Ozark Country Read online

  Chronicles OF THE Ozarks

  Brooks Blevins, General Editor

  OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES

  The Ozarks:

  An American Survival of Primitive Society

  Back Yonder:

  An Ozark Chronicle

  Yesterday Today:

  Life in the Ozarks

  Ozark Country

  Otto Ernest Rayburn

  Edited by Brooks Blevins

  The University of Arkansas Press

  Fayetteville

  2021

  Copyright © 2021 by The University of Arkansas Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book should be used or reproduced in any manner without prior permission in writing from the University of Arkansas Press or as expressly permitted by law.

  ISBN: 978-1-68226-160-6

  eISBN: 978-1-61075-739-3

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  25 24 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1

  Designed by Liz Lester

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rayburn, Otto Ernest, author. | Blevins, Brooks, 1969– editor.

  Title: Ozark country / Otto Ernest Rayburn; edited by Brooks Blevins.

  Description: Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2021. | Series: Chronicles of the Ozarks | Summary: “Chronicles of the Ozarks reissue of Otto Ernest Rayburn’s 1941 Ozark Country. Edited and with a new introduction by Ozarks scholar Brooks Blevins”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020030293 (print) | LCCN 2020030294 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682261606 (paperback) | ISBN 9781610757393 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ozark Mountains—Description and travel. | Appalachians (People)—Social life and customs.

  Classification: LCC F417.O9 R3 2021 (print) | LCC F417.O9 (ebook) | DDC 917.67/104—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030293

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030294

  To Lutie Beatrice, Glovon, and Billy

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Editor’s Note

  Author’s Foreword

  I. A WORLD APART

  Loafer’s Glory

  Location and Names

  Pioneer Ingenuity

  II. ANGLO-SAXON SEED BED

  Salt of the Earth

  Backgrounds and Movements

  III. HILLSMAN’S HARVEST

  Toothsome Treasures

  Bounties of Nature

  IV. NECESSITIES OF LIFE

  Hillcroft “Vittles”

  Art Crafts and Skills

  Socialized Labor

  V. FUN AND FROLIC

  Swing Your Partner

  On with the Dance!

  Social Pastimes

  VI. CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS

  Hillbilly Barter

  Going to Mill

  Special Days

  Parade of Folklore

  Little Log Schoolhouse

  VII. SPORTS AFIELD

  The Shooting Match

  Hunter’s Paradise

  Fisherman’s Luck

  VIII. BOY MEETS GIRL

  Pride of Posey

  Courtship and Marriage

  IX. MOUNTAIN MUSIC

  “Arkansaw Traveler”

  Ballad Hunting

  X. THINGS ETERNAL

  Death and Burial

  The Church at Hog Scald

  XI. PRIMITIVE PANACEAS

  The “Yarb” Doctor

  Home Remedies

  XII. WIND AND SMOKE

  Snakes Alive!

  Signs and Superstitions

  XIII. STORMY ROADS

  Seat of Justice

  Gallant Outlawry

  Bully of the Town

  XIV. LORE AND LEGEND

  The Fighting Parson

  Treasure Trove

  Indian Footprints

  Fact and Fable

  XV. MEN OF THE MOUNTAINS

  Backhill Hermit

  Hideaway Bent

  XVI. TRAITS AND TRENDS

  The Woman Who Waits

  Economic Drift

  Notes to the Text

  INTRODUCTION

  “Who will lament these simple mountaineers?” begins the first of half a dozen sonnets that compose Dennis Murphy’s Doomed Race, a native son’s elegy to a people “trampled by science and betrayed by man / And all but disinherited of earth.” The answer to Murphy’s question—a lament of its own—was a list of names longer than he might have expected, especially in the Year of the Ozarks. When it was issued as the 225th volume in the Contemporary Poets of Dorrance series by a Philadelphia publisher in 1941, Doomed Race had to get in line to tell the world about the Ozarks. At the very moment that Murphy’s book hit shelves across the country, an obscure wanderer and self-taught artist in Missouri was putting the finishing touches on Pioneers of the Ozarks, a sort of Doomed Race in visual form. Lennis Leonard Broadfoot’s amateurish but oddly compelling charcoal character studies lamented the coming extinction of the true Ozarkers, the woodcutters and farmers and crafters and musicians of the backroads neighborhoods that Route 66 and the modern world had long since bypassed. Gaze upon their weathered faces, Broadfoot implored the reader, for these are surely the last of their kind. It was a sentiment after Murphy’s own heart.1

  Broadfoot’s Pioneers of the Ozarks would not see the light of day until 1944, even though his introduction indicates that he finished his part of the process in 1941. It would have been fitting for his publisher to have rushed the book into print—for it truly seemed to be the Year of the Ozarks—before more than 350 Japanese fighters and bombers transformed 1941 into the year of something else entirely. Just two of many works of art and entertainment focusing on the Ozarks produced that year, Broadfoot’s Pioneers of the Ozarks and Murphy’s Doomed Race captured the urgency with which people of various stripes approached the task of telling the story of the region and its people. It turns out that Murphy and Broadfoot were far from the only ones lamenting these simple mountaineers.

  The Ozarks shone brightly in popular culture in 1941. Devotees of Harold Bell Wright’s classic novel The Shepherd of the Hills bristled over the Hollywoodization of the plot, but moviegoers still flocked to see John Wayne in the Technicolor film version. Anyone interested in more authentic Ozarks accents could catch Arkansas Judge (costarring a young Roy Rogers), Mountain Moonlight, or Tuxedo Junction, three pictures starring the southwestern Missouri musical-comedy trio known as the Weaver Brothers and Elviry. On radio Arkansan Bob Burns—Bing Crosby’s former comedic sidekick—launched The Arkansas Traveler in 1941 and anchored the show with outrageous stories of Aunt Doody, Uncle Fud, and other fictional relatives from the southern slope of the Ozarks. Elsewhere in Southern California, young actors Gloria Grahame and Robert Mitchum played the leads in a bawdy Tobacco Road knock-off called Maid in the Ozarks. After titillating Angelenos, it would find months of success in Chicago before continuing a cross-country tour that culminated in a Broadway debut after the war. Even the national pastime felt the region’s imprint. In a season that saw Ted Williams top the .400 mark and Joe DiMaggio hit safely in a record fifty-six consecutive games, it was Ozarker Mickey Owen who made the most memorable (and infamous) play of 1941. When Brooklyn’s all-star catcher mishandled strike three on what would have been the final out of the fourth game of the World Series, the error opened the door for a Yankees comeback victory. The demoralized Dodgers went on to lose the series and had to wait fourteen more years before capturing their first championship.2

  The bibliophiles of Flatbush found l
ittle reason to celebrate the Ozarks, but 1941 was a bonanza year for other readers enamored of this mid-American highland region. Publishers offered a trio of nonfiction books, each attempting to explain whatever it was that made the Ozarks so unique and irresistible at the tail end of the Depression. Marguerite Lyon in Take to the Hills and Catherine S. Barker in Yesterday Today seemed to be describing two very different regions—the first Ozarks filtered through the romantic lens of a Chicago back-to-the-lander, the second through the clinical and critical observations of a New Deal social worker. As the Year of the Ozarks drew to its close, readers caught their first glimpse of the most ambitious of the three, Otto Ernest Rayburn’s unapologetically romantic Ozark Country, the fourth title in the American Folkways Series from New York’s Duell, Sloan and Pearce. “Unbiased interpreters are needed to tell the romantic story of the Ozarks,” Rayburn gushed without the slightest hint of irony. He was, of course, no freer of bias than were Broadfoot, Murphy, and just about anyone else chronicling the Ozarks. Like them—and like his friend Vance Randolph—Rayburn was drawn to the quaint and anachronistic, primitive survivals in a modern world. His Ozarkers may have provided “a firm cultural bridge between the worlds of yesterday and tomorrow,” but it was clearly the region’s strong scent of yesterday that lured Rayburn and kindred souls to the hills and hollers.3

  It is telling that it was Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills that first introduced young Rayburn to the region that would become his lifelong obsession. He latched on to Wright’s almost mystical view of the Ozarks and its “seclusion in the very heart of a continent steeped in commercialism and flushed with progress.” Like so many romantics, Rayburn was trying to elude modernity, and he found in the backwoods Ozarker “a colorful personality ‘lost’ in isolation.”

  Rayburn may have been a stranger to the rocky hillsides and deep hollers when he first arrived in the Ozarks, but he was no neophyte to rural living. Born in 1891 on a farm in southeastern Iowa, Otto Ernest Rayburn moved with his family to a farm in southeastern Kansas shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. In 1909 he enrolled in the preparatory academy at Marionville College, a tiny Methodist school in southwestern Missouri—“without realizing that I was in the Ozarks,” he recalled years later. Returning home after nine months to begin a teaching career, Rayburn continued his formal education a few years later when he moved to Baldwin City, Kansas, and entered another small Methodist college, Baker University. There he finished his preparatory degree and enrolled in the freshman class of 1916 at the grand old age of twenty-five. It was at Baker that Rayburn first read The Shepherd of the Hills, and so enamored of Wright’s Ozarks did he become that he took the train to southwestern Missouri in the spring of 1917—“The hills called and I answered”—and purchased a forty-acre plot of land near the town of Reeds Spring, just a few miles from the setting of the beloved novel. Service in World War I brought a halt to Rayburn’s first Ozark sojourn. Discharged in the spring of 1919, after almost two years in the army, he returned to Kansas to teach and spent his summers camping out in the Ozarks.4

  Rayburn finally made the move to his adopted home region in 1922. An avid reader of Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and other chroniclers of a life lived close to nature, Rayburn gave up teaching to build a cabin (Hideaway Lodge) on his own Walden Pond, a forty-acre homestead in the White River country of southwestern Missouri. Supporting himself with the cash he received from selling timber rights and the few dollars he made peddling candy to workers building a new highway through his neighborhood, Rayburn fished, floated the James Fork of the White River, hunted, trapped, and typed out his first musings on the Ozarks. Convincing a local to help him build a houseboat on the White River and float it to New Orleans, he and his friend journeyed as far as Cotter, Arkansas, in the fall of 1923. The friend’s decision to take the train back home seemed to snap Rayburn out of his Huckleberry daze, but instead of returning to Hideaway Lodge, he found work as a one-room school teacher in rural Baxter County, Arkansas.5

  Northern Arkansas was Rayburn’s home for the next eight years, during which he worked mostly as a teacher and superintendent at a Presbyterian mountain mission school in the remote Madison County hamlet of Kingston. There Rayburn attempted to emulate another of his heroes, Elbert Hubbard, when he established the Kingscraft Press. Operating out of a room in the mission school, the press specialized in fine printing and published Rayburn’s first book—a volume of poetry entitled The Inward Real, or an Ozarker Looks at Life—but Kingscraft proved “a struggle and a financial loss, from the start.” It was also during his time at Kingston that Rayburn began writing Ozark-themed columns for Little Rock’s Arkansas Gazette and the Tulsa Tribune and made his initial foray into “wildcat journalism,” launching his first magazine, Ozark Life. Coedited with another midwesterner and World War I veteran, Ted Richmond, the magazine reflected Rayburn’s penchant for boosterism and his deep interest in anything and everything Ozarks—from folk songs and folktales to dialect and home remedies. And he approached all of it in an earnest and eager manner, as if he had discovered the most wonderful and unbelievable place on Earth.6

  The longtime bachelor tied the knot while teaching at Kingston. His bride, Lutie Beatrice Day—a Texan sixteen years his junior—gave birth to both of their children (Gloria Juivon, called Glovon, and Billy Joaquin) in the latter half of the 1920s. An inveterate joiner and founder—and apparently possessed of boundless energy as well—Rayburn took an active role in the American Legion and the Kingston Presbyterian Church and found the time to create three different organizations in the late 1920s. Two of those, not surprisingly, were focused on his adopted region: the Ozark Wildlife Association and the Ozarkians. Only the last survived for more than a meeting or two. The Ozarkians, a covey of regional writers and enthusiasts, reflected Rayburn’s lifelong desire to surround himself with kindred spirits, and its membership list grew to include native and adopted Ozarkers from various walks of life, including Vance Randolph, writers Charles J. Finger, Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni, and Bernie Babcock, Missouri Congressman Dewey Short, lyceum entertainer Thomas Elmore Lucy, tourism entrepreneur and booster William H. “Coin” Harvey, and Springfield newspaper and radio personality May Kennedy McCord—“Queen of the Hillbillies.”7

  Believing—erroneously, as it turned out—that he was due a paid sabbatical, Rayburn left Kingston at the conclusion of the school year in 1930 and moved his family and printing press fifty miles to the southwest, where he set up shop on the crest of the Boston Mountains in the little railroad burg of Winslow. It was a typically impulsive move for the peripatetic romantic—and led to typically disappointing financial results. At the end of 1931—the Depression deepening and debts piling up—Rayburn sold Ozark Life, left his printing press behind, and packed his young family off to the other side of the Ozarks, settling in the small town of Eminence in the rugged Current River country of southeastern Missouri. There he launched another modest magazine, the Arcadian—and two more organizations, the Arcadians and Hillcrofters—but the magazine folded after a year and a half. Spending the next six months at a tourist camp on the James Fork below Galena, Missouri, where he forged a friendship with Vance Randolph, Rayburn reluctantly abandoned the Ozarks in January 1933. Moving Lutie Beatrice and the kids to Texas, he settled near his wife’s family in rural Hopkins County and took a job as a school principal.8

  “Publishing an Ozark magazine is like going on a snipe hunt and holding the sack,” Rayburn reminisced late in life. “For most people, once is enough. But not for me.” The heart of the Depression found him hundreds of miles from his beloved Ozarks, but Rayburn kept the booster flame burning for the region to which he longed to return—and he did so largely through the publication of his third magazine. Arcadian Life, which he started just a few days after arriving in Texas, did not break his string of unsuccessful periodicals. It may have been his biggest money loser yet. Arcadian Life seemed headed for the grave until Rayburn’s fortunes turned in the middle of the
decade. He was forty-five years old when Congress passed a bill mandating payment of bonuses for World War I veterans in 1936 instead of the original date of 1945. It was, he recalled, “the largest sum of money I had ever received.” The bonus provided Rayburn the financial wherewithal to make his way back to the Arkansas highlands—only this time it was the Ouachita Mountains that beckoned. Settling his family in the little village of Caddo Gap in southwestern Arkansas, Rayburn found work as superintendent of the local rural consolidated school district. He continued to publish Arcadian Life, on rare occasions ending the month in the black, and found a small Arkansas printer to publish a cheap “booklet of philosophical prose” that he called Roadside Chats. It was during this sojourn in the Ouachitas that he made his most enduring contribution to the study and celebration of the Ozarks—the book that you now hold. Learning of Duell, Sloan and Pearce’s intention to commission a book on the Ozarks for its American Folkways Series, Rayburn mailed samples of his work to editor Erskine Caldwell in the spring of 1940. “I am completely sold on you because your writing is different,” Caldwell wrote back, and Rayburn relinquished his superintendent’s job for a part-time teaching position in the fall to concentrate on writing.9

  By the time Ozark Country was released, six days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the author was back in the education business, having assumed the superintendency of the little Rural Dale School in Garland County, Arkansas. Arcadian Life enjoyed its largest readership to date, but Rayburn’s busy schedule forced him to stop publication just a few months after his book came out. The magazine bug bit again before long, and the summer of 1943 bore witness to the first issue of Rayburn’s Ozark Guide, his fourth and final effort. It was his first profitable publishing venture. Suffering frayed nerves and a bout of ill health—a rarity for the robust outdoorsman—Rayburn resigned his job at Rural Dale in December 1943 and went into business as a real estate broker. But the Ozarks continued to beckon. As World War II drew to a close, Rayburn looked to move back to the hills about which he had been writing for twenty years. He took a shine to West Plains, Missouri, but found it “short on folklore.” His search ended 150 miles to the west, where he found a small town that “seemed to have everything I needed.” Confident that Eureka Springs, Arkansas, “could be made the folklore capital of the nation,” Rayburn packed up his wife and son—Glovon had recently married—and headed for the old resort town in 1946. He was joined by Randolph two years later.10