Defining Moments: Historic Decisions by Arkansas Governors from McMath through Huckabee

DAVID PRYOR: 1975-1979

DAVID PRYOR 1975–1979 And Once Below a Time I Lordly Had the Trees and Leaves Trail with Daisies and Barley Down the Rivers of a Windfall Light. —DYLAN THOMAS, “FERN HILL” Arkansas is called the Natural State for good reason.Its abundant forests and wildlife accented by free-flowing streams and majestic mountain ranges make it a vacationer’s paradise. Dale Bumpers, when he was governor, was wont to say, “Arkansas is a well-kept secret,and we want to keep it that way.” Though economic development and enhanced business and agriculture opportunities are the mantra for any state “on the move,” most Arkansans in their heart of hearts agree with Bumpers. Arkansans prefer to keep Arkansas pristine and natural. After the catastrophic flood of the Mississippi River in , Congress enacted the Flood Control Act of , which authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build dams for floodcontrol purposes and also to provide recreational lakes, a water source, and, in some cases, navigable waters and hydroelectric power.1 The mission of the Corps was not necessarily malevolent.  David Pryor as governor. Courtesy of Butler Center photos, Arkansas Studies Institute Collection, Little Rock. The trade-off, however, was the ruination of pristine waterways which for generations had been a source of recreational enjoyment .Those streams provided fishing and wading and swimming holes and pools. Thus, by the s, destruction of these natural rivers began to raise an anguished cry from naturalists and preservationists comparable to that raised by the destruction of a Carnegie library or aVictorian residence.Corps activities gave rise to the “Keep Busy” slogan created by Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher as part of his campaign (and the Arkansas Gazette’s) against the Corps’s damming natural streams and channelizing free-flowing rivers.2 In the s and ’s in particular, the tension between the Corps of Engineers and preservationists evolved into open warfare .What gave some solace to the preservationists was that federal law required the states to bear part of the recreational costs associated with a new dam and related facilities. This, in effect, gave veto power to a governor who wished to block the project. Examples of the gubernatorial veto go back to the reign of Governor Orval Faubus, when he saved the Buffalo River from the Corps’s Gilbert Dam project in  at the urging of the newly formed Ozark Society.One need only cogitate on the hundreds of thousands of recreational hours enjoyed by floaters and fishermen that would have been lost had the Corps prevailed. Faubus vetoed the Corps project in a flowery and poetic letter to General William F. Cassidy of the Corps in Washington, D.C., on December , . In doing so, he said: “The Buffalo River area is one of the greatest examples of the majesty of God’s creation . The beauty of the region cannot be adequately described in any of the many languages of man.”3 Next, there was Governor Dale Bumpers, whose efforts to save the Cache River and Bayou Deview from a Corps channelization project was heroic in its own right. Bumpers stood with DAVID PRYOR  the duck hunters and preservationists like Rex Hancock of Stuttgart against the rice farmers with sizeable farming operations who wanted the project for flood control and a regulated water source. But no recent Corps project was as heated and controversial as the proposed Bell Foley Lake, which would result from damming the Strawberry River in north central Arkansas. This relatively small project was first authorized by the  legislation. In , however, the Corps announced that this dam project was next, and as David Pryor later put it, “The fat was in the fire.”4 The Strawberry River has its origin just south of the Missouri line in Fulton County. It then meanders toward the southeast through Izard County, Sharp County, and Lawrence County until it merges with the Black River northeast of Batesville in Independence County. The dam proposed by the Corps was to be  feet high,and the lake would cover some , acres.The cost in  was estimated at $ million, but it was expected to climb to $ million by . Both the dam and the lake were to be named after Bell Foley, a man who had been a well-known and well-liked blacksmith in the Ozark foothills.5 Those advocating the project were major citizens,speculators, and developers in north central Arkansas who wanted a...