"In the Land of a Million Smiles": Twentieth-Century America Discovers the Arkanasas Ozarks

Abstract

HEMMED-IN HOLLER HAS LONG BEEN a popular attraction for Ozark travelers. Today its rugged beauty and isolation attract hikers and awe canoeists floating on the swift upper reaches of the Buffalo River. Hemmed-in Holler was especially appealing to writers who the Ozarks after World War I and whose preconceptions of Ozark people seemed to be satisfied by Holler dwellers. Perhaps no other community in the Arkansas Ozarks-a region that appeared staggeringly remote to most Americans-was as isolated and removed from the forces of modernization as Hemmed-in Holler. One observer described the exotic terrain in 1935: [were] no roads into the holler. One usually enter[ed] it, afoot, fording the river from one to a dozen times, following a mountainside trail steep enough to become discouraging to a mountain goat.1 This Newton County hollow was home to a community as isolated and anachronistic as any the United States had to offer in the middle of the twentieth century. When Charles Morrow Wilson, a Fayetteville native and freelance journalist, visited the Holler in the midst of the Great Depression, he found twenty-two families living lives similar to those of their ancestors a hundred years earlier. There were no automobiles, radios, or telephones; no electricity or indoor plumbing; no doctors, teachers, or even preachers. Although the Buffalo River bottoms were fertile, the difficulty of transportation allowed only subsistence farming. Most raised their own tobacco, and the women continued to spin and weave wool cloth and make the families' clothes. Cash incomes-estimated at only $60 a year per family-depended upon by-products and incidental crops such as wool, honey, sorghum molasses, cow hides, chickens, eggs, furs, and herbs. The residents of Hemmed-in Holler, their names outstandingly English, could, according to Wilson, swap talk and break bread with farmers of Chaucer's England, and suffer few misunderstandings.2 Hemmed-in Holler was an anomaly on the eve of World War II, an anachronistic, quaint model of a region as it had existed half a century earlier. Yet for all its uniqueness-in the Holler were no cotton tenants, apple orchards, or broiler houses-Hemmed-in Holler matches the Ozark image that developed after 1930. The Holler and other remote communities scattered across the region satisfied the demands of that image so well, in fact, that one must presume they served as the model for the popular Ozark portrait. Not surprisingly, writers and tourism promoters discovered the region and its Hemmed-in Hollers just as the quaint relics of frontier existence-the diverting and picturesque qualities so appealing to nostalgic urban Americans-were fading from the scene, rendered obsolete by the modernizing forces of government intervention and technology. As historian Janet Allured comments in her study of women and family life in the Ozarks: Though many outsiders were loathe to admit it, not everyone was poor, few families kept a still at the spring house, even fewer women smoked a corn-cob pipe, and not every person was superstitious.3 Thus, the image of the Arkansas Ozarks formed during the depression-of log cabin homesteads inhabited by broad-brimmed hat-wearing, barefooted moonshiners and wrinkled women weaving homespun-was based on nostalgia and whimsy, and it was supported only briefly by a select cadre of remote twentieth-century families living almost wholly lives of the nineteenth century. By most standards, life in the Arkansas Ozarks before World War II would have been isolated and difficult, but the isolation and harshness were relative and in most areas decreased in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Isolation and accessibility, like agricultural practices, differed from subregion to subregion and community to community within the Ozarks. Two archaeological studies reveal these contrasts. Artifacts at the Moser site northwest of Lowell in Benton County dispute the backward image and indicate that by the late nineteenth century the people were integrated through a flow of information and goods that connected the site to the community, the region, and beyond. …