A People’s History of the Lake of the Ozarks

Dexter Slagle came to the Lake of the Ozarks as a twenty-four-year-old surveyor in 1953. He would pass the next forty-five years mapping much of the region’s property. In his first assignment, he platted the area on the east side of the Gravois arm of the lake, known as Golden Beach.

“Thirteen hundred lots,” he recalled. “It took over a year—not working on it all the time though. Each lakefront lot had 50 to 75 feet of shoreline.”

With original 1931 UE plat maps of the entire Lake of the Ozarks on the table before him, Slagle reviewed how land is surveyed and platted and the methods of doing so in olden days.

The plat maps are fairly straightforward. “Township lines” and “range lines” intersect rows of neatly leaning blocks, each representing a square mile or “a section.” Slagle notes that the blocks are periodically elongated because every thirty-six miles, the curvature of the earth must be accounted for and represented.¹

One of the challenges of surveying in the early days was that some of the land had been acquired through squatters rights.

“Those [squatter] surveys are called ‘New Madrid surveys,’” Slagle said. “In 1811 and 1812, there were earthquakes in the Boot Heel along the New Madrid Fault. And a number of people moved out of the area for good.”

The New Madrid Fault is a seam between the platelets of the earth where they intersect at midcontinent North America. The New Madrid Earthquakes are seared as one in national memory—the largest ever such event in recorded American history.²

“A good number of [these squatters] moved to Howard County, where Fayette is now,” Slagle said, “and claimed new homes by squatters rights. When you do squatters rights ownership, you don’t survey, you just mark off your claim and it is identified by a ‘New Madrid’ number on a plat recorded in the courthouse. That is why the entire older part of Fayette is shaped in a kind of northwestern-leaning rectangle. That area was all done with New Madrid surveys,” which is to say they were plat mapped after the fact of ownership had already been established.

Land claimed through the Homestead or Graduation Acts was surveyed in some manner. In the early days of American survey practice, though, accuracy was not always achieved, and the methods of marking boundaries often involved the use of trees, called “witness trees.”

The term is near self-explanatory: the surveyor stamped a brand into usually two trees to be used in recording and identifying (or resetting lost) section and quarter section markers—pacing off from “corner marker” stones or stakes to the witness trees provided a means of approximating accuracy in the platting. This type of survey methodology is known as “metes and bounds”—localized measurement and boundaries.

Slagle had a collection of surveyor memorabilia, including two marked witness tree sections and a Colonial-period surveyor’s compass with “peep sights”—aligned notches to guide the eye. Slagle noted that the antique had a sixty-six-foot chain (an English measurement), which was used in measuring land until the early 1900s, when a one-hundred-foot steel tape—the American standard—was introduced.

In more modern times, boundaries were marked with metal pins or pipes, and the surveyor’s instruments had telescopes for much more accuracy than in the old days.

Dexter Slagle, in an interview, described the evolution of his survey equipment:

In 1983, I bought a new type of surveyor’s transit. It shot a laser beam from the transit to a glass reflector on a pole, which gave a level measurement up to a mile. This made surveying much more accurate and a lot less time consuming. About ten years later, GPS came into use. It could read angles and measurements over great distances and did not have to be line of sight. This made land surveying even more accurate and took even less time to complete a job and only requires two men on a survey team instead of three.

When attention was turned to the 1931 Union Electric plat maps, the story of the creation of the Lake of the Ozarks took a critical turn. The majority portion of the land bordering or in what is now the lake bed was, according to the plat maps, by then owned by the Kansas City Joint Stock Land Bank. In fact, most of the land needed for flooding the section of the reservoir abutting Bagnell Dam had been acquired by the Kansas City JSLB when the plat maps were created, according to the UE 1931 plat map numbered 5.

Some accounts of the creation of the Lake of the Ozarks present Craven and Street’s scheme as a complete failure, saying that the “big fish” they were after was never caught. That they did not see the effort through as originally conceived is correct, but they came closer than is generally credited.

Apparently, Street and his land acquisition crews ranged the entire length of the stretch of Osage River to be flooded, from far up in Benton County to the Bagnell area where the dam was to be constructed. They appear to have successfully managed to make numerous land deals with the locals.

This should not have been too unexpected, since most of the land to be submerged by the new lake was steeply hilled, rocky and essentially worthless in terms of commercial farming or other use. The farmland being traded was located down-land and no doubt was at least somewhat arable.

A visit to the Morgan County Recorder of Deeds office revealed that the plan to use cover corporations was indeed put into effect. There in the 1927 “Reverse Abstract and Index to Deeds,” handwritten entries in a huge, heavy, age-worn volume reveal row upon row of deed and affidavit transfers of property to the Kansas City Joint Stock Land Bank from Farmers Fund, Inc. The consideration in the deals was always “One Dollar and Other Good and Valuable Considerations.” The notarized signature was that of Walter Cravens, as president of Farmers Fund, Inc. The witness was A.B. Todd—Alice, the loyal secretary.

It seems the original scheme was to have Farmers Fund, Inc., act as cover in the purchasing and trading aspect and then transfer the procured land to the Missouri Hydro-Electric Power Company (another of Cravens’s cover or “straw” entities). But apparently Cravens lost patience or found some flaw with that process and caused the land to remain titled to Kansas City JSLB—only one or two of the purchases were transferred to the power company—making no further attempt to cover his tracks.

So Cravens controlled the entity—Farmers Fund, Inc.—that made the land deals and also the entity to which the land was ultimately transferred, the Kansas City JSLB. And which hat he wore depended on where he was in the transaction.³

It has been said that Cravens was himself, at the end, attempting to broker a deal that would have enabled the completion of his dam scheme. Had that been the case and had he escaped criminal prosecution, Walter P. Cravens would certainly be now a name to reckon with in the history of American business—if no other reason than for sheer audacity alone.