The Battle for the Buffalo River: The Story of America's First National River

by Neil Compton, Kenneth L. Smith (Contributor)

Under the auspices of the 1938 Flood Control Act, the U.S. Corps of Engineers began to pursue an aggressive dam-building campaign. A grateful public generally lauded their efforts, but when they turned their attention to Arkansas’s Buffalo River, the vocal opposition their proposed projects generated dumbfounded them. Never before had anyone challenged the Corps’s assumption that damming a river was an improvement. Led by Neil Compton, a physician in Bentonville, Arkansas, a group of area conservationists formed the Ozark Society to join the battle for the Buffalo. This book is the account of this decade-long struggle that drew in such political figures as supreme court justice William O. Douglas, Senator J. William Fulbright, and Governor Orval Faubus. The battle finally ended in 1972 with President Richard Nixon’s designation of the Buffalo as the first national river. Drawing on hundreds of personal letters, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, and reminiscences, Compton’s lively book details the trials, gains, setbacks, and ultimate triumph in one of the first major skirmishes between environmentalists and developers.

496 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2010

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's now 50 years since the riverine park was established, in NW Arkansas. Essentially, this book provides a story of a federal bureaucracy run amuck, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) being in mid-throes of its dam-frenzy, from the 1940s to the 1970s. (Not treated here is how such human agencies act as contributing factors to the exacerbation of the anthropocene.) It took an upstart, grassroots, civil society effort to prevent the clear-running river from being transformed--like so many others--into an artificial lake. Man-made lakeshores are legion in the area, and not just in Arkansas. The book points this out (e.g. map, on pp.114-115). At the time that the Buffalo River was being targetted for inundation by the USACE (whether by one or two dams on the river), you already had Beaver Lake (est'd 1960-66), Table Rock Lake (est'd 1954-58), Bull Shoals Lake (est'd 1951), just in NW Arkansas, and not to mention Lake Ouachita (est'd 1948 to 1953, pronounced WAH-shi-tah) in central Arkansas. And in the tri-state area, you already had, across the state line in Oklahoma, Grand Lake (est'd 1938-40), Ft. Gibson Lake (est'd 1953), Lake Hudson (est'd 1964), Lake Eufaula (est'd 1956-64), let alone other artificial lakes such as Lake Carl Blackwell (est'd 1937), Lake Texoma (est'd 1939-44), Lake Oologah (est'd 1951), Broken Bow Lake (es'td 1958), and Keystone Lake (1964), etc.; while in Missouri, you have the notorious Lake of the Ozarks (est'd 1929-31), and about the same time as the Buffalo River contention, the building of the Truman Reservoir (1964-1979).

As the book explains, in confronting this juggernaut, there was a turning point (an inflection point in history) --a fork in the water, so to speak-- or a tipping point that was reached with an either/or, that made impossible the oldtimers' dream of being left alone on their land along the riverbanks of the Buffalo River in Arkansas: either the land would be swamped and made into a reservoir for hydroelectric power, or the land and river would be enjoyed in perpetuity as a national treasure. The only way existing landowners were not to be kicked off their land was if the park ideal went forward; otherwise, landowners would be forced to sell with the USACE using eminent domain in order to shove the hydroelectric dam(s) down their throat. For the larger controversy of the USACE dam-building fixation--and the rival federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), also fixated on building dams-- see Cadillac Desert, which is good on other areas in the U.S., especially in the drought-stricken southwest but also more generally, e.g. controversies over the Missouri River. For an account of how far the USACE's fortunes have fallen since that hey-day, see the documentary "DamNation" (2014), with American examples of dam removal as a way to restore river ecosystems, a documentary produced in defense of the organically-forged landscape. Oddly, in northwest Arkansas, back in the 60's, many of those living in the small cities or towns near to the proposed flood zone were in favor of the dam(s), more or less swallowing hook, line & sinker the propaganda from the USACE with its blandishments about the benefits to be had from yet another reservoir impounding waterflow in the state of Arkansas. And yet, many, many of the locals were in the habit of enjoying the free-flowing waters of the Buffalo River.

A running theme throughout the book subtitled The Story of America's First National River is about how the local newspapers played a role in the controversy, and where they faltered in their coverage, how larger newspapers from further afield took an interest, city papers such as the Tulsa World, the St Louis Globe Democrat (with Leonard Hall reporting), but especially the Kansas City Star. The local papers in Arkansas, such as the Northwest Arkansas Times out of Fayetteville, the Arkansas Gazette (defunct 1991) out of Little Rock, or the Yellville Mountain Echo, but especially the Pine Bluff Commercial (with Harry Pearson reporting), all covered the dispute. The national import of the scenic river meant that even Time magazine (p.77) and the Wall Street Journal (p.272) would weigh in.

An intrepid group of both in-state and out-of-state canoeists, kayakers, fishermen, hunters, bird-watchers and campers had already had a long-standing practice of floating and visiting the Buffalo, well before USACE put the river in its sights. If customary practice were a second law, there would never have been the prospect of losing the right to ramble along or float down the river. Instead, the Ozark Society (est'd 1962) had to be born and the "dam-busters" would work together with the Ozark Wilderness Waterways Club (est'd 1956 in neighboring Missouri), to lobby successfully, always peaceably, for the preservation of the free-flowing river. The protection of the Kings River (1979) and the Mulberry River (1992), both also in NW Arkansas, would follow suit in the years thereafer (pp.387-8, 429).