The Shepherd of the Hills: The Novel That Built Branson

Before there was a strip of theaters, before there were dams and lakes, there was a book. In the late eighteen nineties, a sickly young minister named Harold Bell Wright came to these hills on his doctor's orders, told to spend his summers in a healthier climate. He pitched a tent on the land of a farming couple named John and Anna Ross, and over eight summers of camping among the ridges and hollows, he came to love the mountain people he met.

In nineteen oh seven he published a novel about them, called The Shepherd of the Hills. He set it right here, and he modeled his central characters, Old Matt and Aunt Mollie, on the Rosses themselves. The book was a sensation.

The novel became an international best seller, and readers did something no one expected. They came looking for the places in the story. They wanted to stand where Old Matt's cabin stood, to see the ridges Wright described, to meet the real people behind the characters.

In an age before highways or dams or a single theater, a novel turned a remote corner of the Ozarks into a destination. Historians of the area say plainly that tourism in Branson began with this book, years before Branson was even an incorporated town. The Rosses' homestead became a pilgrimage site.

Later generations built an outdoor drama here that staged the story under the stars, running most summers from nineteen sixty onward, with a brief announced ending in twenty thirteen before it returned the following year on a shorter schedule. Nearly everything that Branson became, the music theaters, the lakes, the families arriving by the millions, grew from the seed this one novel planted. It is a rare thing, a town that can trace its identity to a single work of fiction.

Wright wrote about forgiveness and mountain folk and the beauty of the land, and in doing so he wrote the first chapter of a tourist economy that now draws millions of visitors a year. When you drive these hills today, you are following, in a sense, the footsteps of readers who came more than a century ago, chasing the world of a book.