Buffalo National River: The First Wild and Scenic River

The Buffalo River runs undammed for roughly one hundred fifty-three miles through the limestone bluffs and hardwood forests of the Arkansas Ozarks, from its headwaters in the Boston Mountains to its confluence with the White River near Buffalo City. There is no dam on the Buffalo. There has never been a dam on the Buffalo. That is not an accident of geography. It is the result of a decade-long political fight.

In the nineteen sixties, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed building two dams on the Buffalo, at Lone Rock and at Gilbert. The dams would have flooded the upper river valley and converted the Buffalo into a series of reservoirs. Local landowners, outfitters, and conservationists organized against the project with the kind of sustained, unglamorous lobbying that rarely makes it into popular history. On March first, nineteen seventy-two, Congress designated the Buffalo as the first National River in the United States, a new category of federal protection specifically designed to prevent the Army Corps from damming rivers with outstanding natural and cultural value.

The separate Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, passed four years earlier in nineteen sixty eight, now protects more than two hundred rivers nationwide, and the Buffalo fight became a model for later river-protection campaigns. The river was protected not by designation alone but by the fight to create the designation.

The NPS corrects a figure that circulates in older travel materials: the river is approximately one hundred fifty-three miles, not the one hundred forty-three miles cited in some early documentation.