CHAPTER 7

HOMESTEAD AND SQUAT

Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law in the middle years of the Civil War. It provided that any person over twenty-one years of age or who was the head of the family and who had not taken up arms against the United States was entitled to claim 160 acres of land (a “Lot” or a “Quarter of a Section”) if one could prove they had lived on and cultivated said “Lot” for a period of five years.

There was never a “forty acres and a mule” federal act. That post–Civil War field order proposal was never enacted.

Squatters rights, however, were taken very seriously in the Ozark population that Street would be dealing with in the great evacuation the dam project required.

The underlying tenet of the squat—that is to say the use and care of the land—was highly honored even when ownership was not in issue. It is said that a tenant farmer or renter would seldom be evicted by an Ozarks sheriff during the growing season if he had even one crop still in the field. Another issue, noted by Gerard Schultz, was that the eviction of a squatter by a legal claimant was frowned upon in most parts of the Ozarks, and that claimant often was soon discovered shot to death on some lonesome glade or forested byway.

Some of the interior Ozarks land, mountainous and untillable, no doubt would have been acquired under the “Graduation Act of 1854.” Schultz wrote:

The Missouri mule is a state icon and a very reliable part of the Ozark way of life. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

This Missouri mule team represents the native Ozarker’s most important possession. Quite often, the mules are worked as a team. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

This early twentieth-century photo of a woman making lye soap demonstrates a housewife’s specific chore and is an example of the division of labor. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

The Graduation Act…reduced the price of slow selling lands, by progressive stages, to a merely nominal sum. The price schedule was based on intervals that the land remained unsold, with the final price of twelve and one half cents per acre at 30 years. Thus 40 acres could be purchased for five dollars at that point. The total acreage that could be purchased under the Act was capped at 320 acres.¹

Land platting was blurred further by the “free range” nature of the regions animal husbandry and such matters as communal hunting and fishing understandings that were common in parts of the interior Ozarks until the mid-twentieth century.

Well into the twentieth century, the concept of “private” property rights was coexistent with that of free range. In the 1920s population with which Ralph Street and Union Electric dealt, however, many had obtained their properties through sweat and tears or for hard-earned cash money under the original Homestead, Preemption or Graduation Acts.² The mid-1920s were little more than six decades distant from the passage of the Homestead Act, a couple or so generations past.

This early lake-area 1950s-era bait and tackle store provided everything a fisherman needed for an enjoyable day on the water. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

The “good ol’ boys” hunting with their homemade ATV, trailer and a milk can full of water—everything you need for a hunt! Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

Early farming machines were not mobile. This stationary hay baler required the cut hay and straw to be delivered to the machine, which was common in the early 1900s. Courtesy of Missouri State Capitol Commission, Missouri State Archives.

The old-timers of the region, however, were in agreement that the deals Street and UE struck with most of the affected landowners were, in the final analysis, fair. This was particularly so with bottomland acreage that had been periodically enriched by river flood silt and thus had considerable commercial value.

Lee Mace, who will figure prominently further along in this narrative, said it was those who did not own land—the renters and share tenants—who suffered most perilously in the mass relocation.

Victoria Pope Hubbell documented the local sentiment:

Fifty years later Doc Foster recalled the reaction of local residents. “You take a young man, he can adjust. But you take a man sixty or sixty-five years old and put everything in his vest pocket and start him up the hill on foot and his probability of getting started again wasn’t too good. He’d left everything he had behind him.”

Speaking further to the point Lee Mace had made, Victoria Hubbell wrote:

Ralph McDowell was a tenant farmer using the land under the Grand Glaize Bridge in the last years before the Dam. Because he did not own the land where he raised corn, he did not receive monetary compensation for the loss of his livelihood. His horse drawn farm equipment was suddenly as useless as his knowledge of riverbottom farming. When asked “What did you do then?” he simply replied, “I walked to Linn Creek and got a job.”

Those who would not sell were flushed out through eminent domain, even though at the time the doctrine was not supposedly interpreted as a tool for private gain.

It may be worth noting that when the majority of justices of the U.S. Supreme Court voted to “privatize” eminent domain during the early years of the twenty-first century, it was but one more sign the pre-Depression laissez faire politics had returned—possibly one of the more notable such signals since the repeal of the protections of the 1933 Banking Act in the late 1990s.³

However uprooted, the Ozarkers may have found entertainment in one of the first of the Lake of the Ozarks turf wars—a kind of soap-opera scenario involving serious money.

In the early twentieth century, a wealthy business owner from Kansas City, Robert McClure Snyder Sr., decided to build a “castle” for his family’s personal benefit on a spectacular cliff-top spread overlooking five thousand acres of pristine Ozarks on the Niangua River. The property had been dubbed “Ha Ha Tonka”—said to translate from the local Native American tongue as “land of laughing waters” (good to learn that the aboriginals engaged in occasional onomatopoeic poetics).

This was in the days of extravagant mansion construction by the barons of commerce and industry. Anyone who has toured the manses of Newport, Rhode Island, will have some sense of what may have been Snyder’s inspiration for his castle. The project commenced in 1905, but then Snyder Sr. was killed in 1906 in an automobile accident in Kansas City.

The Snyder family pressed on with the plans for their grand castle in the Ozarks, spending a reported half million dollars to finally complete the project in 1922. But the surviving Snyders couldn’t afford to keep up the extravagant castle and grounds.

The Snyder heirs got the idea that they should sell the pile to the state of Missouri for use as a resort and state park. The state viewed the offer with indifference. The transaction did transpire decades later in 1978—too late to do the Snyders any good.

But in 1931, in an ex post facto notice, Union Electric gave the Snyder heirs the news that the Lake of the Ozarks, already in full flood, would inundate a portion of their castle property. But UE would be happy to pay them $143,000 for the expropriation.

The Snyders did not accept the deal and sued for $1.3 million. But what it all boiled down to was wealthy city folks—Kansas City’s Snyders and Louis Egan (president of St. Louis–based UE)—engaging in expensive litigation over land and power in the Ozarks, foreshadowing aspects of the urbanized cultural overlay of the region in the decades to come.⁴