The Captivating History of the Ozarks

The United States government bought an entire Oklahoma town, moved everybody out, and erased it from the map. The ground underneath had been mined until the streets were falling into the holes. Picher sat on one of the richest lead and zinc fields on earth. Eighty years of mining left the rock beneath the houses a honeycomb, the air full of lead dust, and around a third of the town's children testing poisoned. It was bought out, emptied, and formally dissolved in 2013. What remains are the chat piles — mountains of grey mine waste standing over empty streets. Picher is the Ozarks in miniature, and this is the full history of the region: the geology, the Osage, the French lead miners, the Upland South families who settled it, the guerrilla war, the timber and mining booms, the racial expulsions, and the myth that was sold to tourists once there was nothing left to take. In this video: Why the Ozarks are a dissected plateau and not a mountain range, and why 1.5-billion-year-old rock in the St. Francois Mountains is some of the oldest exposed stone in North America. Why limestone gave Missouri over 7,000 caves and soil too thin to farm. The disputed origin of the name — aux Arkansas, aux arcs, and five other theories. The Osage, and the 1808 Treaty of Fort Clark that took 52 million acres in a single document. The Cherokee Old Settlers who came west voluntarily before the Trail of Tears, and the removal route that Route 66 now partly follows. French lead mining from the 1720s, and the Paw Paw French dialect still spoken at Old Mines in the twentieth century. Brooks Blevins's argument that Upland South settlers chose land that looked like home rather than land that farmed well. Why the Scots-Irish claim is weaker than the festivals suggest. Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, the bushwhacker war, and the Bald Knobbers. The timber boom that stripped the forests in forty years. Monett, Pierce City, Joplin, Springfield and Harrison — and how the region's whiteness was manufactured in fifteen years. Harold Bell Wright, Vance Randolph, and why the "Elizabethan English in the hills" claim is false. The dams that drowned farms, roads and cemeteries. And the Civil War courthouse fires that make Ozark genealogy so difficult. Chapters 0:00 The town that was deleted 3:00 Why the Ozarks are not mountains 7:00 Where the name comes from 9:00 Osage country 14:00 French lead and Paw Paw French 17:00 Who actually settled the Ozarks 23:00 Slavery in the hills 25:00 The bushwhacker war 30:00 Timber, railroads and the Tri-State mines 35:00 Fifteen years that made the region white 41:00 The novel that invented the Ozarks 46:00 Leaving, and the dams 50:00 Two Ozarks 53:00 Tracing an Ozark family Tell me in the comments: which county are your people from — and if you know it, which county in Tennessee, Kentucky or the Carolinas they came out of before that? Ozark families moved in chains, so there is a fair chance somebody reading came down the same road. Subscribe for more of the regions and migrations that built America. #Ozarks #Missouri #Arkansas #AmericanHistory #Genealogy