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St. Robert, MO → Joplin, MO → Eureka Springs, AR → St. Robert, MO 438.0 mi (704.9 km) |
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I came, I Arkan-saw, I adventured, everyone!
Today, I’m dipping down to the intersection of the Show-Me and the Natural in my ongoing quest for national park sites! I had a great birthday yesterday, and the best part of scheduling a birthday adventure is I wake up to even more adventure the next day! So bright and early, I was off to beat the heat, paying a visit to the birthplace of George Washington Carver, now a national monument!
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Most folks are familiar enough with George Washington Carver to remember his association with peanuts. Some confuse him with Booker T. Washington, though both were integral faculty members at the Tuskegee Institute and Mr. Carver took his middle name from Mr. Washington’s last name! But there’s so much more to the story of the man who practically saved the South!
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As you can imagine, growing up in a place as lush as the tall grass prairie of Neosho, Missouri was a great place to pick up a love of botany. And this is just what young George did, mostly because he was often sick when he was little and couldn’t work the fields like his brother, James. His was an unusual childhood, born into slavery, kidnapped with his mother but recovered without his mother, then raised by white farmers, Moses and Susan Carver. It was Susan who introduced him to the garden and herbal medicine!
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Out here in the woods, young George installed his own secret gardens for experimenting, and it turned out to be much more than child’s play! Even before he turned 11, neighboring farmers started calling him “the plant doctor” because he was so good at figuring out what was wrong with their growing conditions and how to fix them!
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Though Moses and Susan Carver didn’t have any other children, Moses’ niece had two kids, and George would often play with Thomas Williams on the banks of Williams Pond. It was an idyllic lifestyle up until George started school and found out that, even in the years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a lot of systems weren’t as friendly toward Black folks as Thomas was. Today, Williams Pond was very peaceful with only a great blue heron prowling its shores!
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The creeks surrounding Williams Pond are very special too! For instance, they’re home to freshwater sponges! As filter feeders, these ancient organisms are super sensitive to water quality, and along with their caddis fly neighbors, give park rangers today a sense of how clean the creek water is. They’re surprisingly close to being as clean as they were when young George came a wading!
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George left the Carver farm for school when he turned 11, and he jumped around from school to school looking for places that were friendly and gave him access to the knowledge he very much craved. This journey took him to Kansas then to Iowa State Agricultural School (now Iowa State University), where in 1894, he became the first African-American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree! Rather than graduate as a piano teacher, as he meant to, he altered his course and earned lots of acclaim for his studies on the fungal infections of soybeans! Five years later, he earned his Master of Agriculture, another historical first, which is what caught the attention of Mr. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute.
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from there, the Plant Doctor would go on to diagnose what was ruining Southern agriculture: planting cotton again and again, so he recommended nitrogen-fixing plants like soybeans, sweet potatoes, and peanuts to restore essential nutrients that rebooted the cotton industry! And yes, he came up with over 300 products made from peanuts, from drinks to soaps, gasoline to meat alternatives! He showed farmers how to feed pigs wild acorns and use the decayed plants from swamps to fertilize their fields! Always ready to help folks, he even traveled to India and discussed improvements to nutrition with Mahatma Gandhi!
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By the time I completed my loop around the Moses farm, it was downright scorching! I headed over to Joplin, Missouri (named for Rev. Harris G. Joplin, not Scott Joplin) and hung out for a bit in the air conditioning at the Chamber of Commerce. A railroad town, Joplin was built on lead and zinc mining, quite literally! 10% of the city is on top of old mining tunnels, some of which have collapsed and opened up sinkholes! But beyond the rails and mines, Joplin has its own special place in American folklore as one of the key stops on Route 66!
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The arrival of the Mother Road had a huge impact on Joplin, giving it a good reason to build up its main street with motels, gas stations, and restaurants. Folks would stop here to dine at Wilder’s Steakhouse or visit Missouri’s largest continuously flowing waterfall, Grand Falls! Today, the city commemorates its Route 66 heritage with a small park with big murals!
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Route 66 also brought notorious bandits, Bonnie & Clyde, to Joplin in 1933 and hid out in this apartment for several months. Local law enforcement got suspicious, though, and after a shootout that killed a detective and a constable, the gang got away. Importantly, they abandoned a roll of Kodak film that gave the public their first glimpse of the infamous pair!
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The bandits had escaped the heat for the time being (they were shot a year later), but there was no refuge for me in this Southern summer! I ducked down south of the Missouri state line to visit my second national park of the day: Pea Ridge National Military Park! This was home to the Civil War battle in 1862 that saved Missouri for the Union! It was also technically closed.
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No matter, I began my loop around the battlefield, starting with a sad reminder that the Trail of Tears had passed through here three decades before the battle, removing the Cherokee and other tribes from their ancestral homeland in a forced march to Oklahoma.
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Nonetheless, about 1,000 Cherokee soldiers fought in the Battle of Pea Ridge, on the Confederate side. About 16,000 Confederate troops had gathered near Elkhorn Mountain with the intention of invading neutral Missouri and taking St. Louis! It was up to General Samuel Curtis on the Union side to keep that from happening! The general orchestrated the campaign from this spot!
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West of headquarters, the Union and Confederacy clashed dramatically near the tiny village of Leetown, which has not survived to the present day! In this fight, not one, but two Confederate generals, Ben McCulloch and James McIntosh, were killed on after the other!
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This caused a huge hiccup in the Confederate strategy, as the troops were without orders for over an hour! That kept them separated from the other half of the troops circling around the other side of the mountains. All the while, they were under fire by Union cannons!
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While Elkhorn Mountain wasn’t exactly as tall as mountains I was familiar with, it did give a great perspective of the battlefield from above. Well, it would, once I walked around the trees that had grown so tall in the years after the battle and now blocked the view from the parking lot!
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But the designated overlook still came with a sweeping view of the battlefield, where about 26,500 soldiers clashed over two days from March 7th to 8th, 1862! Since so much of this war was fought in the flat South, there weren’t many opportunities to see a whole battlefield from so high up, but these Ozark heights would have given an absolutely epic view of guns and cannons blasting away in miniature!
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The battle largely concluded near the Elkhorn Tavern, named for the rack of elk antlers on the roof! The Confederates had captured it on March 7th and used it as a hospital for about 24 hours, until the Confederates ran low on ammunition against the Union bombardment. Both sides of the Battle of Pea Ridge left the area for other campaigns east of the Mississippi afterward, but the Union would keep the Elkhorn Tavern as a military telegraph station until 1863 when Confederate guerrillas burned it to the ground!
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And then, I’d completed my second loop of the day! With the sun’s rays getting longer, I had a hankering for some grub, and by sheet coincidence, I happened to be in the neighborhood of Eureka Springs, Arkansas! Funny enough, this place has been on my radar for three years since a fellow named Justin recommended a local hot spot when we were hiking Guadalupe Peak in Texas! That hot spot was the Rowdy Beaver Restaurant and Tavern!
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This beaver was more of a full beaver after devouring their scrumptious BBQ baked potato. I was near to shouting “Eureka!” when they brought it out. Looking around, I was super surprised to see an advertisement for a drag show here at the Rowdy Beaver, which completely defied my expectations of northwest Arkansas, and though I wasn’t going to be in town for it, I knew I’d patronized the right kind of establishment!
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Tomorrow, I’ll be heading back to St. Louis, where I’ll do my best to see some amazing history before it gets too dangerously hot (it’s supposed to cap out at 109°F)! Tune in and make sure I drink enough water, because there’s a very good reason beaver jerky isn’t popular enough to sell in the grocery store!
Pea there, or pea square!
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Total Ground Covered: 1,016.0 mi (1,635.1 km) |
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