Gateway to the Ozarks, What Springfield Is

Stand anywhere on high ground in Springfield on a clear day and you can see the Ozarks beginning. The terrain to the south and east starts to fold and steepen, the roads start to curve, and the sky opens up the way it does when you are at an edge. Springfield is the largest city in the Ozarks, which is also to say it is the last large city before the Ozarks, depending on the direction you are traveling.

For more than a century and a half, it has functioned as a gateway, a supply point, a commercial center for the surrounding hill country. Settlers passed through here heading west. Troops marched through here in both directions during the Civil War.

Travelers on Route Sixty-Six passed through here on their way to California. The Ozarks themselves are old, geologically speaking, geologically ancient, worn down from what were once great mountains to the rounded hills and hollows that define the landscape today. The culture that grew up in the Ozarks over two centuries of American settlement is one of the most distinctive regional cultures the country produced: intensely local, wary of outside authority, self-sufficient by necessity, given to both deep community solidarity and spectacular violence.

The Bald Knobbers were of the Ozarks. So were the subsistence farmers who fed their families from the same hollow for four generations. Springfield sits at the edge of that world, urban enough to be cosmopolitan by regional standards, rooted enough to understand the culture it borders.

It has Wild Bill's ghost on its public square, a gunfight in its civic identity, a highway birth certificate, a fisherman's empire, and a cave you can drive through. There are worse things to be.