‘Natural’ history isn’t always serene
“In a country undergoing a population explosion, and in a state enchanted with the benefits of industry and technology, the river could not escape notice forever.” —Harry Pearson, Pine Bluff Commercial, April 18, 1965
The classic retort to the French national motto (liberté, égalité, fraternité) is “which one do you want?” When I started writing about rivers and dams a few weeks ago, I had no idea that people were fighting about the Buffalo River once again. Bill Bowden is covering the controversy in this paper. It’s layered and ironic; the once-poor mountain parts of Arkansas now have problems that once-rich Pine Bluff would love to have.
We hear a lot about polarization, about left and right (which refer to where one sits in Parliament, we might ought to remember), but I rest easy at night believing that most Arkansas people quietly favor conservation, property rights, and minimal government interference in anything. It’s not a left-right matter, just common sense, but we do find ourselves sometimes faced with “which one do you want?”
Once again, I recommend Brooks Blevins’ essay “Against the Current” in his 2022 collection “Up South in the Ozarks.” The history of some of our “natural” places is bizarre and involves antagonism between government agencies (the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service) and the erasure of human landscapes (the removal of people from their property) by forces of lesser evil in their attempts to recreate “wilderness.”
But enough of that. Let’s talk about Harry Pearson.
“I have just been through the most traumatic experience of my life.” That’s how Harry Pearson introduced himself to Neil Compton. It was Friday, April 9, 1965, and Pearson had just caught up with Compton at the Crest Haven Motel in Harrison. Compton was preparing for a two-day float from Mount Hersey to Gilbert.
At first, Mrs. Compton (Laurene) couldn’t stand Harry. Later she came to believe, in Neil Compton’s words, that he was “the smartest thing on two legs.” Dr. Compton (Neil) describes Harry as “a junior-grade edition of Charles Laughton.”
Harry arrived in a Volkswagen Beetle, one of a fleet that belonged to the Pine Bluff Commercial. Ed Freeman, publisher of the Commercial, sent him. The traumatic experience that Harry recounted was a meeting of the Buffalo River Improvement Association, a group in favor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to dam the Buffalo. Or, as Harry called them, the Marshallites.
In Compton’s words, Harry at the BRIA meeting had heard “lurid threats of violence, couched in the most revolting Arkansas-style vituperations that the human ear could tolerate, all directed toward us peace-loving save-the-Buffalo types.”
For 14 years, the core of my existence, the thing that gave everything else order and meaning the way the Eucharist did for Flannery O’Connor, was sitting around a table (dinner, supper, brunch) with Ed and June Freeman and Paul Greenberg and hearing stories of Pine Bluff and of Pine Bluff Commercial people. Of all the characters, and Lord knows that Pine Bluff and the Commercial had a few, Harry Pearson was a star. He would want that to read “the star.”
Reading his series on the Buffalo, which ran April 18-23, 1965, I understand why Paul and Ed and June kept talking about him decades after he left Pine Bluff.
In the first of the series, he digs deep into the history of federal interest in damming the Buffalo, then turns to local chamber-of-commerce-type support for the same. “The boom that hit Mountain Home in the wake of Norfork Dam was something the folk in Marshall had been eyeing with considerable interest. ‘Why not here too?’ was the inevitable argument,” he writes on April 18, 1965.
The story of Marshall’s Buffalo River Improvement Association involves James R. Tudor, owner of the Marshall Mountain Wave, and a roundtable discussion in which one pro-dam party said “the dam’ll bring in a lot of business, boost the assessments.”
Harry Pearson’s genius is evident when he picks up a stray detail about the BRIA: “They hired an executive secretary, L.R. Winners, an itinerant minister who travels from town to town hiring out as a promotion man. Winners subsequently has left Marshall.”
Harry Pearson will be a recurring character in this column, and we will return to the Buffalo, but I want to cast an eye to the southwest and round up some stray notes. One came last week from a reader who attended Henderson State University in the late 1970s. He remembers a professor there who claimed that the gorgeous bluffs on the Ouachita River were “all sold out for some … Glastron boats with 40-hp Johnsons and Cypress Garden water skis. Vast Conspiracy … I’m here to tell ya …”
Back in January I thought about going to Natchez and trying to trace the Hunter-Dunbar expedition up the Ouachita, but Charles Portis already tried that and wrote about it for the Arkansas Times in 1991. The story can be found in “Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany.”
Richard Mason, whose column appears every Sunday in this paper, turns up in the story as the chair of the Businessmen’s Coalition to Save the Ouachita, a group opposed to a plan to make the Ouachita more barge-friendly by cutting off its bends and curves and turning it into a long ditch. That plan came, naturally, from the Corps of Engineers.