The Buffalo National River, First of Its Kind

The Buffalo River rises in the Boston Mountains and runs east for about one hundred fifty miles before joining the White River near the Marion and Baxter county line, near Buffalo City. For most of that journey it passes through a limestone canyon landscape of bluffs, gravel bars, and clear riffles that looks much as it did before European settlement. That is not an accident.

It is the result of a political fight that lasted nearly two decades and came close to losing several times. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Army Corps of Engineers had plans to dam the Buffalo. Two reservoirs were proposed, which would have flooded the most scenic sections of the canyon.

Local outfitter and conservationist Neil Compton organized opposition through the Ozark Society, founded in nineteen sixty-two specifically to fight the dams. Compton and his allies made allies in Congress, notably Senator J. William Fulbright, and they eventually won.

On March first, nineteen seventy-two, President Richard Nixon signed the bill creating the Buffalo National River, the first river in the United States to receive that designation. What the designation meant was protection. No dams, no mining, no subdivision.

The National Park Service manages the corridor today, and more than a million visitors a year come to canoe, hike, swim, and camp along its banks. The bluffs at Hemmed-In Hollow contain the tallest waterfall between the Rockies and the Appalachians, a two-hundred-foot drop that fills with water in spring and dries to a trickle in summer. The Buffalo is not the wildest river in the country.

But it is a river that was nearly lost and was not, and that story is worth knowing when you drive along its banks.