In his first volume of A History of the Ozarks, Brooks Blevins explores the antebellum history of the Ozarks region, arguing that past and contemporary depictions of white nineteenth-century Ozarkers as distinct from other Americans — primitive, isolated, ignorant — do not withstand scrutiny.[1] The Old Ozarks (2020) is intended to provide a more nuanced portrayal of settlers and frontiersmen, to capture the complexities of local history and diversity of its people — rather than defined by the stereotypical “barefooted hillbillies” and “hicks,” Blevins posits “that the Ozarks, when shorn of the mythology…comes closer to being a regional microcosm of the American experience than to being a place and people of unique qualities.”[2] Importantly, Blevins sees such stereotypes, coming to full power after the Civil War and in the twentieth century, as coloring historians’ views of the earliest Ozark communities.[3] Like the explorers and novelists before them, historians placed too great an emphasis on Ozarkers’ particularities, masking their rather unexceptional American-ness. Blevins’ contribution, alongside other works of the past few decades in his own field and that of historical anthropology, helps break the spell.[4]
To get a sense of the “exaggerations and oversimplifications” Blevins is working with, one might turn to the nineteenth-century American geographer and explorer Henry R. Schoolcraft, who makes many appearances in The Old Ozarks.[5] Schoolcraft documented his observations of the Ozarks in his influential Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw: From Potosi, or Mine á Burton, in Missouri Territory, in a South-West Direction, toward the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1818 and 1819.[6] He wrote of dirt-floor log houses “beyond the pale of the civilized world,” devoid of “comfort,” “cleanliness,” and modern conveniences. They were full of horns, skins, and other hunting trophies — few items of value. Noticing the dried meats kept indoors, Schoolcraft compared an Ozark home to a smokehouse. Children were dirty and dressed in buckskin, the girls ugly from a poor diet. Schoolcraft was dismayed to see women “doing in many instances the man’s work,” and to hear that many infants perished in the region due to a lack of basic medicine. These were people divorced from “refined society.” They were of the remote wilderness, battling native tribes, thieves, and nature.
Schoolcraft writes that he tried to engage the Ozarkers in “small-talk, such as passes current in every social corner; but, for the first time, found I should not recommend myself in that way. They could only talk of bears, hunting, and the like. The rude pursuits, and the coarse enjoyments of the hunter state, were all they knew.” This positions Ozarkers as different from other Americans — proper discourse occurred in all other corners, he had never needed to refrain from it elsewhere. Schoolcraft further complained of a greedy and dishonest guide and his sons, who abruptly abandoned Schoolcraft and his fellow explorers. Again, the exceptionalism of the Ozarkers is highlighted: the group “bore no comparison” to anything “we had ever before witnessed, but was rather characterized in partaking of whatever was disgusting, terrific, [and] rude.” Proud displays of skins outside homes, and other eccentricities, were likewise “novel.”
The geographer reported that settlers hunted and farmed a limited number of crops only to sustain themselves; there were no exports. They were too isolated and remote for that. Life revolved around simple subsistence, when more could in fact be produced, and tolerating the associated deprivations and hardships; the people, therefore, were both “lazy” and “hardy.” They were inferior to Americans back east in every conceivable way. “In manners, morals, customs, dress, contempt of labor and hospitality, the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among the savages. Schools, religion, and learning are alike unknown.” Ozarkers, Schoolcraft writes, did not pray or observe the Sabbath. There was no reading or books, only “ignorance.” Residents knew nothing of the political happenings of the nation — not even who the president was — and did not wish to learn. Such “indifference” set them apart. Ignorance and faithlessness led to moral decay. The Ozarks were a place of not only sloth but vigilante justice and drunken brawls. Even young boys settled their disagreements with violence, “the act being rather looked upon as a promising trait of character.”
Clearly, Ozarkers were seen as backward and primitive. Schoolcraft compared them to indigenous people, but even went so far as to position them as, at least in some ways, inferior. Native Americans did the same tasks with “half the labour” — implying more intelligent methods — and fewer resources. The settlers had no interest in preservation or frugality, but carelessly killed more game than they needed, felled more trees than they could use, and so on. “The white…destroys all before him…” Sources like Schoolcraft’s Journal not only influenced how early nineteenth-century Americans back east regarded this region, but they further informed the writing of history during the twentieth century. Carl O. Sauer, Robert Flanders, David Thelen, Jeff Bremer, and others marked the early Ozarks as cut off and stuck in the past, an island of uncivilized, ignorant frontierism.[7]
Blevins of course points out that many observations by explorers and later historians were “not whole-cloth fabrications.”[8] The Ozarks had hunters, material deprivation and poverty, violence and vigilantism, a dearth of modernity, and so on. But it had much else — it was too diverse to be characterized by those elements alone. For example, ironworks developed even before Schoolcraft’s journey through the region.[9] Iron was mined and forged into wagon boxes, ovens, kettles, cannonballs, and all manner of other objects to be sold at market. Pig iron was shipped to St. Louis and other cities. Beginning in the 1820s, Maramec Iron Works was a major “iron plantation with modern technology in a place still lightly settled” that quickly “dominated the local economy…”[10] After arriving in Missouri, wealthy entrepreneurs Thomas James and Samuel Massey brought workers and slaves from Ohio to dig up ore and run the Maramec furnaces. Manual laborers often lived in company housing and were paid in credit to company stores. This booming industry determined where many roads and rails were constructed, which helped ship raw material to surrounding states and territories. “With hundreds of employees, modern technology and equipment, and access to shiny new railroads,” Blevins writes, ironworks ensured “the region’s integration into a broader national and international marketplace… Travelers like [journalist] Albert D. Richardson were surprised to find such modern industrial activities in the far western reaches of the nation.”[11] When serious study of a broad range of Ozarker experience is conducted, the region starts to look less backward and isolated.
Clearly, not all who settled in the Ozarks were hunters. As partially noted, despite his emphasis on the “hunter state,” Schoolcraft acknowledged that Ozarkers grew corn, possessed livestock like pigs and cows, and engaged in trade by river. Blevins writes: “The marketing of grains, hides, and livestock connected farmers and herders of the rural antebellum Ozarks to a wider world of regional and national commerce and trade.”[12] The historian again documents how other settlers lived and how this tied them to the rest of the nation. They grew corn, wheat, cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes, cabbage, peas, oats, and much else.[13] These were at times brought to market locally: “Wiley Britton recalled that his father…sold corn and other surplus crops to Cherokees or to merchants in Neosho.”[14] More significantly, however, “by 1819 the region already produced surplus beef and pork for the New Orleans market,” and soon became a leading open-range livestock producer nationally.[15] Cattle drives left the Ozarks and marched all over the United States, even as far as New York.[16] Beyond ranchers, farmers, ironworkers, miners, railmen, and hunters, there were artisans, merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, millers, distillers, company lumberjacks, attorneys, and so on.[17] Like the rest of the country, the Ozarks attracted and produced a wide range of laborers, especially as its towns and cities developed.
After the workday was through, many Ozarkers would return home to their log cabins, some with dirt floors and others wood. But, especially in the decades after Schoolcraft’s visit and before the Civil War, some more affluent residents had frame houses painted white with crushed limestone, or even brick houses.[18] Women and girls would make quilts and clothing; those from more prosperous families purchased the latest fashions from cities like Philadelphia, and owned English glassware.[19] “Don’t think for an instant that I am among semi-wild people,” German doctor George Engelmann wrote in the 1830s as he traveled through the Ozarks. “On the contrary, these people have a good deal of culture…”[20] Contrary to claims concerning a lack of religion, Ozarkers were mostly Methodists and Baptists, plus some Presbyterians and others.[21] Bethel Baptist Church was founded near Jackson, Missouri, in 1806, and by 1818 had half a dozen churches in the area it could claim as descendants.[22] Methodist preachers like William Stevenson were at work in 1814.[23] There were churches, camp meetings, and religious societies and organizations. Missionaries came to and emerged from the Ozarks. Religion was a major feature of life, as it was in other parts of the United States in this era.[24] Education was slow to develop, with most children not attending school until after the 1850s, but an academy appeared in Potosi in 1816, and more were established in other towns.[25] In areas without formal schools, children would at times be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic for a fee by a private individual, a “subscription” model.[26] Ozarkers would often remember their hard times and difficulty receiving an education with, to quote Blevins, the same kind of “bootstraps, self-congratulatory memory that had your grandfather trudging five miles uphill in a perpetual blizzard” to get to school.[27]
On that note, the writing itself in The Old Ozarks is generally engaging and dynamic. This elevates both interesting and more tedious content. While the line “Given the myriad uses of corn, it is not surprising that Ozark farms went through it like Henry VIII went through wives” may induce a wince, there are far less lively discussions of agriculture in historical scholarship.[28] A few moments approaching rhetorical beauty occur as well: the “Ozark plateau is rendered, by our rather myopic and mortal outlook, a fixed and everlasting entity, a place as solid and unchanging as the age-old igneous rocks of the St. Francois Mountains, the ancient core of the region. But you and I are human, and history is preoccupied with our kind.”[29] The author’s exposition is interlaced with quotations from letters, diaries, published books, and more by early Ozarkers and visitors, which keeps the history grounded and personified, while secondary sources from other scholars are usually cited without quotation, serving largely the same function. Beyond creativity and variety, the writing is clear and largely dispassionate, though Blevins is an Ozarker, and may have a vested interest in confronting images of backwardness, suggested in comments such as: “Whether our peculiarities are perceived or real, in the Ozarks we are no strangers to stereotype. We’re accustomed to being labeled by outsiders.”[30] This does not appear to impact the validity of his case however, given the nature of the thesis.
The Old Ozarks is a heavily detailed text with the simplest of theses. Dispelling stereotypes is perhaps the most straightforward task a historian can undertake — even a few primary sources can quickly qualify or even blow up an improper, oversimplified representation of a people or place. (Blevins understands well, offering the somewhat sheepish “If…this book contains a central premise, it is that…”[31]) The author accomplishes this detonation, revealing the complexity, diversity, and normality of the early Ozarks using an avalanche of documentation from archives across the region, leaving little doubt that its populace, while including such elements at certain times, should not be defined by isolation, backwardness, or exceptionalism.[32] The “backwoods hunter-herder,” Blevins writes, “represented only a temporary stage in the development of society in the Ozark uplift” and existed alongside “more progressive settlers”; the backwoodsman simply “captured the attention of travelers more…”[33] Explorers and later folklorists and novelists wrote for audiences that loved the exotic — “‘They’re really not that different from you and me,’” Blevins explains, would hardly sell copies.[34] Blevins deserves credit for bringing so many sources together to address myths and capture local history, expanding significantly upon the work of other modern historians and qualifying or correcting that of twentieth-century academics. However, the comprehensive and meticulous nature of the text — recall that this is only the first of three books — makes it for scholars rather than a general audience. With its scope, this is a seminal work for the field.
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[1] Brooks Blevins, A History of the Ozarks, Volume I: The Old Ozarks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 2-9.
[2] Ibid., 2, 8.
[3] Ibid., 2, 5, 7.
[4] Ibid., 122.
[5] Ibid., 9, 293.
[6] Henry R. Schoolcraft, Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw: From Potosi, or Mine á Burton, in Missouri Territory, in a South-West Direction, toward the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1818 and 1819 (London: Richard Phillips and Company, 1821).
[7] Blevins, Ozarks, 121-122.
[8] Ibid., 9.
[9] Ibid., 192.
[10] Ibid., 193.
[11] Ibid., 196. See 192-196.
[12] Ibid., 153.
[13] Ibid., 140.
[14] Ibid., 151-153.
[15] Ibid., 142-143.
[16] Ibid., 147.
[17] Ibid., 153, 175, 182.
[18] Ibid., 134.
[19] Ibid., 122, 137-138.
[20] Ibid., 84.
[21] Ibid., 200.
[22] Ibid., 201.
[23] Ibid., 204.
[24] Ibid., 197-217.
[25] Ibid., 230-231.
[26] Ibid., 232.
[27] Ibid., 230.
[28] Ibid., 152.
[29] Ibid., 5.
[30] Ibid., 2.
[31] Ibid., 8.
[32] Ibid., ix-x.
[33] Ibid., 82.
[34] Ibid., 8.
