Big Lake’s big moment

After several years of advertising in the nation’s leading lifestyle magazines, the first rooms at the luxurious Louis Hotel in the Delta town of Wilson have opened. So has Wilson’s Tin House Golf Club. Gaylon Lawrence Jr., one of the largest landowners in the country who has been buying up wineries in California, continues his transformation of this old company town into an upscale destination.

The Louis features two elegant bars, Staple in the lobby and Cottonwood on the roof. A spa known as Mend will open next year. So will the Wilson Motor Club, a museum housing Lawrence’s automobile collection. The Field Club soon will offer trap and skeet shooting.

As Lawrence expands offerings for wellheeled visitors, allow me to offer a suggested activity: Trips to nearby Big Lake. I’ve long been fascinated by this area of northeast Arkansas, which is as close to resembling the Everglades as you can get in this state.

“The area was a free-flowing river system until the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12 shifted the land to its current environment of swamps and lake,” Julie Bennett wrote for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “The major habitat types are bottomland hardwood forest, wooded swampland and open water.

“These natural habitats support a wide variety of mammal, bird and fish species. There’s abundant waterfowl habitat to support birds annually during migration. Most species of waterfowl can be seen during late winter and early spring at Big Lake.”

Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge is among the oldest refuges in the federal system. It was established Aug. 2, 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order. Now the third-oldest inland federal wildlife refuge, it’s adjoined by a wildlife management area operated by the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission.

“The Big Lake bottoms are the only remnants of timber and swamp habitat in Mississippi County and today are a natural oasis in agriculturally developed surroundings,” Bennett wrote. “An extensive network of ditches in southeast Missouri drain about 2,500 square miles of farmland directly through the refuge. During flood periods, the inflows are laden with silt.

“Sediment has continually filled the bottomland and swamp until there now exists a shallow lake with an average depth of three feet. … Big Lake’s strategic location and historical value to migrating waterfowl, plus its value as the last stronghold of outdoor recreational habitat in this area of northeast Arkansas, has prompted changes in recent decades.”

In 1991, for instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers worked with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to divert some of the silt-laden water. That improved water quality. Last summer, it was announced that licensed anglers could fish without catch limits on Big Lake from July 1 through Sept. 30 as the Fish & Wildlife Service drained the lake to compact the buildup of sediments and reduce invasive aquatic vegetation.

“The lake continues to shrink with the invasive species,” refuge manager Steven Rimer said at the time. “The main two invasives are American lotus and giant cutgrass. They end up making the lake smaller and smaller, and they make it difficult for people to navigate through different areas. The only option, if we didn’t dredge, was to drain it, expose the lake bottom and compact the matter.”

Once draining was completed, contractors began the control of invasive species with aerial spraying of herbicides. While the lake was drained, portions were aerially seeded with millet, rice and milo to provide food for wintering wildlife.

I can picture out-of-state visitors being treated to an airboat ride on the shallow water of Big Lake while hearing its fascinating history, especially the incidents from the 1870s until Wilson’s proclamation in 1915 that were known as the Big Lake Wars.

“War may be a misleading description of the events because there were no formalities, declarations, truces or settlements,” wrote the late Joe Mosby of Conway, a noted outdoors writer. “However, the conflict had a lasting impact on the state and even the nation. The Big Lake Wars pitted local residents, who were mostly poor, against affluent Northerners, chiefly from St. Louis.

“Early Arkansas maps labeled the sparsely populated area between Crowley’s Ridge and the Mississippi River as the Great Swamp. After the Civil War, the railroad boom included the building of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway from St. Louis to Texarkana, as well as construction of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. The railroads established branch lines in northeast Arkansas to haul timber from the vast hardwood forests to meet the building needs of the nation.”

Large parts of St. Louis and Chicago were built with lumber from Arkansas. Businessmen from those and other cities formed hunting clubs, chartered railroad cars to travel to Arkansas and began harvesting fish and wild game. Game and fish from Arkansas also were in high demand in St. Louis and Chicago restaurants.

“The trains that took out timber also provided transportation for the products of market hunters—deer, ducks and fish,” Mosby wrote. “Subsistence hunting became overshadowed by hunting that brought in money. Restaurants north of Arkansas often featured wild game from the Big Lake area. Iced barrels of venison, ducks, fish and even frogs went aboard the trains and headed north. The fish were usually largemouth bass and crappie, as catfish were disdained at that time.

“Friction quickly arose between local hunters and visiting sportsmen, both using the same lowland area. The St. Louis people began leasing land to keep out other hunters. Disputes flared into fights, shootings and beatings. Some clubhouses and lodges, which were constructed with readily available hardwood lumber, were burned.”

There were three factions: poor residents who considered it their right to hunt and fish on the land as they had always done, wealthy club members, and market hunters. Titles to the land often were in dispute. The Arkansas Legislature passed bills in an attempt to end the Big Lake Wars, but those laws were ignored.

“Sportsmen often paid the fines and went on hunting,” Mosby wrote. “At the beginning of the 20th century, concerns over dwindling wildlife populations emerged on a national level as well as in Arkansas. The international Migratory Bird Treaty was passed by Congress in 1913, putting ducks and geese under federal control.

“New federal and state laws were passed to establish hunting seasons and later to set daily limits on the taking of wildlife. … Not directly tied to the Big Lake situation was the arrival of rice farmers in the Grand Prairie region of Arkansas. Migrating ducks made seasonal use of the farms’ man-made reservoirs in addition to the nearby bottomland hardwood areas. Stuttgart became a center of duck hunting.

“But the wintering ducks didn’t forsake Big Lake. To aid in their management, AGFC in the early 1950s created Big Lake Wildlife Management Area on the eastern side of the national wildlife refuge, along with St. Francis Sunken Lands Wildlife Management Area to the west and southwest.”

While the president was being urged to establish a national wildlife refuge at Big Lake, state Sen. Junius Marion Futrell of Paragould was pushing for the formation of AGFC. Futrell became governor in 1933.

“Arkansas’ governor in 1915, George Washington Hays, pitched his support behind Futrell’s legislation to establish a commission to oversee hunting and fishing,” Mosby wrote. “The new agency had a staff of nine part-time game wardens to patrol the entire state. One was a Paragould resident. These agencies, refuges and regulations helped bring the four decades of conflict at Big Lake to a close.”

Big Lake is a natural treasure, ready to be introduced to visitors from across the country who will soon be coming to Wilson.