know anything that has the dramatic possibilities and the permanent beauty that this place has,” he said when he arrived. He said the “very soul” of the place had been materially decreased by the lake.
“Gutzon Borglum, famous sculptor and connoisseur of beauty, sees a future for America’s Ozarks that is more promising than the wildest dreams of this alluring region’s inhabitants,” reported R. H. Slighton for the Jefferson City Daily Capital News on December 6. “The people of the Ozarks, he believes, have inherited a blessing from the hand of the Creator that possesses a fabulous value. The world as yet knows little of it, he believes, but once it is brought to their realization, and the need for what the Ozarks give increases the events that follow, he feels, will be amazing.”
Borglum “gazed out of his hotel window here one misty, wet day last week and peered into the future,” said the article. And this is what he saw—or foresaw.
He spoke slowly, deliberately, carefully and precise. We live in an amazing age. I can sit in my room and speak to New York, Chicago, Portland, any city in the country. I do it almost every day. What could be more amazing? A few years ago I was driving across the country down into the Southwest. I asked along the way where the Ozarks were. ‘Oh, they’re off down that way,’ people would tell me. ‘Off there somewhere’ but no one seemed to know just where. At. St.Louis they told me I would have to follow the highway and go around them.”
He foresaw a time when the Ozarks would be what people were looking for. And highways would take them there.
Where is it going? It is going away from the tenements and smoky cities.
When I started the Rushmore Memorial project in the Black Hills, I selected for my home a place about twenty-five miles from where my work would be. I did it unconsciously despite the fact that I knew I would be making from two to three tips almost every day. Now, what does that mean? With hard surfaced roads the trip is only a matter of a few minutes with an automobile. In the Ozarks, it will be the same.
The time will come when people will be living within a fifty-mile radius of Jefferson City and drive in every day to their place of business. That time is not far off.
He thought the skyscraper was out of date. He thought people would tire of crowded cities and seek out quieter places such as the Ozarks. He knew that “common earth, rocks, trees, and grass,” as Slighton put it, might be worth billions to the city dweller seeking relief from the dirt, smoke, and noise. He used New York’s Central Park as an example.
Why won’t they sell it? Because it is worth more to the people of New York City as a place just to walk through in the evening when their day’s work is done. Borglum recalled a man the previous summer caught with a half-gallon bucket full of Central Park soil leaving the park. He told the judge he needed it for a flower in his penthouse apartment, an argument Borglum used to emphasize the human longing for an out-of-doors. Good roads, he argued, would provide an answer for that longing.
The Snyders lost their lawsuit. Their great mansion in Camden County became a lodge where visitors could look out over the misty Ozark mountains on the other side of the dammed Osage River. The house was gutted by a fire in 1942, its stone walls still standing reminiscent of Europe’s bombed-out churches after the Second World War. It took three-quarters of a century before the state finally made Ha Ha Tonka a state park.
“Already the backwoods stage of the hill country is passing,” wrote Slighton in 1931.
It’s what the whole world wants.
And what would “the whole world” do when it got to the Ozarks? “Mr. Borglum believes the Ozarks are ideal for private estates and that before so very long they will be springing up with their private stock of game comparable to the old estates in England,” said Slighton.
We thought that mix of foreshadowing and philosophizing would be interesting to consider these nine decades later.
Forty years or so after Borglum granted that interview in the Jefferson City hotel room, one of the most passionate writers about the need to seek the out-of-doors, Edward Abbey, said in his book Desert Solitaire, “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” But then he noted the contradiction of people seeking that “necessity” when he continued: “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
The hard surface roads have, indeed, taken the city folks to the Ozarks in search of something basic that cannot be satisfied by the city life. But let us hope there always will be places in the Ozarks where roads don’t need to go.
(Photo Credits: Missouri State Parks, 417 Magazine (color aerial view), National Park Service–Borglum, in light suit, with son Lincoln, in tram inspecting George Washington, Edward Abbey at Arches National Monument)