White River Railroading in the Ozarks:
The Frisco, the MoPac, their subsidiaries, and the Search for Silver along the White River in Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas.
In the years immediately following the Civil War, the Missouri and Arkansas counties along the border in the western reaches of those states were largely depopulated and destitute of industry and organized agriculture. Stone County, Missouri, for example, boasted fewer than 50 residents (white, black, and red altogether) in 1865. A region never prosperous to begin with, the Ozarks were isolated and insular, and the depredations of war had left behind mostly sorrow and lingering animosities.
But, as the end of the 19th century approached, visitors from around the country began trickling in; they searched for nature and the culture of the hillfolk, whose numbers gradually recovered. The novel The Shepherd of the Hills was partly responsible as was the growing popularity of the White River and its tributaries as an anglers’ heaven. In 1869, a St. Louis industrialist named Henry Blow explored a cave known to the American Indians who had once lived nearby at Devil’s Den on Roark Mountain, near where North Indian Creek enters the White River, looking for mineral deposits. His party, using candles and oil lamps, examined the limestone deep in the sinkhole entrance and decided that the cave was full of marble. They bought the land around it and the mineral rights of in the cave, and planned to mine it for the marble to satisfy the hungry builders in the cities of the region.
They began by platting a town near the entrance to the sinkhole, calling it Marmaros, the Greek word for marble, and they set up the Marmaros Mining and Manufacturing Company to run the mine and build the town. Once operations began, however, it quickly became clear that the minerals they had thought were marble were nothing more than the (admittedly spectacular) limestone flow formations inherent in Karst topography caves. They did find an immense quantity of bat guano, however, which was a valuable raw material for agriculture and gunpowder production, and so the company began to excavate this organic produce of the cave, but the hopes of wealth on the part of the company were dashed. Further dampening the atmosphere was the hostility many of the locals felt toward the company, expressed one night in an attempt to burn down the town made by local vigilantes known as the Baldknobbers. As the guano began to run out, the company made preparations to abandon the mine and preparations to sell the cave to a Canadian named William Lynch, who wished to open it as a tourist attraction.
That was the point when a history-changing event took place: beneath the last hill of guano, the miners found traces of silver. Hurried calls to St. Louis for geological and mineral experts revived the hopes of the Marmaros Company. Indeed, the new information inflated those hopes: the inspector discovered that the traces of silver led to a silver lode whose richness vied with the great mines in Nevada.
New works were undertaken to bring that silver to the surface and mill it and take it to market. The first shaft—Marmaros Mining and Manufacturing Company Shaft No. 1—the Lucky Silver Mine—was sunk into the mountain near the cave (leaving the cave’s beauty largely unspoilt). The ore removed from the mine was milled close by at a large stamp mill run by a Mr. Molly as a subsidiary of the company. The first methods of getting the processed ore out of the area included heavy freight wagons and corduroyed roads, but the company knew early on that more efficient transportation was needed. River barges were tried, but the notorious inconsistency of the White River above Forsythe and the fact that the river went in the wrong direction (generally southeast), anyway, argued for the only remaining option: a railroad.
Building a railroad in the Ozarks was declared to be the next level of difficulty below building a railroad in the Rocky Mountains, and so the builders employed similar techniques. The Ozark Mountain Silver Dollar Railway began construction right atop Roark Mountain and wended its way downhill, intending to head east along a ridgeline that ran toward the town of Branson and on to Forsythe, where, it was hoped regular riverboat service could be maintained.
All this while, the two most important railroads in Missouri were rapidly building their pikes, the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) and the Missouri Pacific Railroad (MoPac). Both had planned to build routes through the Ozarks, the Frisco heading south-southwest into Texas, and the MoPac heading south-southeast into Louisiana. The Frisco planned to leave its mainline at Monett, Missouri, and head south through Seligman and Beaver and Ft. Smith, Ark, before turning west; the MoPac intended to go through Branson and Hollister before turning east along the river. The discovery of rich silver lodes in the region quickly changed those plans. The two roads both wanted a piece of the silver dollar, and so they both redirected their routes toward Roark Mountain and Marmaros. But that East-West ridge that the Ozark Mountain RR planned to use as its route stood squarely across the paths of the two standard gauge roads.
There was one gap in that ridge close to Roark Mountain, a “notch” in the stone wall that gave the little town that grew up there its name: Notch, Mo. The Ozark Mountain had just reached that point when the big roads decided that they would cut through the region right there. This was a boon for the narrow gauge road and its mining owners: though they could continue building to the east in search of additional mineral bounty, they could make their connection to the outside world close by and save substantially on shipping costs. The Frisco and the MoPac briefly considered a court fight over the ownership of the right of way through Notch, but their company lawyers worked out a better deal: the two roads could share the land and the expenses of building through the rough White River country—several bridges would be necessary, including a substantial one over the White itself—and save themselves (and each other) a great deal of money. And so a deal was struck: from about the town of Galena, Mo., on the north to the far side of the White and its tributaries on the south, they would share the costs of building a double-track road. There would be a junction with the Silver Dollar Line at Notch—the new main lines would cross North Indian Creek right next to the narrow gauge road’s trestle over it. A yard with the standard gauge roads on one side and the narrow on the other would occupy much of the real estate at the gap, and the three roads would share locomotive servicing and the town depot, gateway to the rest of the world. (Eventually, the Frisco bought controlling interest of the Ozark Mountain RR from the mining company and renamed it the Frisco Silver Dollar line.)
Roark Mountain did not cover the only silver lode to be found in the area, however. The next place that the mining company looked was to its southwest in the direction of old legends. On the south side of the White River, west of the Old Wilderness Road, was another mountain called Bread Tray. The Delaware Indians who had lived in the area prior to the Civil War had inherited stories from their ancestors about silver mines in the vicinity, and the stories hearkened back to 1541, when Spanish explorers led by Hernando DeSoto travelled through the area, prospecting and mapping what was then Spanish territory. According to the Indians, some of the Spaniards had stumbled onto a cave wherein they found silver that was easily mined. The stories said that the Spaniards had smelted some of the silver and coined in into rude “Thalers” (a Swiss denomination which had eight sub-parts, i.e. “Pieces of Eight”). But the Spaniards were intruding upon the Indians’ sacred ground, and a fight broke out in which several of DeSoto’s men were killed, including all who knew where the cave was. Interested in self-preservation, the Spaniard marched on but recorded the incident in his records. (Those records remained largely ignored until the later 20th Century.)
As the white population of the area grew around the turn of the 19th Century, a large family homesteaded throughout the region; their name was Yocum (variously spelled Yoakum, Yokum, Yoacum, Yoachem, et al.). Not long after silver was found under Roark Mountain, the Yocums showed up in the towns of the area paying their debts with coins that they claimed they had found on family property near Bread Tray Mountain. The coins were crudely minted and appeared to be very old; the family story was that they had found a cache of the Spanish silver dollars. Marmaros officials were convinced that these coins were faked, the product of silver shipments that went missing, some openly stolen from the Silver Dollar Line’s trains in various holdups (most of which were attributed to the Bolen Gang of Baldknobbers). But they could make no connection between their lost silver and these coins; they even hired Pinkerton men to investigate, but the detectives found neither the cache the Yocums bragged about nor any evidence that the Yocums were involved in any of the thefts.
One of the moneyed interests behind the Marmaros Mining and Manufacturing Company was a man named Nestor from New York City. On the pretense of wishing to live closer to the home of the company he helped build, he bought land around Bread Tray Mountain from the federal government, and he built a farm there and moved his family in. The Yocums were very unhappy that he had moved into their area, and his cattle sometimes disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Outbuildings caught fire. Hired hands quit abruptly saying that the area was not safe. Soon, stories of ghosts of Spanish soldiers looking for their lost silver started circulating, and Nestor had trouble finding any help whatever.
But Mr. Nestor was not a man who had achieved his position in life by letting anybody, living or dead, take advantage of him. He began exploring the areas in and around his land to the north of Bread Tray, and, in a hollow that lead down to the main channel of the White River almost directly west of where the Wilderness Road crossed it, he finally found the cave that the Spaniard had found 350 years and more before. He also discovered that, though the Yocums had been looking for it, too, they had yet to find it. (It later became clear that the Yocum silver had come from US Silver Dollars they had gotten in trade from the Delaware Indians for moonshine firewater.) Nestor continued to be troubled by strange happenings until he one day faced down the Yocum family patriarch on his own front porch.
Having found the lode, Nestor had the company come in and sink the Marmaros and Manufacturing Company Shaft No. 2, the “Dolores Silver Mine.” The Silver Dollar Line extended a branch to the west to bring the ore to Roark Mountain for milling and then shipment out over the Frisco and the MoPac.
To the east, Long Creek empties into the south side of the White River above Branson near a town called Oasis. Up Long Creek, Yocum Creek comes in from the west. Atop the east bluffs overlooking the confluence is the town of Enon, Ark. Prior to the Civil War, an effort was made to drive a standard gauge railroad from Rolla, Mo., down through Arkansas to the Gulf of Mexico. The route meandered far west of a direct route, and little funding for it was ever accumulated, much less turned into physical roadbed, still less actual railroad. But some sections were built, far-flung and disconnected. One of those sections began in Forsythe, Mo., and drifted south toward Carrollton, Ark. A branch was begun that would run from Oak Grove, Ark., to Omaha, Ark., cutting right across the main line running down Hurt Hollow on the west side of Long Creek, cross the river north of Enon, and then follow Cricket Hollow back up out of the valley. The route would require cutting a short tunnel into the ridge separating Enon from Cricket Hollow. Trains were actually running on these tracks (the rolling stock had been floated up the White to Forsythe) when the war broke out. In early 1862, General Samuel Curtis of the Department of Missouri had a fort built where the lines crossed. The fort was called Fort Cedar, and the crossing became known as Long Creek Junction. Manned by companies of the 2nd Arkansas Volunteer Cavalry (Federal), the fort became a sort of a base for combating the Arkansas irregulars and bushwackers that resented the heavy Union sympathy in the area. In 1864, as part of the ruse to cover the great Price raid, Confederate General Kirby Smith ordered infantry from Arkansas and Texas to attack the fort and tear up the railroad. His forces overwhelmed the garrison and left the road in such a state of disrepair that service was never restored.
What very few people knew, however, was that, during the drilling of the tunnel, traces of silver were discovered. Nothing was ever done about the discovery because of the impending secession crisis and then the war itself. But the grade remained, and the tunnel remained, and, in the memories of a few men who worked on the road, knowledge of those traces of silver remained.
When the Marmaros Mine went in, some of those people travelled to see the men running the operation, and they offered to reveal the possible location of another silver lode in exchange for partnerships in the enterprise. A deal was struck, and men from Enon led their new partners to the old tunnel. In a short time, the presence of yet another solid lode was proven, and plans were formed to mine it. The Frisco had by this time bought the Silver Dollar Line and saw the wisdom of building a branch to Enon. Leaving Notch, the line ran east toward Branson and crossed the White River on the east side of town. Heading south through Hollister on the route originally surveyed by the MoPac, the line then cut over to the old grade along Long Creek, and the tracks were re-laid in narrow gauge back to Carrollton. The east-west line was also re-laid in narrow gauge with the intent to possibly make a loop should the Silver Dollar Line ever build all the way back to Bread Tray Mountain. Later, this line was continued east of Omaha. In addition, the MoPac graded and laid a standard gauge highline along the ridge above that saved many route miles over their original riverside “lowline.” In the bluffs next to the railroad tunnel was drilled Marmaros Mining and Manufacturing Company Shaft No. 3: “Lori’s Lucky Lode,” named for the wife of the manager of the works, a big land owner in Enon, and the MoPac highline ran over an impressive bridge and trestle at the gap and then right over the tunnel and past the headhouse of the shaft.
Notes on the Next Section, yet to be written: Shaft No. 4, Lost Mine near Pontiac. Spring Creek 1887 North Fork River Heck Hollow
