Rush Sierra Club!

Author: Thomas Medford | Major: History | Semester: Fall 2023

As the eminent scholar of Ozarks history Brooks Blevins wrote recently, “part of what historians do is tell the stories of the dispossessed, of those who didn’t or can’t tell the stories themselves.” This is the aim of my honors history thesis about the role of landowners that were eventually dispossessed of their property in the years following the creation of the Buffalo National River in 1972, after a long struggle. When I first began the process of searching for a topic last fall, I was vaguely aware that our Special Collections housed some great archival documents pertaining to the Buffalo River, one I’ve floated and whose hills and hollers I’ve now spent considerable time traversing. After a few brief conversations with faculty I came to realize that, like many things in this world, the river has a complex backstory that has not necessarily been reflected in historical writing to date. My mentor, Dr. Jared Phillips, has aided me in defining the aims of this project through a lens that reimagines the narrative.

This semester, I began graduate work as a part of the 4 +1 program that the history department offers. Like any student pursuing advanced studies in the discipline for the first time, I approached the concept of historiographic writing. With a research topic like mine, it has been a very useful effort. I’ve learned to take a topic and understand how historians have framed and reframed it over time through their writing, building upon and sometimes refuting one another. In Dr. Pierce’s Arkansas in the Nation class, I was able to write one of my historiographic essays about the Buffalo National River under the auspices of my thesis research. As I’ve understood for months, the narrative is written by the victors. This is not to say that a national river has turned out to be a terrible idea with only unfortunate consequences; thousands upon thousands of folks, including myself, have enjoyed it. However, in leading to its creation and cementing its story, the folks that had a much more immediate pastoral connection to the landscape for many years were undeniably left out. The scholarly writing, additionally, is quite sparse. In the process of completing all secondary reading pertaining to the national river’s creation, I’ve found that the dominant narrative often narrowly casts the events in the light of dam proponents versus preservationists, which fails to consider the unique perspective of landowners throughout the ordeal. Furthermore, the developments after the park’s creation in 1972 are typically ignored as well, including the process of dispossession itself and the later efforts of the park service to make amends. Scholar Brooks Blevins has identified these latter issues, and he wrote a great essay late last year about landownership and Ozarks streams. Given that there is limited scholarly writing and a questionable narrative, my research focusing on landowners and connecting the pre-park years of debate to post-1972 developments will contribute to the historiography, hopefully in a meaningful way.

This fall, I completed my first-ever oral history interview. This interview helped me realize that there was room for writing on the post-park years, as well as the park service employee’s perspective. While the aforementioned interest groups involved in discussing the park’s creation are of central focus, nobody has said much about those that first endeavored to manage the park. In the interview, I spoke with a couple that worked at the Buffalo National River for many years. A historian, Suzie Liles, who was around in the early years, and her husband Jim Liles, who spearheaded a land exchange program beginning in the early 1980s to sell land back to landowners in Boxley and Richland Valleys. In the years following the park’s creation, the park service saw fit to better recognize that landscapes preserved are often cultural ones, too, not just natural ones. It had certainly failed to do so in the years leading up to the park’s creation. So, the pastoral nature of these longtime agricultural landscapes was better facilitated by returning land to private landowners where possible.

In the coming weeks, I hope to complete several more oral history interviews with descendants of those dispossessed on the Buffalo River, on top of archival work. While expanding upon the aforementioned periods, I want to frame the research in the context of the present day in order to understand how historical memory influences current opinions of the park service. I will defend this thesis in the spring, and I intend to remain a student of Dr. Phillips’ as I continue this project with my master’s thesis. In conjunction with Special Collections and the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, I am also writing the historical content for a digital web project about the wider history of the Buffalo River, in which this research will be featured.