In this Book
- The Battle for the Buffalo River: The Story of America's First National River
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: University of Arkansas Press
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Author's Foreword
- pp. xi-xii
- Foreword for the Ozark Society Printing
- pp. xiii-xvi
- 1. The Coming of Concrete
- pp. 3-24
- 2. The Conservation Idea Takes Wing
- pp. 25-44
- 3. The Legacy of Lost Valley
- pp. 45-76
- 4. The Battle Joined
- pp. 77-104
- 5. Enter the Ozark Society
- pp. 105-124
- 6. The Dry Buffalo
- pp. 125-144
- 7. The State Fair Fracas
- pp. 145-152
- 8. The Marshall Armory—Second Time Around
- pp. 153-186
- 10. A Rumble on the River
- pp. 205-224
- 11. Orval Faubus Comes to Bat
- pp. 225-252
- 12. The Election of 1966
- pp. 253-284
- 13. Action in D.C.—Reaction at Home
- pp. 285-320
- 14. The Book and the Bulletin
- pp. 321-326
- 15. Adventures on the River and the Hills
- pp. 327-360
- 16. The Transmogrification of the BRIA
- pp. 361-378
- 17. The River War Widens
- pp. 379-392
- 18. Senate Bill 855—The Beginning of the End
- pp. 393-402
- 19. Dreamers and Schemers on the Buffalo
- pp. 403-424
- 20. Conservation—A Political Chess Game
- pp. 425-450
- 21. The Jubilee Bus
- pp. 451-468
- Epilogue [Includes Image Plates]
- pp. 469-470
Additional Information
ISBN
9781610754880
Related ISBN(s)
9781557289353
MARC Record
OCLC
769187846
Pages
500
Launched on MUSE
2012-02-08
Language
English
Open Access
No