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Books by this Author
301+ Ways to Get Ahead: Business Success from Home
If you want to kiss your boss good-bye, this book could be your ticket to a home-based business. Lots and lots of examples of possible home-based activities are included along with stories of real people from across the county who have their own businesses, from accountants to zen instructors.
How Branson Got Started
How Branson Got Started is the captivating story of how a small Missouri town -- less that 5,000 people -- has become the world's live entertainment capital.
Internet Success with Fred
This is a very good introduction to the Internet. If you're smart enough to get this book, you won't need another because you'll learn by doing.
The Emmett Till Book
What happened to cause a young African American student's lynching in the Mississippi Delta? When Emmett "BoBo" Till threatened Mississippi's rigid Jim Crow laws this fourteen-year-old paid with his life. Till's murderers were set free yet his death spurred Rosa Parks to take her important stand in Montgomery. In this 50th anniversary, the case has finally been reopened with new and intriguing information.
Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited
Discover unresolved Mississippi murders - untold stories of the civil rights era. Susan Klopfer's "Where Rebels Roost" reveals new information about unique, persevering and brave people -- many who were murdered and forgotten.
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How does a funky little Missouri town in the Ozarks capture millions of visitors each year?
Most first-timers to this small southeastern Missouri town, 35 miles south of Springfield, want to know how the town came about because what they see and experience doesn't make sense.
With a small town population of just under 8,000, Branson draws over eight million tourists who annually trek to its 53 theaters with 59,757 seats (more than New York's Broadway), 268 restaurants serving 38,813 customers, and 13 golf courses (8 Championship).
Its historic downtown features an old-fashioned five and dime close to the town's new Titanic museum set on year-round ice-cold, trout-laden Lake Taney Como. A Presidents museum, three outlet shopping malls with more than 200 retailers, and two nearby scenic lakes with fishing, boating, parasailing, jet skiing and swimming help round out a vacationer's dream.
Along with canoeing, camping, hiking, biking, and bird watching.
This little/big town that is home to semi-retired rock stars, mystery writers, old Hollywood actors, and even east and west coast opera singers, also claims four roller coasters in its five-year-old 112-acre, forty-million dollar, multi-faceted theme park, Celebration City.
Even more top-of-the-line coasters are nearby in Silver Dollar City.
It's a legitimate question that vacationers used to ask me, as the city and entertainment reporter for Branson's daily newspaper a number of years ago, and surely are asking today: how is it possible for such a small town to evolve from a tiny hunting resort stopover to the entertainment capital it is today?
So how did Branson get started? Named for Rueben Branson, postmaster and operator of a general store in the area in the 1880s, the region's history is far more provocative than Mr. Branson ever hoped to be.
When incorporated on April 1, 1912, Branson had 1,200 residents. "Shortly thereafter, the idea of Branson as a resort town began to take root, spawning a commercial ice plant, a soft drink bottling plant, a candy factory, and an ice cream factory near the waterfront.
"The town's three hotels - the Commercial, Branson, and Malone (the latter renamed the White River Hotel in 1937) - were catering to vacationers; and neighboring factories and businesses were encouraged to stack their logs, lumber, and bricks so that they looked more tidy," Jerry Coffelt, a Branson historian, said.
By the 1930s Lake Taneycomo had become an inexpensive vacation spot easily accessible to distant or nearby cities by car and train. Visitors drawn by street fairs, parades, community picnics, and boat races, as well as by the scenic lake and hills, helped the town's businesses survive through the Depression and bank failures.
But the Branson story actually goes back further, with settlement in the enchanting Missouri Ozarks, the highest land between the Appalachians and the Rockies, and with its early Native American history, that must be included in its telling.
Not really mountains, the Ozarks are a true plateau made up of limestone formations as the result of erosion.
But most locals and visitors still refer to the mountains -- and, in this context, make the Ozarks the oldest range on the North American continent.
The word Ozarks may have come from early French trappers and explorers who marked their early maps "Aux-Arcs," meaning bows or bends -- bows used by the regional Native Americans and bends in the area's many rivers, local historians say.
Branson's Earliest Guests
Today's Ozarks remain witness to a time and culture that lingers only in history and in a few place names, and the occasional relic turned up by the plow or bulldozer.
Yet over the past 9,000 years the region has hosted numerous visitors. The very earliest Ozarkians gathered nuts and most likely hunted animals, like the dire wolf, the ground sloth and the short-faced bear, into extinction.
Hopewell-Mississippian people, who were active as traders, came into the Ozarks as a sort of vacation spot, or more appropriately as a place to relax from their busy commercial endeavors.
As the area's first merchants, Hopewellians often traded obsidian (used to fashion arrowheads), conch shells and various ceremonial objects. White people were beginning to enter the scene, bringing unknown diseases that would decimate the Indian populations.
In 1540 the Spanish Conquistadors, headed by Hernando de Soto, hit the southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas regions and perhaps the Hopewell-Mississippians headed west to avoid the wrath of de Soto's army. By 1863, when the French explorers Marquette and Joliet arrived, these Indians were completely gone.
Next into the region was the Osage tribe who used the hills for their hunting grounds. Major Osage horse trails ran atop the divides of large streams, and today a good number of back country Ozark roads, as well as some major highways, were at some point an Osage horse trail. (Something to think about while enjoying the tree lined drive between Branson and Silver Dollar City.)
Trail of Tears
In about 1796 the Spanish Governor at New Orleans permitted the Cherokee and some Delaware to live inside the Arkansas Ozark settlements, believing it would be to his advantage to have the enemies of the Federal government well settled inside his borders.
Western Cherokee moved west of the Mississippi, giving up a lifestyle of farming for hunting; the Eastern Cherokee nation was shattered in 1838 when Presidents Jackson and Van Buren ordered all Indians east of the Mississippi to leave.
Roughly one third of the 20,000 Cherokee died during this forced relocation, known as the "Trail of Tears." But a good number of Cherokee remained in the hills and inter-married with many of the white settlers and today many Ozarkians have ties to the Cherokee people.
Early Settlers Bring French Influence
The United States purchased the Ozarks region from France for about 12 cents an acres, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and many French settled here as missionaries, fur traders, and farmers; but their influence was never very strong, except for the wealth of names they gave to the land: Bois D'Arc, St. Louis, Gasconade, Pomme de Terre, and Versailles.
Even the White River is a translation of the French La Riviere Blanche.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, famous for discovering the source of the Mississippi, was one of the first Americans to explore the area in 1819. Early settlers were not far behind as they sought cheap land in isolated spots.
Pioneers moving westward across Missouri didn't stop here though, because the land wasn't as good for farming as in the prairies and Great Plains.
But after the Civil War a second wave of settlers began moving into the hills and hollows of the Ozarks. Scotch-Irish mountaineers moved in from the Appalachian Mountains, looking to escape Appalachian newcomers, with homesteaders from Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia joining them.
In years later, during the 1920s and 30s, the region became home to mobsters and gangsters who came by rail. "It was a known fact that this was neutral territory. Any mob family could send a family member here to cool off.
"They had to behave themselves but people would turn their heads. Pretty Boy Floyd and others often visited. And for this reason, Branson was perceived as off limits by the mob, for their activities," Coffelt said.
Because of the region's relatively remote and inaccessible nature, it was luring more than its share of individuals escaping from the law, including the infamous outlaws Bonnie and Clyde and the notorious gangster Jack Fleagle.
A Shepherd Arrives, Just in Time
Back in the late 1880s, a time of extreme violence and lawlessness following the Civil War, a group of 13 citizens formed a vigilante group, known as the Bald Knobbers, naming themselves after the bald knobs (treeless hilltops) where they assembled.
But soon their members were aiding and abetting the violence, rather than calming it, and their reign ended in 1892 when retaliation came from another group known as the Anti-Bald Knobbers. One of Branson's first entertainment shows took the group's name and eventually built a theater, naming it the Bald Knobbers Theater; four brothers, the Mabes, began performing for visitors on the Branson lakefront in the late 1950s.
Over the years, people have trekked to the Ozarks for a variety of reasons. They've come to rest and refresh at early health spas, to hunt, fish, and camp. Spring water was so abundant in the Ozarks that health spas were once very popular.
Nearby Eureka Springs was the most famous of the Ozarks spas in the height of the Ozarks health cure craze. As visitors arrived, they saw the region's natural beauty, especially the rivers. By 1904, the Ozarks first commercial float fishing company was formed at Galena, advertising the "Famous Galena to Branson Float."
The route on the James and White Rivers winds nearly 125 miles, and at the end of the week-long trip, floaters, after the opening of the railroad in 1906 returned to Galena by train, a ride of about 20 miles.
While floating the White River was at first a sport of the wealthy, train travel and better roads brought more people to the region to enjoy the beauty of the Ozarks, including one very famous visitor, Harold Bell Wright, author of an enormously popular book, The Shepherd of the Hills -- a book that brought unanticipated change to the Ozarks and Branson, even after Wright tried to halt its influence.
Next: Part II -- The Shepherd of the Hills Brings in the Flocks About the Author Susan Klopfer, Mount Pleasant, IA, USA
Keywords: Branson, Missouri, Ozarks, Harold Bell Wright, Osage, Cherokee, Silver Dollar City, roller coaster
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Tourists Surprised by Town's Size Want to Know “How Branson Got Started” -- Part 1