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The Odyssey Has Begun...

Passing the ruins of
Monte Ne

The Indians living along its banks called it Unica, which means "white,"  referring to how clear it was.   French colonists later memorialized it as the Riviere Blanche.  Today we call it the White River, the queen of the Ozarks and the king of Arkansas Delta.

Ballad Hunter: Listening To the White River is a river journey by author-photographer, Chris Engholm, who is canoeing the 720-mile length of the White River  from its headwaters in the Ozark Mountains to its mouth where it marries the Mississippi River.

Along his river journey, Engholm is meeting with families who have lived in harmony with the river, in many cases since before the Civil War. He is encountering remnants of the old 'cracker culture' in the hills and hollows of the Ozark Plateau and vestiges of plantation life in the Delta, meeting itinerant  musicians, curmudgeonly fisherman, cantankerous environmentalists, and even "rewilders"---young people going back to the land, getting off the grid and settling along the river.

A swimming hole near the headwaters of the
West Fork of the White River

A Liquid Legend

Few Americans outside Arkansas have ever heard of the mighty White River, minus a contingent of savvy fly fishers who know its Bull Shoals tailwater as America's trout Mecca. When I first met the White it was love at first cast.  This was partly because I'd been imagining a river like it for most of my life.  This site tells the story of my personal journey to comprehend  this mighty waterway, its natural rhythms, flora and fauna, and how man has lived in tandem with it for centuries.

 

The hook-shaped White River and the places

Chris Engholm has visited and floated so far. 

         

Chris Engholm can be reached at

chris@chrisengholm.com

Big Bite: A 100-mile Paddle from Batesville to Augusta

Ee gad, don't try this at home unless you're either insane or a person of your convictions.  We put-in below the dam (#1) at Batesville at 9 in the morning.   After passing the city's waste water treatment plant, we started a long journey out of the foothills of the Ozarks into the Central Delta of Arkansas.  I tried to make 33 miles per day and do the trip to Augusta in three days, but suddenly, around Oil Trough, we lost the current and the wind cranked up out of the north. Every northbound reach was perilous and exhausting.  I only made 23 miles the first day.  27 the next.  31 the third. We made Augusta in the early afternoon on the fourth.  My body was gone; fingers cracked and oozing from the bitter wind and constant wet.

Passing a half-sunk barge near Newport on the
White River. (Photo: Jim Fortune)

The river changed on this trip from clear and green to turbid and pea-green.  There are observable causes for this that I'll write more about later.  For now, let it be a warning to floaters from Batesville south: the current right now slows to 1 mph and fighting a headwind here leaves no muscle untested.  The good news:  only 200 miles to go.

Bull Shoals Tailwater Is So Fly

Here's one of those flying fishing 'bums' who do everything right and catch-and-release all day long, while my Woolly Bugger goes neglected for hours.  This is the barbless area just below the Bull Shoals Dam, last week, just before we embarked on our two-day paddle from Norfork to Sylamore Creek. The name of this fisher is being withheld pending his revealing to us how the hell he catches fish like this on a fly with such calm panache. 

Postcards from the Enchanted (White) River

Summer's end, looking south from Calico Rock.

The end of a first float on the Lower
White; high winds,  a broken paddle,
and thrashed ego.

Bull Shoals Lake at sunrise.  Yes, I goosed the
saturation and added some contrast to make the image
look like something Shirakawa might have shot in the 70s.

The twins at Meersack Lake in the Delta,
looking for snakes, skinks, and spiders.

Our favorite lake in the Delta...located in the
Dagmar Wildlife Management Area. 

The boys with Jim Fortune(teller)
at Meersack Lake before we paddled
through the locks to the White River.  

A top-five stretch on the Middle White---Monkey Island
(on the left) and the primordial forest all around, accompanied
by absolutely bewildering silence.

When the car breaks down it's best to
let the good-looking guy hitch the ride.

The mouth of Moccasin Creek north
of Calico Rock, with its
enigmatic railroad trestle.

The bridges of Cotter, Arkansas.  Should make a nice
panoramic when the fall color comes. 

Can you guess what this 'was' before
it became of diving helmet for a
mussel 'hogger' on the Lower White? (Photo
made with permission from the Lower
White River Museum in Des Arc)

Lil' Dyl on Lake Meersack.

Readying for a terrifying 6-mile panic
attack from the foot of Bull Shoals Dam
to White Hole Access.  

This isn't a 'trot' line.  It's a 'snag' line
used on the Lower White.  (Photo made
by permission from Bill Sayger)

Steve Halford, my ocean fishing compadre
in California, learning that there be sea
monsters in Arkansas, too.

8 inches from being a keeper.

Last light of day at Kings River near Huntsville.

Interview with Albert Bush, "River Rat" of the Lower White

An excerpt from White River Memoirs: The Spoken History of a Liquid Legend, by Chris Engholm in partnership with the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History

Interview with:  Albert Bush

Locaion:  Des Arc

Date: August 14, 2012

Interviewed by Chris Engholm

Chris: How are you doing?

Albert: Oh…fair. What you want to talk about?

Chris: I’m working with a museum in Springdale, which is up north near Bentonville, and we’ve received a little grant of money for me to travel around and talk to people who have memories of the White River…fishing on it, playing on it, or working on it.

Albert:  Well, I was born on it.

Chris: Really?

Albert: Yea, I was born in a houseboat on White River. 

Chris:  There don’t appear to be many houseboats left on the river?

Albert: No, I got rid of mine, let’s see, last year and gave it to my nephew.  I had others for years and forgot to save them.  Me and my wife grew up there around that houseboat.  Raised a couple of fine boys, one of them is a policeman over in Little Rock – I wish he was closer. 

Chris:  Tell me about the river back then.

Albert:  The river was something.  Every part of people’s lives were involved with the river here.  And probably other places too.  You talk to people in Clarendon and it’s the same way.  It was a livelihood.  There were boats run by Lewis Sanders and Ralph Sincks[].  The big money that kept everyone alive was the shell boats they ran up and down the river.  And then they hauled timber.  Had them old paddle-wheel boats. 

Chris: Sounds wonderful.

Albert:  The one we hate to see come up river was the Mary Woods.  That sucker up waves higher than the ceiling there and you out there in one of those jon boats, and you find you a hiding place.  It’d blow the whistle and let you know to get out of the way.

Chris:  What kind of boats were you in?

Albert:  Just fishing boats, like this one here beside the house.  But made out of wood.  That’s before aluminum boats came up.  Most people built their boats.  They’d kept cypress lumber and stuff and build them. 

Chris: Were they made out of cypress? 

Albert:  Yea. The water don’t affect it much. I mean you can run cypress years and years without it rotting.  The houseboats were built on tooey[] cypress, the bottoms and all.  They were built like a big boat with a house on top of it.  And some of them used Choctaw logs.  They’d have two or three big logs, they call them Chocktaw logs.  That’s a kind of a wood, great big, I’ve seen them probably as big as five feet through.  And I mean that houseboat would stand up in the water.  It was really hard to sink that wood, and it would last 50 or 60 years, I guess.  A lot of people had them.

Chris: What did the riverbank look like?

Albert:  The fish markets were on the river then.  With people waiting at the river, parked down there.  They had fish markets all down the way, Johnny Dopps[]—his family, his daddy---that’s the way they made their living there after they quit farming.  That was White River back then.  

Chris:  What was the river like as a backyard as a kid growing up?

Albert:  There’d be fifteen of us then, you know, get out of school…I went to school in Des Arc.  After I got married I went to the Navy.  I worked over in Little Rock or years.    Came back soon as I could.   I couldn’t believe the changes.  All the timber was being cut. 

Chris:  This was in the 1960s?

Albert:  The 1950s was probably the beginning because just after I got out of the Navy in 1959,  I noticed all the timber was leaving, all downs the river banks and on both sides.   I was out in my boat anchored out fishing and this farmer come by.  There wasn’t nothing left.   The bank had done caved in about seventy or eighty feet, and he had a bean field up there.   But they’d cut the timber, see, clean to the bank.

Chris:  They had cut the trees right to the river.

Albert:  And then they didn’t have nothing to hold the bank, and boy, it comin’.  The flood come up and here it comes.  Caved in.   He said, ‘I ought to have left some of those trees up there.’  And I said, ‘It’s too late, now.’  The way we have a flood every year, you couldn’t plant trees, see, just about every year.  I said, ‘You couldn’t plant them fast enough to make any difference.’  Not there on the bank.  Out a little further you could.   It’s sad watching all that happen. 

Chris:  It happened fast, too.

Albert:  Really fast.  I remember when they started putting that purple paint on the trees.  They brought in deers – spotted deer – down here and it was the worst thing for the people.   I could not believe how greedy the people got about hunting.   If they caught you on their land, they wanted to charge you three or four hundred dollars for trespassing on their land.  And before that we could hunt, we could do anything on their land.   We never caught more than we needed; we’d catch what we wanted to eat and go home. 

Chris:  But then the purple paint on the trees was there to keep everyone out.

Albert:  Yep.  (Remembering) …Them rabbits at night, I’m telling you, that was fun.  Not deer.  We didn’t have no deer back then.  The Game and Fish Commission brought them in.   They brought in deer…and then for some reason – and I don’t who had this big idea – but they brought in beaver.  Well, it didn’t take the beaver long to become really populated, and they started going up in there and into the ditches and blocking the drains going to the river, and the farmers flooded.  So they said, ‘We’ll get alligators to take care of the beavers.’  You ever seen that cartoon?  I think it started out with a mouse.  And then they got cat, and then the dog…and it ended up an elephant.  Well, that’s the Game and Fish Commission right there. 

Chris:  It could be its logo.

Albert:  And now they’ve introduced bear, and I’m kind of scared to take my grandkids in there to go hunting.  Man, we’ve got bear everywhere.   Black bear.  I was up there at Old River Lake, which they’ve got it posted so bad that you can’t go in there unless you got a flood.  When you’ve got a flood, you can go anywhere in a boat, the law says you can go in by boat.   So I was up there one day crappie fishing.  I and heard these four dogs, and they was chasing this bear just right in this big thicket out there where I was fishing.  You couldn’t see out through it, it was so thick.  Well that bear got in that thicket,  and then they bait him.  He stopped.  He said, ‘well, I’m going to take care of myself I guess,’ backed up some way in that thicket.  And I could hear him roar when the the dogs would try to get him.  And I could hear the bear go after the dogs.   After all I started to think about going out there and I though, ‘You’re crazy man. That sucker is mad.  He’s likely to rap you upside the head.’  But about three days later I went back up there.  All the stink you ever heard of.  After awhile I see those dogs.  They were a brave bunch of dogs but that bear killed every one of them.  And I mean it stunk bad. 

Chris:  Were these wild dogs?

Albert:  No, no, just people’s dogs.  They get out and go hunting.  Two or three of them get together and go up and down the bayou there.  And they run into that bear and ‘Boy, look what we got.’  And he killed every one of those suckers.  He’d let out a roar and he’d bite or slap one of them.  Black bear is all up and down White River now.   Most of them were placed in the refuge south of here.  Now the problem is alligators.  We’ve had two or three up here.  There are so many kids who use the river and bayou for recreation.  It’s got so bad you don’t want to swim in the river.  The water’s got so bad you don’t want to swim in that river.  It’s green and it smells like a sewer.  It brought tears to my eyes, boy. 

Chris:  And the Army Corps website says water quality is fine. 

Albert:  Balony.  There are no more mussels shells.  All dried up.  Ain’t none left.  They all gone.  Further down south, they probably already gone too down there.  Pennywinkles.  A snail is what he is.  And they got a little curly house he lives in.  There was all kinds of really good stuff in that river.  We had gars that weighed 280 pounds.  You won’t see none of them either.  You won’t see very many white catfish anymore.  Now we got bullheads and willowcats…flatheads and bluecats.  That’s about all that’s left. 

Chris: What is happening with these giant carp that are jumping everywhere?

Albert:  Oh God, man.  Them old bigheads will knock your brains out.  One of them suckers hit my seat and I bet he was sixty pounds.  I’m glad he hit that seat instead of my head, or he’d knock me out of that boat.  And one time out on the bayou, one came flying over the back of the boat, right across my lap.  That’s a crazy sucker, some kind of Chinese stuff. 

Chris:  Asian carp.

Albert:  Someone put them loose in here, and now they’re ruining the sport. 

…if they don’t do something about that Red.  The Little Red River is what’s messing us up.  It comes down from Heber Springs and when that water hits White River it’s ice cold.  When it hits the fish, it throws them into shock.  When it hits the shells, I guess it kills them.   And now we ain’t got nothing left on the bottom of that river.  Nothing.  Except that old foreign muscle they call a zebra.  It latches onto boats and come on in from China or some place.  The biggest problem is the dam.   And they got them on account of trout.  That ice water coming out is what keeps them trout alive.  Game and Fish is in on that one.  Boy, something ought to be done about that.  I ain’t got brains enough or I’d fight them. 

Chris:  You were born on the river and grew up here.  Were you a commercial fisherman?

Albert:  Yea.  I fished for sturgeon and catfish mostly, and mostly on trot lines.  But I had to give it up.  Pulled both my shoulders out.  Had to give it up.  That’s the only job I could sit down and do.  You sit down in the boat and that where you run all your stuff. 

I was born on a house boat at the foot of Bean Creek here, and raised right over here on the next block.  My daddy worked down at the old saw mill they had here then.  They’d brink logs down the river, snake them up by steam power to the saw mill.  There was a man named Stewart bought virgin timber land here for fifty cents an acre back in the thirties.  He bought all the timber up and down the river.  [Check with Neva about this]

Chris:  Is sturgeon an edible fish?

Albert:  You get the caviar.  They didn’t too good that past two years.  I look for that to stop too on account of the river situation with the water. 

Chris: So just in the last two years, you see a decline in the number of sturgeon.

Albert:  Oh yea. 

Chris:  Before that, sturgeon were here?

Albert:  Lord yes.  When I first started – this was twenty years ago -- it wasn’t nothing to catch two hundred sturgeon in a day on a trot line. 

Chris:  So the night before you’d put out a trot line and let it sit all night? 

Albert:  Yea.  All night.  And maybe a couple of times the next day.  You’d go run it and bait it.  That’s the way you fished them. 

Chris:  And you could catch two hundred sturgeon?

Albert:  Hell yes.  I’ve caught that much on two lines. But nowadays, if they get six or seven a day, they’re really doing good. 

Chris:  How would you market the roe?

Albert:  Back then, there was a guy in Devall’s named Underwood.  Him and his brother run a place up there.  They’d process the sturgeon.  I would take the eggs out and take the eggs to Underwood.  Then they’d process them.  Now, W.O. Prince in a place south of us about twenty miles, does all that and has a big market down there on the Cache River. 

Chris:  Is that the place with the catfish restaurant too?

Albert:  Yea.  And in that town is a post office and a store.  We know it by the store and not the town.     [The town is Brasfield, on Route 70]  He’s still in the business.   I’ve been out about three years. 

Chris:  But you still go fishing for recreation?

Albert:  O yea.  In October of last year, I caught a big cat.  I’d been wanting – before I die -- to catch one of those big things over fifty pounds, on rod and reel.  I was up to forty-four pounds.  Then last October I caught a fifty-six pounder.  So I made it over fifty pounds. 

Chris:  You did it!

Albert:  But this year I caught something even bigger, at about the same place I caught that old catfish.  About two months ago.   This dude got on there and I pulled up on him.   I use 150-pound test line and 9-0 hooks; that’s the way I fish.  And I went to pulling on this dude, and I couldn’t move him.  So I said, ‘What in the world,’ and just kept pulling and pulling.   When I finally got him up, he come off the bottom, he’d come up a little, and then move out again.  I really pull hard, get him back, get him up a little bit more.  That fight went on for about thirty-five or forty minutes. 

Chris:  Were you anchored in the current at this point?

Albert:  Yea, and I pulled and pulled and it wasn’t fighting like no catfish.  I wanted to see what this sucker is.  I finally got him up and his head was about a foot wide.  And his body was about a yard wide. 

Chris: My God.

Albert:  He was a loggerhead turtle.  And he was about seven inches across his feet.  And them claws were at least three-and-a-half or four inches long.  What he was doing when he was on the bottom, he’d latch on, see,  and he’d start moving out and I’d pick him up and get him up there at the boat.  And they’ve got flippers, like a catfish with four tails!  He whooped me, boy.  I pulled something loose in my back.  And then I got inflammation and my muscles pressed in on my nerves, and my muscles down my back all died, on both sides of my back from the neck down.  The injury to a disc was right between my shoulders.  It hurt all the way down.  So I’ve been fighting a battle, and been in for shots every two weeks.  I couldn’t do anything and the pain was just so terrible.  So I finally took an MRI and he seen it; I had about five place besides that one.  I’ve had a rough time up to a month ago. 

Chris:  And all because of this turtle. 

Albert:  Yea.  That turtle whooped my hide end, boy.  But I had to see what it was.  And if I knew what it was I’d just cut my line.  When I got him up I just took my scolar-secor[] hook – it’s made like a screw driver and you get it on your line and snap it off something – and I’d catch the hook when his head turned so he couldn’t bite me or get his claws into the underside of my arm, to get him off.  The third time I got it loose.  But he had whooped me, boy, I’ll tell you.  The pain was just getting worse and worse.  Finally, my doctor over there did the work.  I got a spot on my right lung; it ain’t moved in five years, but he was wondering where all this pain was coming from.  He did an MRI and spotted it right away.  Sent me to a specialist and he’s helping me. 

Chris: So you are rehabbing for a few months before going after the next river monster?

Albert:  I do that out in the yard with the tiller. 

Chris:  And maybe don’t set any more goals for catching sixty-pound creatures out of the river.

Albert:  No, no, that one was big enough.

  

-end-

We're Front Page News in Des Arc...!

Bulls Shoals' Past, with Author Bob Harper

My visits to Bull Shoals usually begin with an early morning call on Big Phil and his wife Benitia, who own the Mar Mar Resort and Big Phil's Tackle Shop, located on the main street.  All the locals were at their regular seats at Connie's, the inimitable coffee clatch and breakfast nook across the street.  The BassMasters Bull Shoals tournament was being held so I immediately ran into a gaggle of well-known, sleepy-eyed bass fishers at the cafe at dawn when I arrived.  Their eighty-K rigs were sitting on trailers all over town.  

But I wasn't after bass.  I was in town to meet Bob Harper, author of the History of Bull Shoals, a book I recommend to anyone interested in reading tales of how the White River became a series of impoundments that are now, well, fished by a hundred guys in boats each worth more than a typical family farm around here.  I had my son, Brendan along, who manned the video camera as we took Bob over to the Bull Shoals Historical Society Museum, which he helped to start a few years ago.  The place is a first stop for those of you who like history and want to see how the country's fifth largest dam was conceived and built.  Bob opened up the huge, glass covered display cases for me so I could photograph pages from newspapers popularizing the building of dams throughout the region in the 1940s.  

Bob showed us his archival database of hundreds of articles and photographs, including Ranger Boat advertisements from the 1960s and Corps of Engineer feasibility studies of the dam site years before construction was approved in 1946.  Bob proved to be a fascinating interview, with a personal history as a guide on the river during the 1980s.  Having "written the book" on Bull Shoals, his story will make a great addition to our project, White River Memoirs: The Spoken History of a Liquid Legend. 

Start Digging Up Your Old Photos of the White River

Good news!  I've teamed up with the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Northwest Arkansas on an exciting project to create White River Memoirs, The Spoken History of a Liquid Legend.

Here is the copy of the "invitation" to folks whose stories we want to record and publish.  Please read and help us out if you can....

A Canoe Called "BalladHunter"

Here is "BalladHunter," a 16-foot cedar-strip design from Ted Moores called "The Prospector."  We purchased the hull half-built and spent 5 weeks finishing with maple decks, cheery thwart, and cedar mast and boom.  Yes, we converted it into a canoe-sailor for the obvious reason that there are three huge lakes on the 720-mile journey.  Easier to sit back and sail than paddle those. 

   

Look Who's In the Canoe ! (On Sunday, Mar 4th--9am)

On Sunday at 9am, we'll be at Monte Ne put-in to paddle BalladHunter along the ruins.  More importantly, I will have local historian Allyn Lord (Director of the The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History) in the bow  answering questions about Coin Harvey, the history of the old resort, and recent efforts to preserve it.  Come down and paddle around with us.  The weather is supposed to be fine.  


Incidentally, Allyn is a partner with me on White River Memoirs, an oral history project described at http://www.whiterivermemoirs.blogspot.com.


Update: The "ruins float" was most satisfying and informative. It was freezing and socked in when we left the shore but by the time I got the camera running, the sky cleared and the sun struck the old Monte Ne Tower like a cymbal.  Allyn proved once again to be the 'professor of Coin Harvey,' and a great on-camera presence even with a nasty spider bite on her forehead...which we adroitly covered with a ski cap.  I will get some video clips up asap. 

Big Phil in Bull Shoals Says Read "Ozark Trout Tales"

I phoned Big Phil up in Bull Shoals yesterday.  Benitia, his wife, answered.  Pardon my spelling on your name, Benitia, which might be Venetia.  Either way, I love your homemade donuts and coffee at your tackle shop, especially when you serve them before dawn on a freezing fall morning.

Jim Fortune, the riverman from Searcy who has sentenced himself to following me down the river from the dam, needed to know whether his V-bottom bass boat would get through the stretch down to Cotter.  Phil asked what kind of motor was he planning to run, and of course, I had no idea.  Then he said, "if they've got three or four generators running, it shouldn't be a problem."  The issue is, he said, is that you only get a one-day warning on what they'll be running by looking at the internet.

Realizing (again) that this Californian doesn't know his hindside from a raccoon tail, Phil recommended a book to me.  It's called "Ozark Trout Tales," and it's hard to find.  Anyone heard of it, and used it?  It's a guide to fishing the "White River System."  Most copies go for fifty bucks and up, but I found one for $20 and ordered it (used).  I think the author is Steven Wright.  Anyone know him?  He sounds like someone I should talk to.  I hope he's still around.

Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, Phil.  Oh...and incidentally, Phil says he had a party out last week and they hooked up with 44 trout...browns, rainbow, even a cutthroat.  For more about Phil, see: http://www.bullshoals.com/marmar/guide.htm.

White River Canoe Voyage Starts March 4, 2012

The plans are now in place for my canoe journey to begin on March 4, 2012, at 10am at Monte Ne Ruins put-in.  I have visited the river at twenty different places during the past six months, and feel the reconnaissance is complete.

 I will begin at the headwaters of the White River near Pettigrew and Elkins, then proceed across the various impoundments, ultimately arriving in Bull Shoals Dam in early April, weather permitting.  

From the Bull Shoals tail water, I will enjoy the support of an experienced river man who has offered to follow me in a motorboat during my paddle to Batesville and beyond.  

As you may know by now, I have partnered with the Shiloh Museum of the Ozarks to create White River Memoirs, the Spoken History of a Liquid Legend.  The majority of the interviews will be recorded during my adventure in April, 2012.

I looking forward to meeting you along the way!

Many thanks to Jim Fortune of Searcy

Many thanks to Jim Fortune, a knowledgeable advisor on this project, for his hospitality over the weekend during our discussions and day trip through his long-time haunts near the mouth of the Red River (where it enters the White River).  Highlights included filming Jim as he recounted hilarious tales of fishing and hunting with his father, tracking deer and beaver prints along the bank and into the woods, and running "Silver Bullet" aground trying to investigate a phantom sand bar. Jim knows the river as well as anyone I've met and I'm overwhelmed by his gracious assistance and willingness to educate a greenhorn.  He's even offered to follow my canoe in a "support boat" as I descend the White from Bull Shoals a few months from now.

A Walk In the Ozarks