Ozarks and Time Passing

The two men didn't talk very much and every day they built another johnboat and painted it dark red like an Ozark barn. When the paint had dried they put a chain on the bow of each and slid it into the James River at Galena, Missouri. The planks soon swelled tight and the boat was ready to run the river and come back on a flatcar.

There were green johnboats, too, but the first ones I saw were barn red, and I assumed that was the true johnboat color. It was more than 50 years ago and the origin of the boat's name was already forgotten. I asked an Ozark kid of my own age why they called them "johnboats" and he said he wasn't sure but he had an uncle named John and maybe that was the reason. I doubt it.

Those float boats were pretty simple. There was no raised transom for an outboard motor in those days, nor any oar locks; just a board seat in the stern for a paddler and another in the bow, more to hold the boat together than to sit on, I suppose. They nested together pretty well, piled on flatcars and then on trucks in later years.

They still make johnboats in the hills, but nowadays they're mostly aluminum and fiberglass, and factories smelling of resin and paint turn out glossy bass boats that run 50 miles an hour. They would have been apparitions on the old James River. The new bass boats flash across the big impoundments and study the bottoms with clicking, whirring things--they show the old and silent river beds where the johnboats slipped along half a century ago. The big lakes are lined with resorts and homes today; but then, except for the occasional town, there were only a few houses along the old rivers, most of them presiding over little rocky hill farms.

THE FIRST OF THE WHITE RIVER DAMS I saw was the Taneycomo at Forsyth, downstream from Branson, and even 50 years ago there were resorts there. Tour boats would show you the lake, with everything named after characters from Harold Bell Wright's Shepherd of the Hills, which had its setting there. Now there's a Dogpatch, U.S.A. a little father south in Arkansas with characters from much later literature.

The big johnboats were sluggish under homemade paddles of the mountain men who guided them down the smallmouth rivers for a day, a week, or even more at a time, but they rode the rapids softly, taking the steep waves below the "shoals" in measured thumps. There were two casters to a boat, seated on folding canvas chairs, and the guide on his burlap cushion of spare clothing, with room even for a modest sideswipe with a short rod.

A few of the guides fished themselves, and their choice of stubby tubular steel baitcasting rods--sometimes less than three feet long--evidently began with the convenience of laying the weapon aside quickly when the paddle needed attention. Sportsmen in khaki might use split bamboo, but a hill country guide in bib overalls and felt hat used short tubular steel, and so did kids who mimicked him. "Takapart" found its way into the names of some of the reels to emphasize their simplicity, and well into the thirties many did not have level wind. I recall admiring the Meisselbach "Takapart" but my own reel was a Shakespeare Precision. Braided silk was the plugging line of vacationing float clients--smooth casting but needing to be dried after use. The guides and I used crochet thread which seemed to work about as well and cost much less.

There was no doubt about the favorite baitcasting lure along the James and White rivers. For years it was the Peck's Feather Minnow, referred to simply as "Black Peck" or "Yellow Peck." It had a spinner in front of a weighted head and a long feather body, often with a porkrind attached to the single big hook, or the occasional trailer hook.

I still have an old Tom Thumb casting plug, a fast-wiggling little diver with metal "lips" both front and rear, and when I first began fishing on James River it was second to the Pecks in popularity. The fly fishermen used the Callmac bass bug, the Tuttle's Devil Bug, Tuttle's Mouse and feather minnows like the Wilder-Dilg.

News traveled fast among river fishermen, even if its interpretation was questionable. One evening, two float boats came downstream to Galena, both with heavy strings of smallmouths, one of them a four-pounder, and all but that one fish were caught on the Yellow Peck. The big one was caught on a Black Peck and the general store at Galena sold out of Black Pecks the next morning. Those river smallmouths run bigger in memory than in fact and I am surprised that the yellowed snapshots show them so small.

I WAS NOT AN OZARK BOY. I was raised on a flatland farm in southeastern Kansas almost 100 miles away, but an unreasoning passion for the river began during a family vacation there, with the Model-T Ford and white canvas tent, sightseeing in the "mountains." I was less than 10 years old but had a craze for fishing, not just a healthy love for the outdoors, but an obsession that has lasted until after I should have grown up and accepted more productive pursuits. My father did not fish but tolerated my weakness regretfully and was ashamed that I would somehow get back to the James River during much of school vacation when I should have been helping with the farm work. I was ashamed, too, but I must use the word "obsession" again. I slept on the river bank and cooked poorly balanced meals over an old stump soaked in kerosene.

I have taken very few real river floats with guides, but I soaked up the river scene and fished mostly alone, wading in overalls and casting the Peck and the Tom Thumb, or struggling for half a day upstream with a johnboat to enjoy an hour of bliss floating downstream like the vacationing businessmen. I would cast frantically as I drifted, reeling too fast most of the time so that no inch of water would be wasted. That was in the late twenties, and it wasn't until the thirties that I used a fly rod much.

All of the smallmouth rivers were fickle. In spring when most of the heavy rains had finished and the water, still cool, began to clear, there would be times of excellent fishing. Low, warm water could turn the fishing poor in midsummer and guides would paddle continually in the slow stretches, and would often have to drag and shove the loaded johnboats over the gravel bars. With fall came the reddened oaks, flocks of ducks that flared over a float boat as they came upon it suddenly in a river bend, and energetic bronzebacks with enmity for Pecks and Tom Thumbs.

The smallmouths were "black bass," and the largemouths caught in sloughs off James River and in the slower, wider parts of White River below, where the James emptied in, were called "linesides." The occasional walleyes were "jack salmon" and the rock bass were "goggle eye." Many years later when I returned to the rivers I found the smallmouths called "Brownies."

ONCE, AS A REWARD FOR SOME NOW FORGOTTEN high school triumph, my father paid for a full day's float with a guide, downstream from Galena, and went along to watch, not knowing that I had become a better caster than most guides. I'd worked at it harder and longer.

I had not slept the night before and was suffering nerve-wracking anticipation. When the boat actually began to slide downstream and plopped over the steep "shoal" with the big boulder just below Galena, I somehow managed to produce a mammoth backlash, a super-tangle I can still see, and prodded it helplessly with quivering fingers while the guide threw his lure over shadowy chunk rock and against willowed banks. I had no spare reel and I heard the guide land two fish and remark condescendingly that I could use his outfit, while my father asked if he could help me. It was a long time before I untangled the mess, my parents' worried sympathy hanging over me like a raincloud, and it now seems incredible that such a little mishap could be so important. All that expensive fishing time lost was catastrophic, and when I finally straightened in my canvas chair the sweat of humiliation ran down my neck--but it was then that I saw the muddy creek pouring in from the right. It had rained the night before somewhere back in those hills and the creek water boiled into the James River, leaving a sharp line where it met the clear river current and turned downstream.

For some reason I had neither a Peck nor a Tom's Thumb on my line--but whatever the forgotten reason, the choice of a jointed Pikie Minnow had been made with deliberation. I threw it at the juncture of bright river and muddy creek, and the big smallmouth came storming up and took it crosswise in his jaws, lunged in a half-jump and went down in clear water where I could see his gyrations, a blur of twisting fish and flashing plug, distorted by curling currents. When he was in the boat my confidence came back.

And then I could do no wrong, the plug breaking the little eddies above the shoreline rocks and against the drowned willows, the gentle bulges over the upthrust boulders and the foamy vees of undecided water at the edge of the rapids. The burnished fish came out from underwater shadows in quick streaks, sometimes in twos and threes. They sometimes turned about the plugs before they struck. I remember them much larger than they must have been.

"He casts just as good as I do," the guide said, and then admitted he had been keeping score.

Then, "He puts it up there against the bank better than I do," he conceded, and although the guide was a mediocre caster, I can recall no greater angling triumph. It is true that he used the paddle a bit but the day's score was so one-sided I am sure I would have caught more fish, even if he had cast full time. And my father, who had suffered through my fishing addiction, could see I had at least become reasonably proficient at a game, the niceties of which had never before occurred to him.

But when the day of glory had ended and I was back splashing the side channels and tugging on waterlogged johnboats, priding myself in my casting of three-eighths-ounce lures, I met a wading hill-country boy with a great string of smallmouth bass he had caught on a gigantic "Dowagiac" torpedo plug with five big trebles and two spinners and 25-pound line on his Montgomery & Ward reel. I doubt if I ever equaled that catch.

IT WAS THE LONG FLOAT TRIPS that made the Ozark rivers famous, the parties made up of several fishermen. There might be a commissary boat as well, to carry the camping gear and cook, going mushily with little freeboard. The man with the commissary rig would paddle on through and set up camp on a high bar, ready for the guests' comfort when they arrived in late afternoon--a procedure that was still followed much later when most of the fish to be caught might be rainbow trout--for the charm of floating remains in the hill country, changed though it may be by engulfing progress, the rivers shortened by great impoundments painted like blue dragons on Missouri and Arkansas maps.

But in those days of 50 years ago there was instant wilderness when the boat rounded the first bend. The home landing was probably a little town, mostly unpainted, but with a false-fronted store or two and a neat church, the streets of gravel and generally tilted. And if the float began in early morning, there would probably be mist on the river so that a catfisherman running his trotline or limb lines might seem suspended in dark silhouette as the boats went by. Some said the fishing wasn't good until the mist cleared but it wasn't always true.

Later generations of float fishermen would frequently see whitetail deer at the water's edge, but when I first went to the rivers there were few deer in the hills and I never saw one on James or White River then. There were nesting ducks in spring, gray squirrels in the oaks, and barred owls to startle a kid under a tarpaulin at night. Always there was the wood smoke as there is today, sometimes in faint blue wraiths through the valleys.

Although their presence was not obvious to a man engrossed in casting plug or fly rod streamer, the hillfolk lived near the rivers, if not on their banks, and the rocky roads strayed from cabin to cabin. Here and there would be a steep trail coming down to the river and probably some kind of boat, often a sort of caricature of a johnboat. At evening there might be the sound of an axe in some unseen clearing and, inevitably, the call of a hound. Later, the tired tones of a distant coon pack, crossing ridge and hollow, and the next thing he sensed would be wood smoke, coffee and bacon, with the mist on the river not yet burned through by the sun.

Float fishing became big business and some of the companies were famous. Perhaps the best known of all was the Jim Owen outfit at Branson, and I sent Jim Owen the first angling telegram I ever wrote--carefully counted words to learn how the fishing was--and I can quote his answer:

This story originally appeared in Ridge Runners and Swamp Rats by Charles F. Waterman. Copyright (c) 1983 by Charley Waterman. All rights reserved.

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