The Buffalo River and the Ozark Backcountry

The Buffalo River in north Arkansas was the first river in the United States designated as a national river, a category Congress created in nineteen seventy-two specifically to protect the Buffalo from a proposed dam that would have flooded its lower canyon. The river flows approximately one hundred fifty miles through the Ozark Mountains, dropping through bluffs of limestone and sandstone that in some places reach five hundred feet above the water. It is one of the last undammed rivers of significant size in the lower forty-eight states.

The national river designation protects about ninety-five thousand acres of Ozark forest on both sides of the river, but the designation did not come easily. The Army Corps of Engineers had been proposing dams on the Buffalo since the nineteen forties. Outfitter Neil Compton organized Arkansas conservation organizations and eventually national environmental groups through the nineteen sixties to fight each proposal. The Buffalo National River Act of nineteen seventy-two was the legislative result. The Corps has not proposed another dam since.

The Ozark-St. Francis National Forests, which surround and buffer much of the Buffalo River watershed, cover approximately one point two million acres in the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks. The forests contain a cultural landscape that reaches back to some of the earliest European American settlement west of the Mississippi River. Scots-Irish settlers arrived in the Ozark highlands in the early nineteenth century, followed the ridgelines, and built a mountain culture that persisted in relative isolation through most of the twentieth century. The folk music, craft traditions, and vernacular architecture of the Ozarks were documented by the folklorist Vance Randolph, whose forty-year collecting project in the nineteen thirties through nineteen sixties recorded songs, stories, and customs that had not changed substantially since the settlements were founded.