Jun 132016
 

#AmericanRivers and #Riverkeepers celebrate the removal of a rusty, abandoned dam on Wynants Kill near Albany, NY. Already they see the flash of silver as herring swarm upstream to spawn.

” ‘Every dam should have an existential crisis,’ ” said John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, tells The Associated Press.” In Missouri, time for that crisis has come for one of those aging, inoperable and dangerous structures. We have an extensive discussion of the issues surrounding Lock and Dam No. 1, a monstrous relic, more than 100 years old, of Corps of Engineers river mismanagement on our website: (click here) Lock and Dam no. 1 on the Osage River.

04

This was taken during the 2012 drought. The river is full now and its waters barely cover the tops of the crumbling old concrete, barely held together with rusting iron and rotten wood. More than 100 years old now, Lock and Dam No. 1 serves no useful purpose for navigation or flood control, and it blocks the migration of paddlefish and endangered pallid sturgeon.

Removing Lock and Dam No. 1 would open those 80 miles of Osage River from Bagnell Dam to its junction with the Missouri River to possible spawning of both paddlefish and the endangered pallid sturgeon. Major spawning grounds of the paddlefish were destroyed by construction of Truman Dam. Per Wikipedia, the endangered pallid sturgeon, related to the sturgeon, another ancient fish (Cretaceous period), is endemic to the waters of the Missouri River system and the lower Mississippi. Like the paddlefish, its spawning grounds have been greatly diminished by river channelization and dams.  Both species are now sustained by hatcheries. The gravel bars of that last section of the wide, slow Osage River could provide both species an environment for natural spawning.

Oct 302012
 

Trophy Paddlefish

This looks to be taken below the Osceola Dam which was removed when Truman Dam and Reservoir was built. While the primary paddlefish spawning beds were over gravel bars between Osceola and Warsaw, paddlefish on spawning runs would accumulate below this run-of-the-river dam, making them vulnerable to snaggers.

We’ve not run across an authoritative history of the sport of snagging. The two areas most associated with snagging in the 1950s were the Osage River above Lake of the Ozarks and below the big Corps dams on the upper Missouri River. If anybody knows of any articles on snagging before the 1950s or had personal experience – we’d love to hear about them.


Continue reading »

Oct 142012
 

The Osage River runs a course of about 500 miles from the Flint Hills of north central Kansas to Bonnot’s Mill in central Missouri where it joins the Missouri River. A fecundate prairie stream that cuts into the Ozark uplift in mid-Missouri, the Osage is rich with human history.  One little remembered piece of history involves the site selection for the state’s capitol of governance.

Why is Jefferson City, a modest town in central part of the state on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, the capitol of Missouri? Why not a larger, more commercial, more populated urban setting?

Steel engraving of Missouri’s second capitol from an 1852 Meyers’ Universum, published in Germany. (and page 292, Damming the Osage)

The answer to that question is found in the 1820 constitution of the soon-to-be-state of Missouri.  At that time, rivers were the highways of the frontier—rutted lanes were the closest thing to a surface road and they were scarce; railroads were not even a gleam in a developer’s eye.  Waterways carried the freight and passengers pushing west.  Rivers were “…common highways, and forever free to the citizens of this state and of the United States, without any tax, duty, impost, or toll, therefor, imposed by the state.”

The Mississippi and Missouri were the continental pathways; the tributary Osage carried fur traders to their Indian suppliers, and later carried steamboats with settlers and supplies to communities established along its banks. Under Article X, “Of the Permanent Seat of Government”, the General Assembly was directed to name five commissioners from different part of the state to select a site for the state capitol. The primary limitation for selection was “that no place shall be selected which is not situated on the bank of the Missouri river, and within forty miles of the mouth of the river Osage.”

US Highways 63 and 54 cross the Missouri River at Jefferson City, just west of the capitol.
First railroads, then highways co-opted commercial river transportation.

The Osage at times runs a large quantity of water. Its access to western Missouri would have made it a good conduit not only to western Missouri and eastern Kansas, but an avenue to a jumping-off place for overland travel to Santa Fe and the southwest.

Missouri’s capitol, named for Thomas Jefferson, only 18 (more or less) miles from the original mouth of the Osage, was incorporated in 1821.

Although the Osage Indians and French fur traders and early American officials knew it was seasonally unreliable for boat travel (from canoes to steamboats), business interests ignored its hydrologic realities and pushed for river improvements. Before the Corps of Engineers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on multipurpose dams of questionable usefulness in the Osage valley, they wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on “improving” the Osage for steamboat travel.

 

Dec 032011
 
We are interested in things, the common denominator of which is the Osage River – for 35 + years exploring prairies, small towns, the Ozark-prairie border, doing some snake hunting in the middle part. Leland has fished the lower Osage since he was a child.That the river and its denizens had literary potential was not initially obvious. Leland’s father was an engineer for the state of Missouri, inspecting the water systems of small towns. Some days, young Leland would join him on his visits. He’d let the boy out to explore while he made his rounds. At Osceola one day, Leland got a Coke at the café by the low dam on the Osage and wandered down to the river. He found the carcass of a huge catfish, 5 feet long, floating belly up at the base of the dam.  
The next year he read Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea when Life magazine ran it as a series. In the end scene tourists look at the carcass of the great marlin and misunderstand the explanation of a local who says ‘sharks’ – meaning that’s what killed the marlin. They take his words to mean that the carcass is a shark. Flashback to the big, dead catfish. The Osage River became a literary river then – associated with words and stories. It was more literary than the clearer, scenic, Ozark rivers, which are art rivers, visual places, with smaller literary components. The Osage River is murky, with a more Shakespearian history, a more robust historical aspect. Clear rivers are rightly called scenic. Nature is more dominant there. Nothing like paddlefish or big blue catfish there. More artistic.We started on The Osage River: paddlefish, prairies, farms & villages, dams & reservoirs, imperial Indians, explorers, slickers, sportsmen, tourists & various violent, litigious & noteworthy events in the history of the Osage River Valley and at about the 500th page realized  it  had gone beyond affordable as we wanted an all color book to sell for less than $100.  It was our own form of cultural geography, an exploration of life along the river through generations, with a vaguely Carl Sandburg-1920’s-1930’s-Americana feel to it. We knew we didn’t want it to resemble William Least Heat Moon’s mooney stuff.We also realized that the real untold story is the machinations behind the building of Lake of the Ozarks and Bagnell Dam and Truman Dam and Reservoir. These are water resource crimes and misdemeanors on the order of Polanski’s Chinatown.  Lots of bitter court battles; two of three of the most important developers of Lake of the Ozarks went to federal prison; Environmental Defense Fund’s 1972 lawsuit against Truman Dam took years, was very contentious and has mysteriously disappeared from public record.

Mug shot of Walter Cravens, President of the Land Bank of Kansas City. Cravens was the prime mover behind the development of Bagnell Dam and Lake of the Ozarks in the mid-1920s. He served time in Leavenworth for financial shenanigans that included his efforts to swap Osage Valley farms for bankrupt, dusty Kansas farms (on which his bank held the paper).
No mug shot available for Louis Egan, high-flying president of Union Electric during the construction of Bagnell Dam, who would up in a federal facility in Florida.
We’ve left in a considerable amount on the imperial Osage Indians whose military power, some think, altered the development history of the central United States. And we’ve kept iconic crumbling small towns that pepper the prairie watershed of western Missouri and eastern Kansas.Previous to the dam-building era (the serious, high dams) of the 1920s, numerous efforts were made to improve steamboat travel by planning a series of locks and dams (only one of which was built).
Lock and Dam #1 about 20 miles up the Osage from its confluence with the Missouri River
More than 150 years of efforts to develop the river industrially that were unrealistic, sometimes criminally motivated, with lots of corruption and sloppy engineering have rarely produced the utopian benefits promised in whatever era.  Dammed as it is, resilient American culture on the lakes, tributaries, and watershed of the Osage is still interesting and Twainian in its vigor, variety.We’re ending up with 304 pages, 600 color illustrations (maps, old and new photographs).  Hope to send it to the printer in late spring; hope to send it to bookstores in fall, 2012; $35 retail – a huge bargain for such a book.