Missourians are proud of their mules and work horses. This is a photo of a local horse and mule show on the square in downtown Versailles. Courtesy of Morgan County Historical Society.
CHAPTER 4
OZARKIANA ATTITUDE
Reviewing the local histories, personal transcriptions and reports of the interior Ozark culture of the late nineteenth and early to midtwentieth centuries reveals a society of good and generous neighbors, as General Ivy described. However, gun and knife fights to settle personal or familial feuds were fairly common, and drunken fisticuffs were a regular form of community entertainment. Much of this entertainment was, according to various accounts, provided by older bachelor men who lived reclusive lives but came into town every so often to get liquored up, unruly and, ultimately, jailed.
Ernest McNeil related the story of one such recluse, J.R. Miller, who rode into town on his mule from his house in Shawnee Bend every half year or so for the purpose of drinking liquor at the local grocery-saloon. This was sometime in the second decade of the twentieth century. McNeil noted, “All the old men in those days rode mules,” to which Doc Foster added, “Or stud horses.”
Whenever Miller was taken in for the inevitable drunken brawl, young people would go to the jail to visit and be entertained. Miller would rattle the barred cell door and yell at them:
Here I am, John R. Miller, the flower of Shawnee Bend
A thousand cows upon a thousand hills
Money to loan and money to spend
And here I am in jail with a damned n****r
Missourians are proud of their mules and work horses. This is a photo of a local horse and mule show on the square in downtown Versailles. Courtesy of Morgan County Historical Society.
(The racially charged language is included herein with great reluctance and repugnance. However, this is a recounting of cultural history and, as such, demands unflinching candor in such matters.)
The chant was apparently Miller’s signature with the townspeople—“The Flower of Shawnee Bend,” indeed.
On the subject of brawling as community pastime and spectator sport, McNeil said the most intense such activity always occurred on Christmas Eve and the Fourth of July. He noted that those dates were when the fighting was most likely to turn deadly, with no holds barred and often entailing what he referred to as “cuttin’ contests.”
In addition to brawls and feuds, it seems that in the Ozarks of old, almost everything—including sexual assignations, adultery and incest—was carried out, by necessity, more or less openly. This is another characteristic that has attached to the regions “hillbilly” mythology: that of a sexually amoral society. That imagery has been forwarded by writers like Vance Randolph and Donald Harington, among others.
Bill and Dorothy Williams, Morgan County’s dedicated historians, tell of socializing on the square in Versailles during the 1930s, when Bill was a teenager working at the local grocery. He recalled, “Everybody came to the Square on Saturday night and there went to their usual spots—if you wanted to see someone in particular you knew where to find them.”
The Christmas holidays are very important in Ozark towns. The large tree is brought into Versailles via a wagon and team. The tree will be put on the north side of the courthouse lawn and decorated, and residents have a ceremonial lighting on the Thanksgiving weekend. Courtesy of Kay and Lonnie Joe Williams.
One of the locals was carrying on an adulterous affair and would meet his paramour at the grocery where Bill Williams worked on Saturday nights. Everybody in the county knew about it, and the adulterer’s wife made her business to be elsewhere on the square while it was going on. What may seem remarkable is that the adulterer openly discussed the shenanigans with the youthful Williams.
Williams recalled the man coming to the grocery one Saturday and, while waiting for his partner to drive up, revisited a sermon from the previous Sunday—a blistering review of the sanctity of marriage and the sin of adultery.
“There I sat,” the man told Williams, “in the front row, a pillar of the church—and guilty as sin.”
Much has been written of the music of the Ozarks. Jack Hurst in the introduction to his book Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry wrote that the Ozarks (of the 1920s) was the “region and era that inspired the Grand Ole Opry.”
Prior to the age of live radio music in the 1920s or so, there were few steady paying jobs for musicians in the mountains. Most families had members who played musical instruments, and some played for neighborhood house parties called “play parties” in the old times. By the mid-twentieth century, they were “music parties” and, by the late twentieth century, “jams.” But music making in the old days was considered separate from “work” and thus not eligible for wages or fees. Joyce Mace recalled that her father played the fiddle but only at home. Perhaps there will always be those Ozarkers who would agree with the statement: “I like a man playing the fiddle—but he shouldn’t get paid for it.”
Missouri and Ozarks culture are also famous for the high regard in which mules have historically been held. The mule has a unique ability to place its rear hoofs in the exact places in which its front hoofs have trod. This makes for a sure-footed steed in traversing mountainous terrain. This trait also made the mule a preferred plow animal. Old-timers speaking of their favorite mules almost always noted something to the effect of “that animal never stepped on a (crop) plant.”
Then there is the relationship Ozarkers maintain with fire. It is not uncommon to see a “burn pile” in the front or side yard of a rural house or even those of Ozark country towns (though some towns require a “burn permit”). It is by bonfire that unwanted or discarded things are disposed of in this culture.
A team pulling a plow is another example of farming the Ozarks bottomland. Look closely—there are three horses or mules hooked to this single plow. Courtesy of Miller County Missouri Historical Society.
The north side of the Versailles square, across the street from the Morgan County Courthouse, housed a bank, a drugstore, a jewelry store and a dry goods store. This early 1900 photo also shows the overhead electric lines. Courtesy of Morgan County Historical Society.
Ozarks tracts of grasses and vegetation are burned off in the springtime and autumn. Usually, areas around dwellings (but at times also field range and forest floor) are put ablaze in these deliberately set grass fires. The general explanation for this practice is that it makes for healthier vegetation growth in the coming season, and sometimes natural debris in ditches and culverts is burned off. Another older form of the practice is said to require burning right up to the cabin. This was explained as a means of controlling insect and varmint populations.
Whatever reason the fire is started, it not infrequently spreads beyond the desired perimeters and takes down fence rows, outbuildings, barns, dwelling places and other unintended targets. During the month of March, Ozarks fire departments respond to scores of grass fires.
Richard Rhodes, writing on the subject of the Ozarks, pinned the “burning off ” practice to the strength of culture:
The first Americans to go into the area, hunter-farmers from Kentucky and Tennessee, thinned out the wild game and girdled the trees to kill them so that they could plant corn. They believed that the humus on the forest floor inhibited the growth of grass, as indeed it did, and they began informal programs of annual burning that destroyed the primary source of organic matter available to improve the thin, rocky Ozark soil.
Humus is the natural material from which soil forms. Its exact nature is not well understood. The Missouri Department of Conservation has spoken plainly to the effects of the burn-off tradition: “Fires set each spring were meant to encourage herbaceous growth for livestock forage but only added to the ecological devastation” in the old-time “free range” and “clear cut” days of the Ozarks.
Gerard Schultz places the custom far back in regional history, writing that the Indians used seasonal burns to clear land for crops and others to drive game animals toward their hunting parties. The implication may be that the early settlers learned the practice from their Native American precedents. Centuries later, many Ozarkers continued the “informal programs of annual burning”—by then possibly a culturally ingrained ritual—celebrating the turn of the seasons as much as any other stated purposes.
The old Ozark custom of planting crops according to the phases of the moon or other natural signs has also been viewed by some outside observers as cultural ritual or superstition. However, such custom is most likely the product of a centuries-old “oral almanac,” extant long before modern agricultural studies and practices. As Leonard Hall wrote on this subject: “The connection between agriculture and astrology is ancient beyond the records of man and may, for all we know, have considerable foundation in fact.”
Another characteristic that was noted by students of Ozarks culture is the practice by older men of the mountains of telling long, generally pointless stories.
(DWP:) These products were, it has been said, called “Windies” and may be still. I am relating from personal experience. My grandfather (born in the 1880s) was a master of the art in his elder years. He would take a grandchild on his knee, gather round the remainder of the children or others available for audience, hook a thumb in the bib of his overalls, lean back, close his eyes and launch into a lengthy story about old-time days on the railroad or some other experiences that seemed likely fuel for a good fable but were, in the end, woven into aimless narratives terminating abruptly at the junction of Nowhere and What the Hay.
Family members—notably my sister Lola Hook Rice and a cousin, Cindy Hart—state that the cultural drill down of this tradition is far greater than may be immediately apparent. The subtexts were often to first determine the audience’s relationship to the community (did they recognize the story references) and next to discover if there was any blood—or blood feud—relationship between the parties. And apparently some of the “Windies” were traditionalized narratives, and the nonsensical finales depended on whether or when the storyteller lost track of which tale was involved in the telling and slugged in a piece or two of another such story.
This team of mules, pulling a corn planter, represents a very common method of farming the Ozarks bottomland. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.
Then there was the fondness of Ozarkers for Walmart stores (during the time of this narrative). To favor Walmart had long been considered by some segments of the American general culture to signify a lack of shopping sophistication. Walmart, however, was a store that was founded by Ozarkers, of the Ozarks and for Ozarkers. James “Bud” Walton—Sam Walton’s brother and co-founder of the Walmart chain—owned a five-and-dime in Versailles for a number of years, and the Walmart headquarters is located in the Arkansas Ozarks where Sam originally operated a “dime” store.1
The chain’s rural roots were one of the reasons for its success. While the more urban discounters generally had conflicted marketing strategies with regard to location or destination, Sam Walton apparently knew very well that in rural regions, everything is a destination. Thus was avoided the temptation to pay premium for location as the enterprise grew.