BROOKS BLEVINS: We picture the Ozarks as this kind of unique place where life goes on in a different way than it does everywhere else in the United States, but I've never thought the historical research really showed the Ozarks being that way.

[music playing] The history of an area where someone was born or presently living is often of interest to those individuals, and these histories are almost always unique in ways and sometimes surprising.

In other instances, we, perhaps, see parallels and commonalities with other regions and peoples, experiences and cultures that unite us as a country.

A special region and home to many of us is the Ozarks, a beautiful expanse of land and charm and one with an impacting and enduring influence.

Dr. Brooks Blevins has authored an extensive trilogy documenting the Ozarks.

In this program, he shares information about this remarkable trilogy.

NARRATOR: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well, thanks for coming in today, and you're a pretty special guest.

You've been here several times, and we were talking about the mugs.

You've got quite a collection of them from showing up a lot.

I think if there's a number for a set of mugs, I've probably reached that number.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit.

I know most viewers are probably familiar with you, but why don't you give a little bit of your background and what you do at Missouri State and you're interested in the history of the Ozarks.

Yeah.

Well, I'm a native of the Ozarks.

I grew up down in Izard County, Arkansas on a little farm, and I've been pretty much studying the region all my adult life.

And I've been here at Missouri State since 2008.

I came here as the first Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark Studies, and I'm still the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark studies.

And so I've written a number of books, and this trilogy may have finished me off on the Ozarks.

I'm not sure I've got a lot else to say, but that's where we are.

Yeah, you'd written several books before the trilogy.

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, the first time I appeared on this show was back in the early 2000s, the very early 2000s, talking about my first book on the Ozarks, which was called "Hill Folks," and it was my revised doctoral dissertation.

And so this makes about half a dozen books that I've written specifically on the Ozarks.

And by the way, that's still one of my favorite books.

I thought that really captured so much about the Ozarks, so it was definitely [inaudible]..

I appreciate that, and I didn't know after doing that book, I guess I didn't know that I had anything left to say on the Ozarks, but it turns out I didn't know how little I knew when I wrote that book.

But that's what happens, you keep digging, and you keep finding stuff.

Yeah, I'm always curious about what kindles the passion for a person to pursue something in great detail and depth like writing about the history of the Ozarks.

What really got you into that-- just motivated you to do it?

Yeah.

I think people who write or people who are scholars are motivated by personal things, things that have personal meaning to them.

I've had friends who've had certain political leanings, and they pursue certain kinds of political history or people who pursue certain kinds of religious history based on their upbringing.

So for me, it was just a very direct thing.

As a native of the Ozarks, with deep roots in the region, my earliest ancestors arrived here over 200 years ago, it was really just kind of a self-exploration and an exploration of my family, my community story.

And it just sort of grew out from there to include this entire region that we call the Ozarks.

So a lot of it was just selfish.

You're just kind of interested in yourself and why I grew up the way I did, why my people were the way they were.

And so I've spent 30-something years digging into that now.

Just before we get into the trilogy, have you ever had a desire or an interest to just write about something totally different that's outside of your scope of experience?

Sure.

And I follow that a lot by just-- I read a lot of things that have nothing to do with the Ozarks, listen to podcasts, and watch documentaries that have nothing to do with the Ozarks.

And I've even written a couple of books that had nothing to do with the Ozarks.

I wrote a book on the history of the cattle industry in Alabama, not exactly a best seller, especially here in the Ozarks, but that was the first book I ever did.

And so I've done a lot of other things.

As an undergrad and a graduate student, I never took a single course on the history of the Ozarks.

They mostly didn't exist back in those days except here at Missouri State, and I'm not an alum of Missouri State.

So yeah, I've done a few other things, and I hope to, at some point, maybe do a book on something that doesn't have anything to do with the Ozarks, If Missouri State will let me get away with that as the professor of Ozarks studies.

Oh, I think you might be able to pursue some interest outside of that.

Like you say, I mean, you've done a lot of-- how many years have you been really focusing on the Ozarks?

It's been a lot.

I mean, I know you've been doing that for a long time.

Yeah.

Well, I can tell you, now, it's really been a little over 30 years.

As a junior in college, I wrote my first research paper that had something to do with the Ozarks.

It was about an African-American community in the Arkansas Ozarks, and I did that in the spring of 1991 and did oral history interviews.

And that was really the thing that got me hooked on it, got me involved in the Ozarks.

And so I I've officially been doing Ozarks history now for over 30 years.

Was there any person or folklorist or historian or anyone that really triggered your interest, or was it just pretty much the self-exploration that you just did on your own?

Well, here's the funny thing, and I talked to a lot of people from the Ozarks, and I've talked to people from Appalachia and other regions who had the same experience, but as I said, I grew up in the Ozarks, but my family, my community, we really didn't go around saying, we're from the Ozarks.

We didn't really identify with the Ozarks.

We heard Ozarks this and that on Springfield TV stations.

And we had the Ozark Folk Center just across the river in Stone County, Arkansas from where I lived.

But we never really self-identified as people in the Ozarks.

We knew we lived in the hills, so we knew we were hill people, but that's about as specific as we ever got.

And when I was in college, my junior year of college, I was in the library at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas, and I remember they had a regional room.

And I remember just browsing through the shelves in there, and I found Milt Rafferty, "The Ozarks, Land and Life."

And of course, a lot of people who watch this show have seen Dr. Rafferty in the past and remember him.

He was a long-time geography professor here at Missouri State.

And I read that, and I saw his map of the Ozarks, and I thought, well dadgum, I'm right there in it.

It looks like something someone would have told me at some point, but it was kind of at that moment, I had that sort of epiphany moment where I realized I'm part of a bigger region.

I'm not just in some unnamed hill region that's different from the flat country an hour away.

But we've actually got a name, and it's part of the Ozarks.

And so that was kind of the thing that spurred it, and it was Dr. Rafferty's book.

And then I soon after that read things by Lynn Morrow, who's an alum of Missouri State.

I consider him one of my mentors.

And so know they were both very influential in my early development and interest in the history of the Ozarks.

Yeah, I remember when I did an interview with Dr. Rafferty, and I started reading his book.

It was a fairly good sized book, and it was about the physical and the cultural Ozarks and all that.

And as a geographer, I think he was able to capture the physical dimensions as well as the cultural, social stuff as well.

And that still remains one of the better books about the Ozarks, in my view.

I mean, it's terrific.

Yeah, it really is, and Dr. Rafferty, as a cultural geographer, was really able to capture what it was that defined Ozarks culture.

Of course, it' changed a lot.

He wrote that book 40 years ago.

The first version came out about 40 years ago, and the region has changed a lot since then.

But I've often wondered now that he's gone, I can't ask him anymore.

But I've often wondered if he tried to do the same thing that I tried to do and ultimately, failed to do.

But one of the things I had hoped to do for volume three of my trilogy of the Ozarks was to come up with a pretty usable cultural map of the Ozarks or kind of map of the cultural Ozarks.

We've got maps of the physical Ozarks, and the geographers and the geologists can tell us when we're in the Ozarks and when we're not based on rocks and soil and all that kind of stuff and terrain, but really, the tricky thing is defining what is the cultural Ozarks.

JIM BAKER: That would be a fascinating question.

Because I remember talking to him about that very subject, and he said, you know, it's one thing to do the physical characteristics.

Because he said we can look at rock formations and the Karst topography and all that stuff.

But when it comes to the traditions, the culture, and the history, and so on, it's a tougher deal because there's a lot of variety.

BROOKS BLEVINS: Yeah, it really is.

And a lot of cultural identity just comes down to whether somebody thinks they're part of a group or in a place that's part of a group.

And so a lot of it is just, one of the things I do as I travel around the Ozarks-- and I probably do that as much or more as anybody out there-- is sometimes I'll just ask people.

I'll stop at a filling station or somewhere, and I'll just ask somebody, am I in the Ozarks?

just to see what they say.

And you and you kind of get a feel for where is the cultural Ozarks by finding out where people consider themselves to be in the Ozarks.

And certainly, there are lots of places on that physical Ozarks map, where people don't identify with the Ozarks, and that's especially true as you get closer to the Missouri River, the kind of northern border of the Ozarks, even closer to the Mississippi River.

A lot of communities and people in those places don't really have a strong, cultural connection to the Ozarks, and some of that has to do with the fact that there are a lot of people of German heritage there, and that was kind of a separating point at some point in the 19th century.

But it is interesting, as you travel around the region to find out where you're actually in the Ozarks, and where you're not, even when you're inside that physical Ozarks map.

I drive across the State of Missouri a lot, heading to Kentucky to visit family.

And so when I go through the Mark Twain Forest and Eminence and all that and then hit Poplar Bluff and I drop down a little bit, I think, OK, I'm probably leaving the Ozarks because it's really more of a delta kind of a thing.

Although, physically, it's still defined as part of the Ozarks, I guess, to a certain point.

Some of it is.

JIM BAKER: Some of it is, but not all.

But you can feel that there's a drop off on the difference there.

Let's talk a little bit about the trilogy.

I guess the first logical question is, why did you decide to break it into a trilogy in three parts instead of having one, big, massive atlas of some sort.

BROOKS BLEVINS: Well, that's a pretty easy question.

When I sat down to start writing this thing, I thought I was writing one book, and I started writing it, it was six years ago this month, almost to the day that I started writing this trilogy.

And so I thought, well, it's going to be a big, fat book, but I'm going to write a book.

And by the time I got to the Civil War, which is not really even not even halfway through the story, I had a book the length of manuscript already.

And I realized, hey, this is not what I had in mind.

I'd done so much research and I'd really overdone it.

I mean, that's kind of how I tend to do research anyway.

I read everything even peripherally related to what it is I'm working on.

And so I realized that, well, this is not going to be just one book.

I'm just going to keep writing, see what happens, and then I'll try to convince a publisher at some point to publish these things.

And by the time I got through the Civil War era, got through reconstruction into the late 1800s, I basically had two books written.

And fortunately, I had a relationship with the University of Illinois Press from a previous book that I had done called "Ghost of the Ozarks," and I talked to my editor there, and he liked the idea of doing a trilogy on the history of the Ozarks.

Yeah.

The one thing that seems like there's some natural kind of breaks there, like the first one is the older Ozarks, and then we'll talk a little bit about the central theme of that, then you break it into the conflicted Ozarks, which is the Civil War and then the Ozarkers, which is the third book is going to be a little bit more about the culture and the newer things.

So why don't we go back.

Let's work our way chronologically through that because I think it's very interesting, the history.

So for the older Ozarks, for the first book, what was your central theme, and what do you want the readers to get out of that particular book?

The overall theme, I guess, if it has one and I hope people pick up on this, this really, it's kind of the overall theme for the entire trilogy.

It's that the story of the Ozarks is, in a lot of ways, just a microcosm of the story of the United States' development.

We picture the Ozarks as this kind of unique place where life goes on in a different way than it does everywhere else in the United States, but I've never thought the historical research really showed the Ozarks being that way, being a quaint place that's unlike any other place, an exceptional place, as we say in the scholarly world.

And that's really the theme of the old Ozarks.

The Civil War era, it kind of does its own thing when you get into the Civil War, but certainly, with Volume 3, that's the theme in there too that it's a regional variation on a national story.

So in the first book, you're really talking about the indigenous people that lived here and really kind of just give the history up to the Civil War.

And then it seemed to me like the Civil War period was an exceptionally violent time in the Ozarks and in Missouri, in particular, it seemed like it was even more violent than a lot of the other States.

What did you really pick up out of that whole period that really stood out to you?

Yeah.

Well, you're exactly right.

I mean, if there is anything exceptional about the history of the Ozarks, it might be the Civil War era and what I call the long Civil War era, which is the four years of war and then the years of reconstruction after it, which are, in the Ozarks, were bloody and difficult as well.

But really, the thing about the Civil War era and the Ozarks that I stress in Volume 2 is that it's there are two civil wars in the Ozarks.

You've got your classic Civil War, the kind you see on the History Channel of armies marching around and pitching tents and buglers and cannons and fighting each other in traditional ways like we get at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge and places like that.

But that sort of Peters out by the end of 1862, not even halfway into the Civil War.

And then the rest of the war in the Ozarks is mostly a guerilla war.

The region devolves into a bloody, dangerous no man's land.

Many people flee the place just because it's lawless, it's dangerous.

You never know, I mean, all these people look alike, and they're mostly dressed alike.

They're not necessarily wearing blue and gray as we picture them on the History Channel.

You never know who your enemy is, who your friend is, and so that becomes the story that makes the Ozarks this just bloody no man's land in the last half of the war.

And that's an equally important part of the war, and that even impacts the region for years after that all the way down-- In Volume 2, with the story of the Bald Knobbers, the original Bald Knobbers down in Taney County, Missouri, in many ways, they're still fighting the Civil War 20 years after the war is over.

They're still lined up in many of those same factions that created Union and Confederate people in the Civil War, and a lot of times, it's the same families.

And it's those old, wartime animosities that are driving the Bald Knobber thing.

So that war, it doesn't just end in 1865, it lasts a long time after.

Yeah.

It seemed like the whole State of Missouri was kind of no man's land in a way because it's hard to figure out who was on the Confederacy side and who was on the other side because it kind of changed and moved around.

But the level of just violence was really high, and it wasn't necessarily normal warfare at all.

No, it wasn't.

A lot of this is, I mean, outside of the normal bounds of armies fighting against each other.

These are neighbors killing neighbors and families splitting up you.

There are plenty of examples of that.

And it's just, Missouri, as a border State, it was a slave State, but the percentage of enslaved people in Missouri was not near as high as a lot of those other Southern States.

And so you had lots and lots of white people who didn't have stakes in the slavery system, but even that, there is no magic formula for predicting who's going to join the Union side, who's going to join the Confederate side, and that's what makes studying the Civil War in Missouri and studying the Civil War in the Ozarks so confounding is it does just become a jumbled mess.

Just out of curiosity, was the violence like in the Ozarks, was it that much different than, say, the rest of the state of Missouri, or was that just a regional in a big region sense?

No, Missouri suffered from violence throughout the State.

I would say it was just as bad in places like the Missouri Valley.

We know Jesse James and the younger boys, and they're from the Missouri Valley region up closer to Kansas City, so things got really bad up in there.

Probably the farther north you went in Missouri the less you saw that kind of violence.

Certainly, from the Missouri Valley on down, it was quite a mess.

JIM BAKER: Was the Arkansas Ozarks pretty much the same as the Missouri Ozarks as far as the level of violence or was it a little bit different?

Yeah, the Arkansas Ozarks had that kind of violence as well, and that starts very early on.

Really, the root of that violence is that the population was so divided between pro Union and pro Confederate.

And it was in every community and every family, and it was just they were there.

I mean, this was a true civil war in the Ozarks.

And the first examples of that happened, actually, down in the Arkansas Ozarks, where you have a group called the Peace Society that doesn't want any part of the war, and some of them are basically going to end up on the Union side eventually, even though they try to stay neutral.

But that's right at the beginning of the Civil War, and that divides those communities right off the bat.

And so you've got violence for four years and more in some of those Arkansas communities.

Well, as usual, I've managed to take up too much of your time, but we have a couple of minutes left.

Why don't you talk a little bit about the third book and the central theme of what you're doing in that one?

Yeah, the third book carries the story from the late 1800s to the present day into the 21st century.

And it's kind of like, we talked about my book "Hill Folks," which was specifically about the Arkansas Ozarks.

In many ways, it's sort of taking that model from "Hill Folks" and ballooning it out into the entire Ozarks.

And it looks at agricultural change, industry, society, and just about everything about the Ozarks and brings it into the present day.

I know this is a tough question, but is there a defining characteristic that's driving change in the Ozarks as far as you can tell?

I don't think there's a defining characteristic that's different than things that are just driving change in the United States, in general.

And I think, again, that's one of the areas where my thesis is the United States is or that the Ozarks is just a regional variation on the United States' story.

And I think we tend to follow the same characteristics, the same impacts that happen in US history, in general.

They just take on maybe a little different form here in the Ozarks.

So we really are just kind of a regional example of what's happening in the United States at large.

Well, I really appreciate your being with me today, and I hope everyone has a chance to read all three books.

And I'm hoping you get recharged and you can do a fourth book, eventually.

And remember, history continues to grow and develop, so maybe in 10 years, you can do book number 4.

That's right.

Well, I may have recovered by then.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll be back in a moment.

NARRATOR: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you enjoyed our program and Brooks Blevins' insight into our Ozarks region, history, and culture, and that you join us again for "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

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