View From The Riverfront- August 17, 2012

River towns have always drawn me by their history. Music traveled up and down the rivers when it was first being dreamed up....by the black deckhands on the steam boats, the Irish and English ballads of the flatboat crews coming down the Ohio to merge with the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, later, the single musicians that would work the steam boats, going up the Mississippi from New Orleans, and then off on the Arkansas or Missouri Rivers, or the Cumberland to Tennessee. Kansas City had it's own style of music, as did St Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, Louisville, KY and Cincinnati , as the music all cross pollenated with the help of traveling musicians that came into those towns and moved on. It was Polka from LaCrosse, WI, Blues from Memphis, Jazz from Kansas City and St Louis, a mixture of Jazz, Blues, Cajun and whatever from New Orleans, Mountain music from up the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers as it filtered down from Appalachia, it was hillbilly witnessed by the few steam boats that made it up the Arkansas River to the White River in Arkansas, when the flood waters had not left such a tangled mess of uprooted trees blocking the channels. In the 1800's when the railroads started across the Western plains and needed cross ties by the millions in those arrid plains that didn't have a tree in sight, they turned to the Ozarks as a ready source for the ties. My ancestors would cut and shape a cross tie, all by ax, saw and broadax, gather them in one of the Ozark rivers that ran into the White River and float them down to the White and on to the Arkansas where they would be held for the Steamboats that then carried them to St Louis and on by train to the rails end where they were building the new tracks. This was a major source of income for those early Scots-Irish settlers who had moved into the Ozarks from Tennessee and Kentucky. The Ozark woodcutters would ride on the mass of ties in the rivers, using long poles to untangle and help guide the ties to their destination. It was a very specialized talent to be able to stay alive on the heaving mass of ties as they bucked and slithered on down the rivers. On slip, down between the ties, was usually all the mistakes you were allowed to make on this ever moving stage and there were no encores.  The Ozark Mountain forests provided the wood for the railroads as they made their way to the Pacific coast. River folk have always been a little different breed and I find it fascinating to study their history.   -Stan

Sunset on the Land Beyond The River