CHAPTER ONE
“Temples of God’s Own Building”
Harold Bell Wright and the Roots of Branson Tourism
In 1895, Harold Bell Wright was unemployed and living in Ohio. He suffered from serious respiratory problems and was plagued by an acute eye condition that had forced him to withdraw from college preparatory school. Contemplating suicide, he instead decided to construct a canoe and float to the White Oak district of the southwestern Missouri Ozarks to recuperate among extended family. Embarking down the Mahoning River and connecting with the Ohio, Wright traveled as far as Cincinnati before high water forced the abandonment of his boat. The remainder of his 1,000-mile journey was completed by train and horseback, with this would-be clergyman and author arriving at Springfield, Missouri, in early 1896.1
At the time, Wright was twenty-three years old, and few signs pointed to his pending career as a minister and best-selling novelist. Although he had attended a Disciples of Christ school and could count a number of Congregationalist preachers among his distant relatives, he frequently expressed misgivings about dogmatic theology and institutionalized faith. And while he had written a manuscript when at Hiram College, he was too ashamed of its quality to send it to a publisher. It was within the Ozarks hills, a setting he would exalt and extol throughout his career, that Wright realized his calling. Drawing on a decade of experiences in and around this region, he published The Shepherd of the Hills in 1907—a work that both catapulted him onto the literary scene and attracted the first substantial body of tourists to an Ozark locale heretofore unknown to most Americans.2
Although Wright was mostly forgotten or ignored by the middle of the twentieth century, he was extraordinarily popular in earlier decades. From 1903 to 1942 he conducted a self-labeled “ministry in print” by penning nineteen books, numerous play scripts, and many magazine articles. Six of his books appeared on best-seller lists from 1911 to 1923, with five selling half a million copies by 1934. According to Asa Dickinson, he was the third most read American writer from 1895 to 1926 and the first in popularity from 1909 to 1921. Moreover, in 1945 Frank Luther Mott developed a system to compare top-selling books, defining a book as a best seller if its sales equaled 1 percent of the U.S. population. Mott’s system ranked Wright as the fifth most successful writer since 1665. According to these estimations, only he, James Fenimore Cooper, and Gene Stratton Porter had written five best sellers from the arrival of the Pilgrims through the first quarter of the twentieth century.3
Such dominance of the American fiction market was achieved by offering maudlin melodramas to white working- and middle-class readers. Constantly emphasizing the moral responsibility of those at the forefront of consumer culture, he plied fans with an embrace of rural sentimentality, wholesome family values, and simple moral lessons grounded in Christian precepts. This approach was berated by reviewers like Irvin Harlow Hart, who wrote, “No critic has ever damned Wright with even the faintest praise.” Predictably, H. L. Mencken extended this vitriol to the author’s readership, claiming that the texts appealed only to “naïve and half barbarous people.” However, millions or ordinary Americans welcomed such antimodern nostalgia. As a woman who ran a small library in France during World War I recalled, “I soon came to know that ten out of a dozen of the boys who asked for a book would say first: ‘Got anything by Harold Bell Wright?’” His status as the king of popular literature even became a begrudging litmus test for publishers. When confronted with a manuscript from a new author, they often asked, “Is he a writer or a Harold Bell Wrighter?” Although his fame began to wane in the 1920s, The Shepherd of the Hills, The Calling of Dan Matthews, That Printer of Udell’s, and five other novels remain in print, and fifteen movies have been made from his body of work.4
The word recreation implies physical and mental refreshment through a process of creating oneself anew, and it was such an opportunity for remaking that initially drew Wright to the Missouri Ozarks in the late nineteenth century. Though the logistics of leisure often necessitate painstaking planning, exhausting travel, or an ability to cope with sometimes uncomfortable social and physical circumstances, tourism continues to offer the possibility of subjective reconstruction or maintenance. Codifying this prospect into his literature, Wright similarly placed before millions of readers the idea of restoration by means of escape from the stings of modernity. In this way he drew Branson’s first literary tourists beginning around 1910. Furthermore, Wright sensed that the region’s inhabitants and topography could facilitate spiritual, social, and cultural rebirth, and it was this occasion for replenishment that stimulated the development of the area’s original religiously oriented tourist attractions.
Although suggesting a direct causal connection between Wright’s Ozark-based novels and all facets of the historical and contemporary Branson tourism industry is a tenuous proposition, it does seem undeniable that these writings established a religious and ethical framework that inaugurated regional consumer culture—a moral scaffold that continues to bolster Branson’s recreational offerings. Commenting in 1931 on such Wright-inspired tourism in the Missouri Ozarks, L. C. Milstead wrote, “The last twenty-five years have seen trade grow from a few hundred dollars into twelve millions annually.” By valorizing both the physically and spiritually curative qualities of the Ozark hills, praising the simple yet virtuous character of their residents, and legitimating the promotion of Christian principles in a variety of forms and lived contexts, Wright expressed attitudes that are reiterated by tourism producers and consumers to this day. Glorifying the inherent holiness of Branson and its environs in The Shepherd of the Hills, the book’s protagonist states, “There is not only food and medicine for one’s body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature. One gets very close to God . . . in these temples of God’s own building.” Even though this city’s modern vacation enterprise now extends far beyond sanctified topography and Christian-motivated attractions, many people would suggest that this facet still provides its core vigor. Thousands have contributed over the past decade to the persistence of such themes, but Wright continues to be memorialized as the individual who initiated this union of religion and recreation.5
THE OZARK EXPERIENCE AND THE MINISTRY OF HAROLD BELL WRIGHT
Harold Bell Wright was born on May 4, 1872, in Rome, New York. Two days after the death of his mother, Anna, in 1881—an event marked by a biographer as the author’s “first Gethsemane”—his alcoholic father, William, sent him to live with a local farmer. This relocation was the first of many during his adolescence, as he lodged with various family members, slept under bridges or in haystacks, and occasionally reunited with his father for brief periods in cheap boarding-houses. During his teenage years, Wright was left to his own devices and subsisted by hauling wood, driving a grocer’s truck, laboring in a glass factory, and consenting to other odd jobs that he encountered during his travels. After fleeing his abusive parent and their squalid living quarters above a saloon in Findlay, Ohio, Wright rode rails upstate to Grafton, where he gained employment as a sign painter. In 1893, a ministerial student from local Hiram College held a tentmeeting revival, and Wright was asked to paint its advertising signs. His signage prompted him to attend a service and to join the evangelist’s church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). As he recounted, this event introduced him to the “simplicity of the idea that it was enough to be a Christian, and to be a Christian was to accept the teachings of Jesus as the guiding principle of one’s life.”6
Formed in 1832, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) called for an end to divisiveness among Protestant groups and sought to restore early Christian accord through a return to New Testament principles. Adherents to this tradition felt that scripture contained a pattern for all religious thought and behavior. Putting forth slogans such as “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent” and “In essentials, faith; in non-essentials, liberty, and in all things, charity” (catchphrases Wright may have painted for the aforementioned revival), members pursued a “primitive” style of religion and took the Bible as their only existential guide. Spreading rapidly throughout the Midwest and South in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the movement protested the sectarian and creedal nature of extant Christianity and called for an ultracongregational polity that ceded all control of theological and structural matters to the local church. A sporadic attendee of Congregational churches since his youth, Wright professed that this older church was “all right for those who did not know life in the raw as [he] had experienced it.” But its preachers, with their “immaterial and irrelevant theological discussions, seemed to be apart from life.” Within the Disciples’ fold, he would find instead a theological vantage that satiated his desire for a more action-oriented and less doctrinaire form of religiosity.7
Based on his revival experience, Wright quickly embraced the Disciples’ theology and therefore found the themes that would eventually permeate his literature. With monetary assistance provided by a wealthy Grafton resident, he enrolled in Hiram’s preparatory department in the fall of 1893. However, after two years of schooling, he was still uncertain about the preaching profession and continued to contemplate other avenues through which he could apply biblical social ethics. When his brief stint as a student ended, he returned to a life of physical labor, but he soon contracted tuberculosis and began to lose his eyesight. These maladies would prove to be the first of many throughout his life, with the search for physical well-being becoming a primary impetus for his original and consequent visits to the supposedly curative Ozark hills.8
It was Wright’s feeble health that prompted an uncle to invite him to the Ozarks. Within pristine and undeveloped Stone and Taney counties (parcels of land now spanned by the Branson tourism industry), he pursued painting and drew general inspiration from a topography that he would hallow in six separate novels. During his first sojourn in 1896, Wright attended services at the one-room White Oak School near what would become Branson, Missouri, and was appalled by the itinerant preacher’s lack of preaching skills and his misreading of scripture. When this same minister failed to show up for a Thanksgiving service, congregation members who were aware of Wright’s truncated theological training asked him to conduct the meeting. Relating both his attempts to pastor in a mode that was comprehensible to untaught Ozarkers and their acceptance of his leadership in spite of his academic training, he quoted a congregant in his autobiography as stating, “He’s got larnin’, all right, but he sho’ talks so’s we-uns kin understand what he’s a meanin’.” Embraced by many rural churchgoers after this inaugural sermon, he frequently preached at schoolhouses and country churches before moving to Mount Vernon, Missouri, to minister to a small congregation.9
In the summer of 1897 Wright was invited by the Christian Church of Pierce City, Missouri, to preach on weekends and eventually served as its resident pastor until September 1898. Espousing a belief that “life was worth the effort only as one made whatever contribution lay within one’s ability toward the more abundant living of all,” and hoping to offer a “simple presentation of Jesus’ teaching power,” he was remembered by locals as a “very plain and somewhat unkempt person” who preached without pretense or undue theological argot. Resisting distinctive pastoral garb and abhorring being called “Reverend,” he advanced an anti-institutional and anticreedal theology with a gentle reserve that appealed to Pierce City residents exasperated by the prevalence of late nineteenth-century “denominationalism.”10
Near the end of his second year at Pierce City, Wright was invited to pastor a church in Pittsburg, Kansas, a booming coal-mining town in the southeastern corner of the state. At the turn of the twentieth century, Pittsburg was a locus of much ethnic diversity, with laborers from a dozen European countries seeking employment as deep-shaft miners. Partly as a consequence of this labor presence, the city was also a hotbed of populist and socialist political activity. In nearby Girard, J. A. Wayland had since 1895 published the nation’s most important socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, with Eugene V. Debs serving as a contributing editor. Such a presence made southeastern Kansas a breeding ground for radical politics and revolutionary social thought. This turbulent milieu was also augmented by a remaining vestige of frontier culture—one that brought with it a considerable amount of violence, prostitution, drinking, and gambling. In Pittsburg, Wright found brothels a mere two blocks from his house of worship and counted twice as many saloons as churches. Yet despite these apparent impediments to piety, he described his five years in Pittsburg as “the most satisfactory” of his life. During this period he married, had two sons, furthered his reputation as a persuasive public speaker, and wrote his first novel, That Printer of Udell’s (1903).11
It was in Pittsburg that Wright fully embraced Social Gospel advocate Washington Gladden’s notion of “applied Christianity.” In essence, the Social Gospel supported Christocentric philosophies premised on the conviction that Jesus’s role as moral exemplar should overshadow his redemptive sacrifice and atonement for sins. Essential for such development was the positing of divine immanence and the call for greater involvement of the church within society. Thus, a remaking of the social order that accounted for dramatic social and cultural changes accompanying the rise of the city and the growth of industry was viewed as the only way to ensure the ceaseless advancement of the kingdom of God on earth. As individuals such as Theodore Munger, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Gladden persistently emphasized the progress of the Social Gospel made manifest in American civilization and the conjoining of the natural and supernatural into a unified whole, their themes deeply affected young Harold Bell Wright. His writing clearly promotes a mode of Christianity that emphasized putting faith into action within one’s home, business, or community. Similarly, it often derided insular denominational wrangling over issues of finance, social standing, and leadership politics which impeded the church’s necessary mission of service to the world.12
Although Wright embraced the practical directness of the Social Gospel, he at the same time shunned the academic rendering of the movement offered by its best-known advocates. In fact, he admitted that in “the company of a bookish person,” he was “ill at ease.” Direct attention to new liberal modes of biblical interpretation or explicit engagement with social-scientific thought is absent from his writings. Instead, Wright opted for the fiction genre and thereby added to the roughly one hundred Social Gospel novels published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were aimed at bringing the movement’s tenets to the masses. His disquiet with scholarly matters and high culture was parlayed into works that frequently rebuked the nonpragmatic intellectualism of spiritual elites and churchly establishments. In this manner, he melded his Social Gospel tendencies with an early nineteenth-century religious populism promulgated by evangelicals of the Second Great Awakening. Groups born out of this revivalistic climate, such as the Disciples of Christ, espoused a democratic variant of religiosity prefaced on razing distinctions between learned theologians and ordinary believers and calling attention to the play of the supernatural in everyday life. This lived and popular approach to Christianity would be invoked in his first novel and later serve as the foundation for Branson’s unique brand of pious leisure.13
That Printer of Udell’s, initially published as a serial in the liberal Protestant periodical the Christian Century, tells the story of an unemployed printer named Dick Falkner who attempts to escape poverty and an alcoholic father by traveling to a small Ozark town. Unable to find help among Boyd City’s (read Pittsburg’s) religious elite, he happens upon George Udell, a local unchurched publisher who demonstrates to Dick that a strong work ethic and unwavering moral principles can be solidly cultivated outside the confines of institutionalized faith. In opposition to the Jerusalem Church of Boyd City’s prominent elders, a Young People’s Society forms with the intention of putting Christian principles into practice. Aspiring to “talk less and do more,” this group is led by renegade pastor James Cameron, who along with Udell epitomizes the merits of lived devotion. Presented as a series of sermons to his Pittsburg congregation, That Printer of Udell’s, like Charles Sheldon’s renowned Social Gospel tome In His Steps (1896), was meant to offer practical religious lessons. That Wright saw this impetus sorely lacking among his town’s most pious individuals is evidenced when he has George Udell state, “Your church members are all right on the believe, trust, hope, pray, and preach, but they’re not so much on the do. And I’ve noticed it’s the ‘do’ that counts in this life.”14
A modestly successful work, That Printer of Udell’s was thinly veiled autobiography. By broaching the concerns of unemployment, alcoholism, crime, and class bias, Wright not only chastised Christian devotees in Pittsburg but also inaugurated a melding of personal narrative and spiritually oriented fiction which would guide his entire body of writing. Further, this work is replete with moral uplift, as the protagonist relinquishes drinking and drifting, adopts a virulent work ethic, marries an affluent Christian girl, and is finally elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Such inspirational conclusions, which can be found in all the author’s texts, led critics to label his works sentimental and chide them as having “the rosy, empty features of banality.” With 1,000 copies initially printed and 450,000 eventually sold, That Printer of Udell’s in no way rivals the popularity of Wright’s later texts. However, its promotion of a style of Christianity that was intelligible to the common folk, thoroughly integrated into other value-creating arenas, and attentive to larger social concerns would recur in every subsequent offering.15
Shortly after publishing his first book, Wright accepted a pastorate at the Forest Avenue Christian Church in Kansas City, Missouri, where he preached from 1903 to 1905. Cautioned by doctors that a persistent cough might grow worse in the mining environs of Pittsburg, he took a brief recuperative vacation in the Ozarks before heading north to his new congregation. During two trying years in Kansas City, he once again sought to combat a wealth of saloons, brothels, and gambling houses through an applied Christian approach and grew increasingly discontented with his fellow ministers’ inattentiveness to these social matters. Chastising their self-centeredness and lack of popular focus, he wrote in his church’s newsletter, “When is a preacher not a preacher? When he cannot forget that he is.” Feeling throughout his career that he was “a thorn in the flesh of the body ministerial” and frequently criticized by his cohorts for failing to embrace the air of distinctiveness that is supposed to accompany the profession, Wright decided in 1905 to work on a second novel. He ventured alone to the Ozarks in the summer of that year and boarded with John and Anna Ross.16
Wright first met the Rosses while pastoring in Pittsburg. The family had settled in Springfield in 1879 and moved to a homestead in Stone County in 1895. Farming a 160-acre parcel with their son Charles, they took advantage of plentiful game, tillable soil, and abundant water to fashion a prosperous life atop a hilltop now called Inspiration Point. Wright’s initial visit to their cabin was prompted by the frequently flooded White River. On the way to join his father and younger brother for a hunting and trapping expedition in Arkansas, he was unable to ford the waterway. Seeking sanctuary with John and Anna, Wright passed time by investigating the idyllic mountains and their residents. As John Ross wrote, “It was on this trip that . . . the scenery charmed him. The peaceful quiet of the hills held his interest. It was the beauties that he saw on this trip that he afterward proclaimed to the world in print.” During his second visit to the homestead in 1901, Wright and his family camped near the Rosses’ home as he explored the region, painted, and worked on That Printer of Udell’s. He called on the family again during the summer of 1902 while in the area for a fishing trip. In July 1903, he revisited with a horse-drawn wagon packed with a tent, furniture, and other household items. Erecting his shelter in the midst of a recently harvested cornfield, he spent three months absorbing the local landscape and culture. He arrived once again during the summer of 1904, and in 1905, after resigning from his church in Kansas City, he returned permanently to begin his masterwork, The Shepherd of the Hills.17
Not yet ready to end his formal work as a Christian minister, Wright accepted a call to become pastor of the First Christian Church in Lebanon, Missouri, in September 1905. There, for fourteen months he continued to emphasize the merits of a lived Christian approach to theology. In October 1906, he offered a variation of Charles Sheldon’s question “What would Jesus do?” by proffering a sermon entitled “What Does Jesus Say about It?” More important, it was in Lebanon that Wright completed most of the manuscript for The Shepherd of the Hills.18
THE THEOLOGICAL, THE SOCIAL, AND THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS
Published in 1907, The Shepherd of the Hills emerged within an American culture that was witnessing the ascendancy of urban lifestyles, the rise of industrialization, and the dawn of new forms of subjectivity dependent on the consumption of mass-produced commodities. At the time of Wright’s first visit to the Rosses’ homestead, 60 percent of Americans lived either on farms or in towns of fewer than twenty-five hundred people. However, by 1920 more than half of the population lived in cities. The decade in which The Shepherd of the Hills was published also included one of the most sizable waves of immigration in U.S. history. By 1910, one out of every seven Americans was foreign-born. Urbanization and new economic modes also facilitated labor unrest and unionization, with thousands of working-class men arrested during the opening years of the century. Yet despite these upheavals of modernity, Wright’s text claimed that it was still possible to produce and maintain the sanctity of the family, the vitality of Christian-based ethics, the integrity of the individual, and the overall value system of an older rural American society.19
Set in the late nineteenth century near what would become the city of Branson, The Shepherd of the Hills tells the story of Daniel Howitt, a learned and cultured Chicago minister who comes to the mountains “staggering under a burden of disappointment and grief” that is product of years spent in degenerate urban confines. Keeping his background a secret, he is befriended by Grant Matthews Sr. (Old Matt), a farmer and miller whose only daughter died giving birth to an enigmatic son named Pete. Hired as a shepherd by Matthews, Howitt mentors the entire community, giving special attention to Grant’s son, Young Matt, and his love interest, Sammy Lane. Most significant, the Shepherd plays an instrumental role in safeguarding the Ozarkers against physical, ethical, and spiritual dangers. Throughout the novel, residents are tormented by Wash Gibbs and his band of vigilantes (a group Wright modeled on the Bald Knobbers, who terrorized Taney County during the 1880s). While Howitt attempts to protect the mountain folk from this obvious threat, he must also counter the more subtle coercions of temptation and materialism. During the story, Sammy is faced with choosing a mate. At the outset she is engaged to Ollie Stewart, a former Ozarker who has left the hills for the corporate world. Young Matt also seeks Sammy’s love, and as the “giant” of the hills he epitomizes the virility and raw power of rural naturalism. At stake for the author, of course, is more than the hand of his unspoiled heroine. The competing sweethearts serve as a representation of the clash between city and country, with meritorious and productive physical labor squaring off against spurious mental work and the quest for monetary gain. Ultimately, Ollie is portrayed as meek and physically feeble, unable to protect himself when bullied by mountain misfits, and feminized by a modern consumerist impulse that decays authentic manhood—traits that the book claims easily precipitate when loosed from the confines of the bucolic Ozarks.
Wright used such dichotomous characterizations and moral conundrums to valorize the inherently ethical fortitude of rural inhabitants, a sentiment with much currency at the time of the novel’s publication. The turn of the twentieth century marked the beginning of the Country Life Movement in the United States, an initiative that mirrored Progressivist programs simultaneously popular within urban America. Country Life, essentially a “rural version of the Social Gospel,” sought to reclaim a lost sense of community among farming peoples and to valorize an agrarian myth of once unproblematic and entirely cohesive social arrangements. The chief impetus for the movement was the National Commission on Country Life, created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. The group was led by urban Progressives with training in both theology and rural sociology. Individuals such as Liberty Hyde Bailey, Kenyon L. Butterfield, and Warren Wilson blurred traditional lines between church and society by prompting country churches to become community centers and sponsors of cultural activities. They also implored rural pastors to relegate soul saving to social betterment. Finally, in a related initiative spearheaded primarily by members of the United Presbyterian Church in the USA, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Moravian Brethren Church, religious leaders stressed the need for federated community houses of worship grounded in nondenominational cooperation. All these ideas clearly echoed Wright’s personal agenda and his Disciples of Christ training.20
Although Wright never claimed a formal affiliation with the Country Life Movement, its glorification of the yeoman farmer lifestyle, promotion of a rural simplicity that translated into uncomplicated rectitude, and claim that agricultural life would always be superior to urban existence all found expression within The Shepherd of the Hills. Liberty Hyde Bailey’s sentiment that “the land is holy” and Warren Wilson’s injunction to “make country life a religion” are mirrored in the opening page of Wright’s text. Here, a character referred to as “Preachin’ Bill” exclaims, “When God looked upon th’ work of his hands an’ called hit good, he war sure a lookin’ at this here Ozark country.” Though Wright, with his seeming detestation of modern accretions, may not have condoned the Country Life Movement’s sponsorship of contemporary scientific techniques to further commercialize and mechanize agriculture, he assuredly welcomed the movement’s attempt to reemphasize American agrarian righteousness. This premise, which traces its roots to Jeffersonian idealism, would hold currency until approximately 1920, with such outlooks informing all of Wright’s Ozark-based novels.21
Seeking to uphold the values of rural decency and spiritual prowess by citing the quest for materialism as their antithesis, Wright uses the characters of Ollie Stewart and Wash Gibbs to illustrate two different but equally injurious brands of acquisitiveness. Ollie’s once solid ethics had been quickly decayed by his urban lifestyle, replete with its accoutrements of “faultless linen, well gloved hands and shining patent leathers.” Similar to C. Wright Mills’s “morally defenseless” white-collar workers who could look only to mass culture for ethical guidance, he had discovered urbane nobility but lost “the aristocracy of heart and spirit.”22
Wright’s fears of an overly feminized modern culture also found support within religious initiatives of the early twentieth century. For instance, the Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912, the first evangelistic campaign to target a specific gender, stressed a masculine spirituality allied with church leadership, social service, and domestic responsibility. Purveyors of religious art such as Bruce Barton, meanwhile, attempted to divest representations of Jesus of feminine attributes and emphasize Christ’s manliness. Finally, men like John R. Mott, general secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA from 1915 to 1928, sought to cultivate “Muscular Christianity” and thereby assuage the ill effects of feminized faith. As cultural historian Erin A. Smith noted, Wright was implicated in this attempt to masculinize American religion. Although his works contain many traditional elements of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, he separated himself from authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe or Susan Warner by “eschewing domesticity and the world of women.” Most of his texts draw on the western genre and through a variety of archetypal frontier themes offer protagonists who have resisted the decay of authentic manhood and virile spirituality which results from modern life. Such trappings of civilization are thoroughly evident within Ollie Stewart. On his transition to city life, “cheap culture” not only facilitates the demise of manly aesthetics but also converts once solid religious principles into nothing but “foam and froth.”23
Alternately, Wash Gibbs’s quest for material gain is accompanied by a violent streak unfathomable to the dandyish Ollie. Killing, robbing, and constantly putting Sammy into physical and mental peril, he is willing to thwart the law to satiate his desires. Only Young Matt can resist the temptations of the time, and it is therefore obvious throughout that he will triumph at the book’s end. Wright resists characterizing this hero as driven by animality, a depiction regularly assigned to “hillbillies” or mountain folk throughout the twentieth century. Instead, Young Matt is the consummate virtuous Ozarker who avoids leveling undue force on either Wash or Ollie. Throughout the novel he heeds the Shepherd’s advice that “it is always God’s blessing . . . when a man masters the worst of himself.”24
Even the gentle and moderate Old Matt must fend off the temptation for revenge to maintain his status as an intrinsically righteous hill man. On the arrival of the Shepherd, Grant is still tormented about the death of his only daughter, who had been abandoned by a lover prior to the childbirth that precipitated her demise. Old Matt constantly battles feelings of hatred toward this wayward man who deserted her at the urging of his conceited father. Seemingly willing to sacrifice his spiritual good standing for retribution, he tells the Shepherd, “Many’s the time I have prayed all night that God would let me meet him again just once, or that proud father of his’n. I’d be glad to go to Hell if I could only meet them first.” When at the end of the text it is revealed that Howitt himself is that fulsome father who had urged his son not to further a relationship with such an uncultured mountain girl, the Shepherd fears that justice will soon be brought to bear. However, like all of Wright’s rural ethical exemplars, Old Matt controls his rage, forgives the perpetrator, and acknowledges the divine providence that guides all Ozark happenings when he states, “It’s sure God’s way.”25
Like Wright himself, Howitt comes to the Ozarks in search of physical and spiritual rejuvenation and an escape from the tribulations of materialistic city life. Although he finds individuals such as Ollie and Wash in the hills, the merits of Young Matt, Old Matt, Sammy, and others far outweigh the ethical shortcomings of the handful of immoral inhabitants. Concurrent with the sentiments of the author, Howitt’s Christianity is linked more to a sense of nature-driven spirituality and concern for social well-being than to any particular creed or theological vantage. For example, it was a comparison of his experiences in the Ozarks with those of Christ in the wilderness which prompted the Shepherd to associate the hills with “temples of God’s own building.” Similarly, Harold Bell Wright’s son has described his father’s spirituality in a manner somewhat analogous to that of the nineteenth-century transcendentalist movement: “He came to a little different concept of God, not so much as a personal entity you can talk to and pray to, but as a great overall power. . . . He believed that the all pervading, all powerful, all the laws of physics, all the laws of nature, everything in the whole cosmos, represented God to him.” At the novel’s end, the Shepherd claims to be “born again,” a sentiment that not only reflects the spiritual refreshment enjoyed by this character but also mirrors Wright’s own sense of rebirth within the hills. As will be documented in subsequent chapters, this amalgamation of leisure with spirituality and its accompanying product of soulful renewal would function as a model for many tourists throughout the next century. 26
Although thoroughly embracing the Social Gospel movement, Wright and his shepherd alter ego were hesitant to view communal and religious betterment as solely a result of a philanthropy of affluence. In the early decades of the twentieth century, tomes such as Simon Patten’s The New Basis of Civilization (1907) extolled the beneficial social functions of capitalism and urged Americans to view their checkbooks as objects “as spiritual and poetic as the grime and bloodstain of ministering hands.” Furthermore, consumers were increasingly being told that “real” naturalness required the subordination of nature to technology rather than a valorization of a bygone way of life and its antiquated economic arrangements. However, Wright resisted both of these intellectual currents and instead, according to John P. Ferre, situated morality as “embedded in nature,” where it could be “discerned by those who look earnestly.” In The Shepherd of the Hills, only those who cultivate a melding of grace and works are able to overcome the threats of modernity that swirl around this pastoral Ozark community, with characters embracing capitalist acquirement marked as dissolute pariahs who have unquestioningly accepted wayward “progress.”27
A union of ethical action and steadfast faith, which reflects the plea for an amalgamation of liberal and conservative approaches to salvation put forth by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), is made manifest by the characters Old Matt, Young Matt, and Sammy. Throughout, they stay the course of their moral quest by recognizing the ethical merits of country life and its concomitant simple yet fruitful value structure. Never does a reader find these individuals attending a formal church service or engaging in any type of prescribed ritual. Instead, their spiritual strength and moral vigor are cultivated in natural temples. In 1931 Wright wrote, “I have come to feel God in the most commonplace acts of everyday life. In the familiar and common objects of my daily experience, I recognize the divine.” It is this popular or lived religious sentiment that the Shepherd both learns for himself during his Ozark pilgrimage and demonstrates to the people he mentors.28
In The Calling of Dan Matthews, Wright’s 1909 sequel to The Shepherd of the Hills, his condemnation of nonpragmatic “churchianity” and promotion of an applied Christian approach are further articulated. Set in the midwestern city of Corinth, this work describes a town filled with churches and dogmatic pronouncements but lacking in the Christian charity so essential to the author’s conception of religion. Dan Matthews, son of Young Matt and Sammy Lane from The Shepherd of the Hills, assumes his first pastorate within this environment, and a struggle ensues between his socially active intentions and the dogmatic and financially preoccupied stances of Strong Memorial Church’s two prominent elders. Early in the narrative Dan meets a young nurse named Hope Farwell, who professes to be a devout Christian and demonstrates knowledge of things biblical. Nevertheless, she also rejects church establishments in favor of putting faith into action by means of her vocation. Dan steadily embraces her anti-institutional piety and loathing for the town’s religious elite. Functioning as a mouthpiece for Wright’s vision, she states during her first encounter with the novel’s protagonist, “To the churches, Christianity has become a question of fidelity to a church and creed and not to the spirit of Christ. . . . Man serves God only by serving men. There can be no ministry but the ministry of man to man.”29
Befriending perceived “undesirables” such as Charity Conner, the daughter of a murderer, and emphasizing accomplishment over intellectual suppositions to the chagrin of Strong Memorial elders, Dan realizes that he must leave Corinth. Like the biblical Corinthians addressed by Paul, Wright’s townspeople suffer from a variety of theological and practical problems. Paul’s correspondence was prompted by the increasing division of his targeted church community into factions. Urging this community to combat social divisiveness, he marked love and service to other Christians as imperative and chastised those who prioritized esoteric knowledge over a concern for this-worldly betterment. By invoking a church constituted of “many members, yet one body” who “suffer together” and “rejoice together,” Paul recommended a service-oriented religiosity grounded in Christian humility which is remarkably similar to Wright’s conception of proper faith. When the New Testament author advised the Corinthians, “If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise,” he was offering a directive that could just as easily find expression in The Calling of Dan Matthews and throughout Wright’s literature.30
In large part it is the novel’s urban setting that dictates its dilemmas and outcomes. Dan was “born with the passion for service in his very blood and reared amid the simple surroundings of his mountain home . . . where every soul was held a neighbor.” In this context each individual was “judged upon his own life and living” and not by the stolid dictates of creeds or confessions. Seeing that the members of his flock are incapable of exhibiting the uncomplicated communal virtues inculcated under the tutelage of the Ozark shepherd, he becomes ever cognizant of their preoccupation with “useless speculation.” Much of this banter is again the result of a feminized church replete with women’s committees that waste time “discussing the most trivial matters with the most ponderous gravity.” As a result, Dan abandons the hypocrisy and inaction of the supposed devout, returns to the hills to supervise mining on his family’s property, and makes the causes of local labor his chief priority.31
By fleeing the corrupt city and returning to this ethical sanctuary, Dan becomes reacquainted with Hope and truly realizes the verities of lived religiosity. As he professes in the closing pages of the text, “The ministry of the farm, and mine, and factory, and shop . . . wherever men toil with strength of body and mind for that which makes for the best life of their kind—that ministry is sacred and holy.” Dan’s choice of a ministerial vocation is well intentioned, but he quickly grows to realize that an assumed willingness among the devout to take principled action was naive. Thus, Wright once again expresses his conviction that the most viable avenues for Christian belief and practice lie outside the parameters of the institutional church and that it is in these popular forums that the real work of faith is done. In taking such a stance, he effectively outraged pastors throughout the United States. The Calling of Dan Matthews was even rebutted by evangelical novelist Alexander Corkley one year after its publication. In The Victory of Allen Rutledge: A Tale of the Middle West, a young pastor in another midwestern town confronts moral challenges similar to those faced by Wright’s hero. But in Corkey’s book the preacher refuses to renounce his denominational establishment and instead reforms the church and remains in the ministry.32
An expansive vision of “ministry” is Wright’s chief legacy within the century-long religio-touristic Branson environment. In The Calling of Dan Matthews, service to the common hill folk is the mark of true Christianity. Similarly, the author himself soon realized that he could better fulfill his vision of religious charity and practiced ethics outside the confines of a preaching career. Reflecting on this transformation in his autobiography, he stated, “All of who in any capacity serve are God’s ministers. . . . The pen of the writer . . . is the sacred furnishing of the temple of life which is the temple of the living God. . . . Certainly I have looked upon my writing as a ministry.”33
In 1906, Wright abruptly left the Ozark region to seek a milder climate in California and eventually retired from formal preaching in 1907 because of declining health. Although he seldom returned to the area during the last three decades of his life, his Ozark-based novels inspired scores of devotees to visit Branson as tourists. Moreover, they also prompted numerous individuals to adopt religious vocations or convert to Christian lifestyles. For instance, Guy Howard, known as the “Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks,” was born in Iowa in 1892. Initially a farmer and teacher, he began his evangelistic work in 1933 after his first wife made a deathbed request that he leave agricultural life and preach. At the time of this tragedy, Howard recounted:
I lost myself in reading. . . . A school patron loaned me copies of two of Harold Bell Wright’s books, The Shepherd of the Hills and The Recreation of Brian Kent. . . . The very word Ozark became to me a symbol of haven—a symbol of peace and quiet. I determined that some day I too would seek out this country which had become the refuge of another weary man. And I felt that in this land so far away in feature and situation I too might experience recreation.34
Seeking the solace of the hills so valorized by Wright, Howard moved to Hickory County, Missouri, to become a schoolteacher. Soon thereafter he decided to spend ten years walking from one community to another preaching the good news. Though raised in a Methodist family, he adopted the nondenominational approach of the itinerant minister, willingly sermonizing to any and all during 4,000-mile yearly treks in which he conducted an average of 280 meetings throughout northern Arkansas and southern Missouri.35
Like the author who inaugurated his illustrious preaching career and countless Branson pastors over the past century, Howard undertook a ministry prefaced on both spiritual uplift and this-worldly betterment. His best-selling autobiography, Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks (1944), is replete with stories that detail creative ways he used his meager salary to supply food and clothing, as well as religious education, to the hill people. His services combined frenzied praying, testifying, tears, laughter, dance, and tongue speaking with discussions of Christian service that could affect others “in works as well as in words.” Though he traveled throughout the region, he made Branson his home for a number of years in the 1950s and there wrote two books. Perhaps no one has had more first-hand experience with the entirety of the Ozarks than Howard. After a decade of surveying the land and traversing tens of thousands of miles on foot, it was the “Shepherd of the Hills Country” that he dubbed his “promised land.” Like Harold Bell Wright, Howard indeed found solace and restoration in the “spiritual nectar brewed in the out-of-doors.” As told in all his written works, The Shepherd of the Hills was the motivation for both his personal religiosity and that which he instilled in thousands of Ozarkers.36
Although Howard achieved much renown within the Ozark region and became known nationally on the publication of his autobiography, the most illustrious individual who was spiritually inspired by Wright’s Ozark literature was former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. At ten or eleven years of age, Reagan borrowed That Printer of Udell’s from the Dixon, Illinois, Public Library. He read it from cover to cover and became impressed by the traveling printer Dick Falkner. As Reagan wrote in a 1984 letter to Wright’s daughter-in-law, “After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. We attended the Christian Church in Dixon, and I was baptized several days after finishing the book.” As will be discussed in Chapter 4, the modern Branson tourism industry finds its roots in Reagan-era America. Although claiming that Reagan’s administration is directly connected to this consumer culture emergence is an unfounded assumption, his 1984 claim that Wright set him on a path that he “tried to follow even unto this day” certainly speaks to the politico-social impetus of the contemporary tourism industry and its connection with Branson’s early twentieth-century roots.37
In language similar to Reagan’s unadorned political rhetoric, in 1917, Wright credited his pastoral and literary successes to an egalitarian approach and characterized both undertakings as “plain food for plain people.” The Book Supply Company, Wright’s publisher from 1903 to 1920, offered no original texts except for his books. The remainder of its catalog consisted primarily of Bibles, Sunday school curricula, and other popular religious literature. The correspondence between Wright’s texts and more explicitly pious materials was recognized by his second publisher, Appleton, which claimed that “people to whom all other books but the Bible are idle and profane read Harold Bell Wright.” In 1910, Sears, Roebuck, and Company began advertising and selling his books through its catalog, a technique that would soon provide him with the epithet the “Dickens of the Rural Route.” The presence of his works within country homes soon became so pervasive that it prompted literary scholar Grant Overton to write, “It was the interesting inevitability of the visitor to humble homes in out of the way American places to encounter, on the parlour table, a Bible, a gift edition of Longfellow’s poems, The Wreck of the Titanic . . . and a copy of The Shepherd of the Hills.”38
Though reaching his prime as a best-selling novelist with The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), The Eyes of the World (1914), and When a Man’s a Man (1916)—books written while he was residing in California and Arizona which reiterated earlier critiques of urban vice and unmeritorious capitalism and promoted the natural integrity of rural communities—Wright is still primarily remembered for his place-defining Ozark novels. The author infrequently visited the region once established out West, and he died in 1944. However, in a 1935 letter to distant relative Marian Wright Powers of Carthage, Missouri, he stated that he “would like to make a pilgrimage back to the Ozarks,” thus continuing to imbue the area with the spiritualized aura present in his first novels. Even though Wright’s poor health and business obligations prohibited regular return visits, the region just west of Branson, Missouri, would adopt the sobriquet “Shepherd of the Hills Country” shortly after the publication of his place-defining novel—a moniker that has compelled visitors to revisit his Ozark legacy on a daily basis for now nearly a century.39
CHAUTAUQUAS, CAMPS, AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF RELIGIOUS LEISURE
Even prior to the publication of The Shepherd of the Hills, the area around Branson, Missouri, was viewed by outsiders as a consecrated Arcadia. The region’s first tourist attractions were game parks meant to draw hunters and fishermen to the untouched Ozark terrain. In 1891, a group of St. Louis businessmen purchased 5,000 acres in south central Taney County for the St. Louis Game Park. Stocking the land with deer, elk, wild goat, bear, pheasant, turkey, and quail, the park opened in 1896 and attracted dignitaries such as frequent visitor William Jennings Bryan and affluent sportsmen from across the country. Following this lead, another group of St. Louis residents established the Maine Hunting and Fishing Club in 1905 by moving the Maine Building of the 1904 World’s Fair to a bluff overlooking the White River and purchasing 207 acres of land south of Hollister in Taney County. These ventures, frequently touted in the leading sportsmen’s magazines of the day, would quickly become catalysts for journeys by city dwellers to the “exotic” Ozarks in search of the antithesis of their modern urban existence.40
The abundance of the land was a primary draw for early tourists in the Branson area, but it was the region’s waterways that were the most heralded aspect of this Ozark topography. While lake sports currently are a chief enticement for tourists, float fishing inaugurated this relationship between water and consumer culture. Vacationers began to frequent the rivers of southwestern Missouri in the 1890s, and by 1904 enough were coming to Stone and Taney counties to warrant the establishment of the area’s first commercial float-fishing company in Galena. Individuals arrived primarily for the “Famous Galena to Branson Float,” a 125-mile trip that began at the confluence of the James and White rivers and terminated at Branson. This week-long adventure (and other shorter variants) not only offered abundant bass and other game but also immersed visitors in “the Ozone of the Ozarks,” a pastoral and spiritual aura that could cure “the ails and ills of man.”41
The Shepherd of the Hills may have lamented ever encroaching modernity and a pending loss of agrarian simplicity, but it also suggested to readers that there was a place where the perceived troubles of industrialization or urbanization could be allayed—a locale populated by folks who, according to the text, “pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of life” and who serve as examples of “what God meant men and women to be” away from “the shame and ugliness of the world.” Utilizing an Ozark vacation to assuage such pressures, a St. Louis businessman floated on the James River in 1908 for an escape from the “awfully hard” business climate of his day. As he wrote, “I have had so much work at home that I simply don’t get any time to get away.” Despite this lack of leisure, he was still offered brief reprieve within an environment deemed immune from the tribulations of capitalism. While the hills and rivers around Branson could offer fleeting solace and time for contemplation to vacationing urbanites, the place could also function as a means for finding sanctuary from or briefly disregarding the stings of technological progress, social differentiations, moral relativism, or even global conflict. As a Branson vacationer wrote on a 1918 postcard, “We don’t get war news all the time and are forgetting everything about it.”42
At a general assembly of Springfield, Missouri, Presbyterians in 1908, eighty prominent elders hoping to partake of the region’s pastoral accoutrements agreed that their district needed a site where conferences, conventions, and group meetings could be held. Pastors of the First and Second Presbyterian churches were instructed to make a 300-mile trip through the Ozarks to investigate potential locations, and they ultimately purchased 160 acres near Hollister in 1909. In 1913, the articles of incorporation for this site, named Presbyterian Hill, identified that the locale would serve as a “suitable place for religious educational assemblies and conventions”; host activities aimed at “the development of Christian character”; and provide “a place for the rest, recreation and entertainment of its members and their guests.” Situated atop a bluff that overlooked Branson and the White River, Presbyterian Hill was reached by climbing 330 concrete steps—bringing one nearly 300 feet above the river. Visitors were offered a commanding view of Branson and the increasingly famous Shepherd of the Hills Country. Dewey Bald, Sammy’s Lookout, and Old Matt’s Cabin were all visible with the aid of a telescope. John and Anna Ross then helped to make this initial association with the novel more concrete by donating their old dinner bell to the new center and presenting lectures there about their connections to the book. Operated under Presbyterian ownership until the mid-1940s, this complex became sanctified terrain not only because of its sectarian affiliation but also because of the surrounding landscape. Peering down at the valley below from atop Presbyterian Hill’s summit, a traveler in the 1920s commented, “Man may have made the Hudson, but only God could have made the White River.”43
Initially, programs at Presbyterian Hill ran only three weeks. However, by the 1920s the site hosted a variety of annual encampments, lecture programs, and conferences. Attendees lodged in floored tents, rentable privately owned cottages, or even the somewhat lavish Grandview Hotel. Because accommodations were equipped with an abundance of water, lighting, bathing facilities with showers, and even a rudimentary sewer system, visitors could enjoy outdoor recreation and Shepherd of the Hills–based attractions without forsaking the comforts of home. A 1928 program for the midsummer gathering at Presbyterian Hill highlighted this notion of rusticity augmented by modern convenience in its information on Branson: “Here in our little city nestled in the beautiful surrounding hills on Lake Taneycomo you will find all the comforts and accommodations of a large city combined with all the scenic beauties and recreation that appeals to the tourist in this most romantic and scenic spot in the Ozarks.” Moreover, a similar resort, Shepherd of the Hills Estates, boasted that although vacationers would not hear “a single city noise,” the site was “easily reached by the completed system of modern highways” and “not too great a distance from home and office.” In this way, these original tourist destinations nimbly negotiate a divide between the premodern and modern worlds through assurances that guests could consume the bucolic wonders of the Ozarks yet still enjoy “necessary” innovations of the industrial age. Such a union of seeming contradictions also indirectly reflected the amalgamative theological vantage present in Wright’s literature, which according to Erin A. Smith promised readers that they could “be both citizens of a modern, disenchanted world and Christians inhabiting a profoundly sacred space.”44
Presbyterians from the five-state area that included Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas had access to the assembly grounds, but Presbyterian Hill also drew national meetings and guests from across the country. Making its accommodations available to other denominations and religiously affiliated groups, the site hosted gatherings of the Southwest Missouri Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Masons by 1915. Attesting to an ecumenical spirit, a promotional brochure proclaimed, “While the Assembly bears the name Presbyterian it would be hard to be sectarian in the presence of the eternal hills bathed in splendor. Here Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, persons of all faith and persons of no faith, meet and mingle on the broad terms of a common humanity.” Boosters asserted furthermore that the site was “Evangelical” and “Evangelistic” rather than “denominational” and thereby echoed Harold Bell Wright’s implicit understanding of the relationship between spirituality and the Ozarks. Branson and its surroundings were thereby vested with the ability to proselytize across faith traditions and even to reach those lacking religious inclination. The hills and hollers offered a means of encountering the transcendent in a fashion grounded in orderly experiences of nature, pious recreational enjoyments, and escape from the tumult of modern urban life. For those seeking “rest, refreshment, and recuperation” in a place “away from the dust and dirt of cities,” Stone and Taney counties were increasingly portrayed as ideal.45
Pulpit Rock and Grandview Hotel, Presbyterian Hill, circa 1930. Courtesy of the Lynn Morrow Postcard Collection, Jefferson City, Missouri
Augmenting the ability of Presbyterian Hill’s natural beauty to bestow spiritual prowess, the grounds also engaged in the promotion of religiously based morality and social conduct. Supporters claimed that the site was consecrated for the purposes of providing “physical, intellectual and spiritual improvement” and sought to shield vacationers from a gamut of vices. By prohibiting card playing and alcohol, Presbyterian Hill joined the early twentieth-century temperance movement in trying to preserve a vestige of morality amid rapid American urbanization. Drawing inspiration from the rural camp-meeting tradition, proprietors offered seemingly secular leisure opportunities such as fishing, boating, and dignified dancing within a sanctified social climate.46
Beginning in 1912 and continuing throughout the 1920s, Presbyterian Hill hosted a late summer Chautauqua. Established by prominent members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1873, the national Chautauqua Association sought to create a space within Protestant America that dissolved distinctions between religious and worldly activity. With an educational rather than revivalist intent, the organization was nondenominational and sought to offer high culture to working- and middle-class individuals through schooling in the arts and public affairs, with all offerings gently clothed in indistinct Protestant theology. Cofounder and eventual Methodist bishop John H. Vincent wrote in 1886 that such leisure opportunities allowed “the cable of divine motion” to stretch “through seven days, touching with its sanctifying power every hour of every day.” If it was effectively instated, there should then be “no break between Sabbaths.”47
The Chautauqua movement achieved its zenith about 1915, with more than ten thousand communities hosting events in that year. Like them, Presbyterian Hill offered celebrations of Christian ethics, patriotism, and family, with an observer portraying its program as “mother, home, and heaven lectures.” Sold to the Missouri Baptist Assembly in 1946 and renamed Baptist Hill, the grounds were employed by the Southern Baptist Convention for similar summer meetings until the late 1950s. By seeking to realize John Vincent’s call to “turn all secular nature into an altar for the glory of God,” Presbyterian/Baptist Hill stood as the first institution in the area to blend recreation with explicit Christian themes. By doing so it inaugurated the intricate conjoining of sacred and secular that now characterizes many of Branson’s most visited attractions.48
Tabernacle at Presbyterian Hill, circa 1920. Courtesy of the Lynn Morrow Postcard Collection, Jefferson City, Missouri
In 1910, a second institution joined the Branson area tourist mix when the YMCA established a campground on a 60-acre site below the bluff of Presbyterian Hill. Named the Hollister YMCA Interstate Recreation Camp and Summer School, and also known as Camp Ozark, this locale sought to further the overall aims of the association by offering a wholesome environment through which individuals could combat the vices of urban America; embrace Protestant virtues of thrift, temperance, and industriousness; and build healthy minds, spirits, and bodies.49
Unlike its male-oriented urban counterparts, Camp Ozark was billed as “An Ideal Vacation Resort for the Entire Family.” Begun with only one small cabin, the facility boasted by 1919 a registration center, a handicraft area, a small library, a 283-seat gymnasium, numerous lodging options, and landscaped drives and walking paths. Like Presbyterian Hill, the YMCA opened its camp to people outside its association and hosted Boy Scouts, physical education clubs, and private vacationers. By the early 1930s, a wide variety of religiously unaffiliated camps had joined Presbyterian Hill and Camp Ozark in the promotion of the Branson area’s Arcadian landscape and links to an idealized history of resident righteousness. Places such as Kohler’s Health Resort, Camp Ideal, and Camp Perfecto beckoned tourists to enjoy, in the words of the White River Booster League (a marketing organization for the Shepherd of the Hills Country incorporated in 1919), a “land of scenic splendor, romance, health, contentment, happiness, sunny days, cool nights, and all else that makes this truly the vacation Paradise of the Ozarks.” In 1930, attracted by such pastoral promises, an average of 150 cars per day streamed into Branson during the summer months, and vacationers could choose from 550 cabins and cottages found at area resorts. Attesting to the difficulties of choosing one idyllic spot over another, a traveler wrote during this period, “It would be hard to decide which camp is prettiest. It [the White River] is the most beautiful river I ever saw.”50
Enhancing this milieu of religiously motivated vacation options were Kickapoo Camp (at the mouth of Bee Creek on Lake Taneycomo downstream from Branson) and Kuggaho Camp (across the lake from its sister site). Built in the mid-1920s, these destinations were intended exclusively for young adults, with Kickapoo serving girls and Kuggaho boys. The camps were begun by Dallas schoolteacher C. L. Ford with the intention of helping city children learn ethical and social graces in a pristine setting, and this vision came to fruition under the leadership of Bill Lantz. Described by his friends as “the best 24 hour a day, 7 day a week Christian we ever met,” Lantz took over the sites in 1929 and renamed the boys’ location Kanakuk Kamp after a Kickapoo leader and prophet. As director, he prefaced the camps on two primary religious doctrines entitled “I’m Third” and “Four Square Life.” The former principle urged attendees to adopt a mind-set that proclaimed, “God First . . . Others Second . . . I’m Third.” Drawing on Luke 2:52, the latter augmented this sentiment of service and selflessness by advocating a life course intent on increasing one’s wisdom, stature, favor with God, and assistance to humankind—injunctions that today continue to function as Kanakuk’s guiding philosophy.51
Filtering lake sports and other athletic recreations through the lens of Christian values, Ford laid the groundwork for an enterprise that would be most fully developed by Spike White, who came to Kanakuk as a junior counselor in 1931 and assumed ownership of the venture in 1954. Nearly fifty years after the White family began to direct the camps, they still offer an “Exciting Adventure in Christian Athletics.” In doing so, Kanakuk continues to emphasize the concern on which it was founded and which was central to Harold Bell Wright, who in 1934 identified the “real social enemies of the day” as people who “make vice fascinating” and attire miscreants “in heroic guise for the worship of young children too young to detect the lie.”52
Throughout the hundred-year history of the Branson tourism industry, boosters and sojourners have persistently struck a sometimes uneasy bargain with modernity. This situation was even more complicated for Wright himself. He realized, for example, that a sizable portion of his readership was of the middle class and that this contingent was in search of a resolution that somehow united nostalgia and progress. Therefore, despite the abhorrence of city living found in The Shepherd of the Hills, Sammy Lane is remade by the Shepherd into a genteel and well-mannered lady by the book’s end. Moreover, despite the constant berating of the railroad as a symbol of the machine menace that threatens rural life in The Calling of Dan Matthews, Dan embraces industry by the work’s conclusion (though he does hope to employ wealth for the good of mountain folk). Caught in this betwixt and between position, Wright increasingly turned to divine sanction of progress to appease people who themselves needed an endorsement of their increasingly progressive lifestyles. As Edward Ifkovic has noted, “By attributing the new industrial America to God, there is nothing to fear. A highly industrialized nation is, indeed, God’s country. . . . The turn-of-the-century romancer created a new America—the industrial pastoral.”53
Ironically, tourism was one of Wright’s most loathed modern practices. In The Re-Creation of Brian Kent (1919), Brian’s urbane and egotistical estranged wife is reunited briefly with her husband while on tour in the hills. However, her avaricious sophistication is brought to an end when she drowns in a raging river, her wickedness checked by the adjudicating waters of the Ozarks. In his last regionally based novel, Ma Cinderella (1932), the author portrays wealthy city dwellers vacationing near Branson as pretentious snobs who select the area as their destination only because of the opportunity to throw wild parties and ridicule mountaineers. Finally, in the closing pages of The Shepherd of the Hills the author issues a caveat concerning the fate of his much beloved mecca which squarely situates tourism as a symptom of modern ills. As stated by the Shepherd, “Before many years a railroad will find its way yonder. Then many will come, and the beautiful hills that have been my strength and peace will become the haunt of careless idlers and a place of revelry.”54
Although Harold Bell Wright clothed Branson, its surroundings, and its residents in a spiritualized aura and connected this portion of the Ozarks with religious sentiments that still drive its tourism market, his literature also initiated a process of discovery whereby outsiders and modern infrastructures overran the hills. In addition, though Wright frequently censured consumer culture and the ethical dilemmas it produced, The Shepherd of the Hills prompted the birth of a still vital vacation market. Commenting on this explosion of spending in the region, L. C. Milstead noted in 1931, “More money changes hands in an hour than in a year a quarter of a century ago.” Milstead, like most literary critics, recognized Wright’s “shortcomings as a man of letters”; nevertheless, he admitted that the author should be “crowned king of press-agents” as a result of such economic growth. As will be seen in Chapter 2, even as most local residents welcomed consumer culture and actively incorporated themselves into this development by becoming the folks envisioned by tourists’ imaginations, others invariably begrudged Wright and his role in unmasking their Arcadia. As told by Chris Meadows, who for many years played the role of Old Matt in local theatrical productions of The Shepherd of the Hills, “The story . . . did the one thing the mountain people hated the most. . . . It gave the outside world a view into their lives and their way of living. They resented this invasion of their property and their lives. These were sacred to them.”55
Employing familiar Ozark terminology to express his contempt for people who unduly complicate straightforward Christian principles, Harold Bell Wright wrote that “plain and understandable truths” were increasingly convoluted by “weird, fantastic theological moonshine.” Since the publication of The Shepherd of the Hills, Branson’s tourism industry has advanced such a practical and lived religiosity that posits God in daily experience. It has also drawn vitality from tourist attractions that lionize the “sacred” lifestyles of regional inhabitants and the inspired topography in which they live. By offering camps prefaced on an interdenominational approach, early boosters crafted a market that resisted religious offense and accommodated vacationers seeking refuge from the perceived immoralities and mounting godlessness of modernity. In decades to come, this brand of popular religion would continue to motivate millions of Branson visitors. Though the status of Wright’s literature waned during the less sentimental and optimistic depression years, bucolic and spiritual themes persisted in attracting people seeking the solace of sanctified terrain and the succor of the imaginary premodern.56
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