The Wonderful River of Oz

America’s wealthiest family has long been refurbishing its hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. But when the Waltons cast their eyes east, toward one of the most beloved rivers in the Ozarks, they found themselves in troubled waters. 

Words by Boyce Upholt | Photos by Rory Doyle

What is the point of a national park?

They are often considered “America’s best idea,” to borrow a phrase from the Pultizer prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner. He wrote that national parks are “absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

The concept originated in 1864, the bleakest year of the Civil War, when President Lincoln set aside 39,000 acres in Yosemite Valley “for public use, resort, and recreation … inalienable for all time.” The next year, famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted presented a report to the park commissioners that suggested the right to the pursuit of happiness that had been enshrined in the Declaration of Independence required ensuring that the nation’s natural beauty not be monopolized by “a very few, very rich people.” That made parks like Yosemite a political matter “of grave importance.”

Even today, in another era of divided politics,  polling suggests the idea of such parks is unifying — wildly popular with both parties. But certain pockets of the country stand outside the consensus, including, notably, the Boston Mountains, in the Arkansas Ozarks. Fifty years ago, when the National Park Service seized land alongside a river here, several hundred people were evicted, some ushered out by armed federal marshals. This was the culmination of what has become known as the Battle for the Buffalo River.

The resulting park was a curious creation, then and now: The Buffalo is the country’s only “national river,” owned and managed by the Park Service to preserve its wild, free-flowing character. Locals have long decried an attraction they see as a 130-mile-long zoo. 

Land matters in these mountains, so when over the past several years a mysterious LLC began buying up property in Madison County, near the Buffalo’s headwaters — becoming, eventually, one of the largest local landowners — people were curious. Who was behind these purchases? What were they up to? Ellen Kreth, publisher of the Madison County Record, decided to find out.

She visited the courthouse to collect property records, and paused to chat with the employees — a typical small-town courtesy, she said, just “telling people what we’re working on, seeing what they’ve heard. And the county clerk says, ‘Oh, by the way, I got the most interesting call the other day.’” And with that, the Battle for the Buffalo resumed.

When I first stumbled into the Buffalo River Valley 15 years ago, I knew almost nothing about the place — just that there were mountains within a day’s drive of my home in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. And that was more than enough for me to say yes when a friend invited me out for an Easter weekend float.

The river was a revelation, a swift ribbon of water cutting through low, pine-clad hillsides before suddenly bending past towering limestone bluffs. Water seeped from the rock face; gravel trailed across the river, creating little pockets of rapids. Once we left behind the campground where we’d launched, there was no human sound — just birdsong and the hum of the flowing water.

I was not the first to be so entranced: In 1931, a folklorist named Vance Randolph published The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, in which he praised the “pine-clad contours and skylines, winding green valleys, and clear, swift streams.” But the region’s greatest asset, according to Randolph, was its people. Slip off into the hollers, and you could still find mountain men who hunted with muzzle-loading rifles and wore homespun clothes. Their Elizabethan dialect would be, to many visitors, nearly incomprehensible. The place was, in Randolph’s estimate, “the most backward and deliberately unprogressive region in the United States.”

The Osage had used the Boston Mountains as hunting land, and then the area was briefly inhabited by the Cherokee. But Randolph was speaking of the descendants of the white farmers who began arriving in the 1820s to eke out a hardscrabble life. The bottomlands along the Buffalo offered the best soil, so, naturally, were settled first. But this was not a place where anyone could build a plantation or get very rich. And if life was hard on the river, the difficulties compounded in the mountain hollers. “The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys,” as Randolph put it. “Hillfolk are not like lowlanders.” 

By the time Randolph published his book, real estate agents were already selling plots of land in the Ozarks for vacation homes. He found “vociferous individuals” selling hot dogs and gasoline in town. In contrast, he decided, the backward men of the mountains represented something to admire — an old way hanging on. 

Randolph’s book kicked off a rush of travel writers, who, as they sought the colorful hillfolk, established an enduring image of the region. Ironically, it was something of a misrepresentation: Most of the terrain in the Ozarks — which, in addition to Arkansas, spreads into Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri — consists of rolling hills and plains, where people lived lives typical of the early 20th century. Even the Boston Mountains are not really mountains, lacking sharp peaks; this is old rock, long ago worn down to plateaus that are cut through with canyons. Nonetheless, Randolph’s mountain-man “ridge runners” came to dominate the stereotypes of the Ozarks as a whole.

But the beauty, too, was a draw. When a National Geographic photographer journeyed across Arkansas in 1945, the state’s tourism publicist, Bud Green, got a tip that one of the Buffalo’s remote headwater canyons might make for good photos. After they visited, the publicist himself became obsessed and began cranking out travel stories for newspapers and magazines. Green eventually decided that the river was gorgeous enough to be enshrined as a national park. These were flush years for the economy, and soon travelers were coming from Kansas City and St. Louis to float and fish the clear streams that flowed below the cliffs. 

But this was an era of dam-building, and Ozarkian rivers were not excepted; reservoirs pooled over bottomlands along rivers to the east, where the new shorelines sprouted lodges and restaurants and second homes. Some locals dreamed of similar prosperity along the Buffalo, but the federal government split over the issue. On one side, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, our exuberant federal construction agency, was happy to take Congress’ money to build more dams. The National Park Service, meanwhile, agreed with Bud Green: In 1963, the agency concluded that the river’s beauty was sufficient to merit inclusion in its system of parks. 

“Here lies the last opportunity for preservation of a river typical of the Arkansas Ozarks, and, indeed, the opportunity for preservation of a river considered by many to be the most outstanding free-flowing stream in the Southwest,” the agency’s report declared. The Battle for the Buffalo commenced — an epithet that was just barely a metaphor. Once, when some “furriners” from Kansas City arrived for a canoe race, they found downed trees and barbed wire blocking their path; some reported being peppered by rifle fire. A letter to the editor of a local newspaper emphasized that visitors who came to tour the river “should also be able to run.” 

If you go by the numbers, the battle was between those who wanted dams and those who wanted a park. Compared with either group, the farmers who lived along the river constituted a statistical blip, barely captured in polling. These people — around 2,000 in total — just wanted to be left alone.

By the late 1960s, as the fight began to tilt in favor of the park, a group of local businessmen launched a curious venture in the Boston Mountains. Walt Disney was planning a massive theme park in Florida; perhaps they figured the Arkansas Ozarks, as another region drawing retirees, needed its own attraction. Like Disney World, their destination would be built on a well-known brand of intellectual property. But the choice of IP played into the worst of Southern stereotypes: “Li’l Abner,” a then-popular comic strip authored by a New Englander that featured a cast of backwoods fools like Li’l Abner Yokum and his eventual wife, the voluptuous Daisy Mae.

Over the objections of state tourism officials, Dogpatch USA was installed along a creek in Newton County, at a site that contained the largest year-round waterfall in the Ozarks, just a few miles north of the Buffalo River.  By then, electricity and better roads had penetrated even remote crevices of the mountains; Randolph’s ridge runners had mostly disappeared. But at Dogpatch, locals dressed up to play a version of their forebears that had been filtered through the worst assumptions and judgments of outsiders. (To add to the postmodern aura, actual musicians and artisans demonstrating authentic Ozarkian crafts intermingled with the hillbilly characters.)

Neil Compton, an adventurous Arkansas physician who liked to wander the Ozarks on weekends, had emerged as the park’s foremost champion. He led the Ozark Society, a group committed to stopping the dams, and more broadly to advertising the recreational merits of the region. He despised the Dogpatch concept, but figured his own work was to blame: He and his allies at the nonprofit had too successfully broadcast the region’s charms. Compton saw Dogpatch as one more reason a national park was necessary. Unless the river was protected from the pressures of commerce, other gaudy attractions might pop up along its banks.

On March 1, 1972 — the hundredth anniversary of the day Yellowstone was declared the nation’s first official national park — President Richard Nixon signed the law that formed the country’s first national river. That designation narrowed the scale of the land involved; this would be a thin ribbon of a park, 95,000 acres strung across 135 miles of river. Still, the Buffalo River presented complex questions for the Park Service. “This wasn’t a big, gigantic, mountainous Western national park,” notes Brooks Blevins, one of the foremost historians of the Ozarks. Most of those parks had been built on land that had never been removed from the federal domain; the Buffalo had turned to private property and now had to be bought back. Locals sued, calling the use of eminent domain unconstitutional, which slowed down the process — but failed to stop the park.

Thirty years in the rearview mirror, Dogpatch USA was a shameless glut of hillbilly hokum just a few miles from the majestic Buffalo River.

A wilderness is defined, officially, as a place absent of people. “The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it,” Wallace Stegner wrote. It remains important “simply as an idea.” Blevins points out that the Arkansas hillbilly has served a similar purpose. Theirs was always a life halfway mythical, one that us moderns liked to pretend we could one day slip into — an “idea of wildness in humanity,” as he put it. Blevins thinks the Buffalo National River would never have been formed had the nation not become so entranced with the Ozarkian hillbilly. 

For all its ugly stereotypes, Dogpatch USA at least preserved the notion that the Ozarks were a human place. The park offered a new way to imagine the region. By the 1990s, when he published a history of the struggle, Compton painted a picture of an empty landscape. The “tide of empire” had flowed around the Ozarks, he wrote, and the land had become “vacant and ready for some other use.” The 2,000 landowners along the Buffalo seemed not to count.

Many landowners felt swallowed by empire. Agents arrived to acquire their property — “backslappers” and “wheeler-dealers,” as one contemporary local calls them, given their manipulative practices. “It’s just so doggone big you can’t see the head of it,” another local told an oral historian, dispatched a few years later by the Park Service to document the quickly disappearing human communities — whose stories, if not their presence, seemed to be of value. “It’s a whole herd of ’em, a whole herd of congressmen and things like that appropriated the money for this.” Soon, the human population of the Buffalo River Valley dropped to just 40, Blevin says. 

The tensions were exacerbated by the fact that in this same era, a wave of newcomers arrived in the Boston Mountains, seeking a self-sufficient lifestyle. Gordon Watkins, for example, was a late-era hippie who had grown up in the Mississippi Delta and had grown tired of its flat monotony. He loved floating the Buffalo, and in 1977 bought a plot of land along a tributary creek. “We just kind of started a big garden that got out of hand,” Watkins says. That garden became one of the first organic farms in Arkansas; he thinks the fact that he stuck around, instead of being run off by the ticks and chiggers, helped assuage some of his neighbors’ suspicions. 

Eventually, the park earned a grudging local acceptance. After all, even residents liked to float the channel; backcountry horseback riding through the wilderness grew popular, too. As one old-timer told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2012, “They took our land away, but it’s still there, and it’s not covered up by water.”

That year, though, the old troubles resurfaced: The state issued a permit to a local landowner who wanted to open a sprawling hog farm on a tributary near the Buffalo River. Watkins, worried that the waste would taint the river, formed a group called the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance. That launched a new battle: What mattered more, private property rights or the health of the river? Eventually, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, intervened to buy the land; he convened a new committee of officials to oversee the watershed. But the fight had resurfaced the old fault lines and underlined Watkins’ position as, in some of his neighbors’ view, an interloper. “You know, ‘Rust never sleeps,’ as Neil Young says,” he told me. “There’s always been this undercurrent, you know, locals versus newcomers.”

Like many other national parks, the Buffalo River has lately turned almost too popular. The river received 1.3 million visits in 2022, far down the list of most popular sites, perhaps, but according to locals, it’s more than the river can handle. The Park Service has noted in recent years that there is as much as $30 million in “deferred maintenance” that they have not been able to fund. 

During the COVID lockdowns, especially, the Boston Mountains felt almost besieged. Hundreds of cars parked at trailheads; grocery shelves emptied, leaving locals bereft. Signs posted in downtown Kingston, which sits near the headwaters of the Buffalo, declared “You are putting us at risk” and “This is not vacay” and “Hey we don’t want you here.” Then in 2020, amid this turmoil, Johnny Morris, the founder of Bass Pro Shops, purchased the old Dogpatch property, reportedly to build some kind of nature park. (The theme park had shuttered in 1993.) Next came the reports of big land sales in Madison County.

The local newspaper, the Record, was once owned by Orval Faubus, perhaps the most infamous Ozarker in history. Nationally, his reputation is based on the fact that as Arkansas’ longest-serving governor he staunchly opposed desegregation. But Faubus was a key player in the battle for the Buffalo, too: His support of the park proposal — based, he said, on fond memories of his youthful visits to the river — was a turning point in the fight. (After leaving office amid financial struggles, Faubus also served briefly as the general manager of Dogpatch USA) Ellen Kreth, Faubus’ granddaughter, now runs the paper, and decided to investigate the land sales. She combed through property deeds and submitted requests for public records, and ultimately the shadowy companies led to a single post office box.

The culprit in this case, she learned, was not Morris: The box belonged to Walton Enterprises, a privately held company that directs the business and philanthropic activities of the descendants of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart — today the wealthiest family in the world. 

Among the properties was an old general store in Kingston, an unincorporated community in Madison County, as well as other sites on the central square; members of the family eventually announced that they planned to “update” the buildings and “open their doors to the community.” In Newton County, meanwhile, the owners of a popular dude ranch announced in September that they were retiring and transferring the business to new owners. Word quickly spread that the Waltons were buying this, too.

Kreth already had a substantial story. Then she learned about that interesting phone call — one of several hundred, it turned out, made over three days in September 2023, as a polling firm conducted a survey. One key question: Whether locals thought “it would be a good idea or a bad idea for the [Buffalo River] and the public land around it to become a national park and preserve” — an upgrade on its oddball status. Then the caller offered a list of pro-park arguments — that no new private land would be taken; that roads and restrooms might be improved — asking about the appeals of each. Only after this list were locals asked about any downsides. To some, the survey seemed designed to yield a positive response to the idea. But given the history of the river, “you just don’t mess with the Buffalo,” Kreth told me. She knew she had a bigger story still. 

By October, a flyer appeared on a new website, hosted by an organization that called itself the Coalition for the Future of the Buffalo National River.  The headlines were ominous in the context of this place and time: “More visitors are coming,” one declared in bold. Private investment was already happening, the subsequent text indicated, so “our natural lands must be actively preserved — or be lost.” Kreth said it was not hard to trace the survey back to its funders: Runway LLC, one of the seemingly countless enterprises affiliated with the Waltons. The same people, then, making private investments that were meant to bring in more visitors.

(First) At Rush Landing, a fly fisherman exults in the lure of a pristine, serene – and some say imperiled – Buffalo River. (Next) Morning light filters through trees near the Buffalo River Trail outside Ponca, Arkansas.

Sam Walton claimed in his memoir that if not for his wife, Helen, he might have become a big-city department store owner. But Helen did not want to live in a city. Sam had started his career as a local manager for a J.C. Penney store in Iowa, and then, after marrying Helen, took a loan from his father-in-law so he could buy his first store. He listened to his wife. 

After a stint on the edge of the Arkansas Delta, the couple headed west, to Bentonville, Arkansas — “just a sad-looking country town,” as Helen once put it. There, on the far edge of the Ozarks, Walton bought what he claimed was the first self-service variety store in the South.

This was a world apart from the Boston Mountains, with flatter terrain, and therefore more accessible — and more prosperous. Neil Compton, the founder of the Ozark Society, grew up in Bentonville; when he first visited the Buffalo River in the 1930s, he was shocked to find that locals lacked indoor plumbing. Compton eventually befriended Walton, and, amid the fight against the dams, took Sam and his sons paddling on the Buffalo. If this was meant as an effort to recruit the businessman, it seemed to fail. “He was just too busy becoming the richest man in the United States,” Compton wrote in The Battle for the Buffalo. Walton focused on expanding his store into an empire, first across the Ozarks, then across the South, and ultimately across the United States.

Walton’s father had worked for a mortgage company, repossessing farms that had gone broke in the Great Depression. Sam was no hillbilly, but he was an outdoorsman; he claimed to have become, as a 13-year-old, one of the youngest Eagle Scouts in Missouri history. He’d moved to Bentonville in part because of its proximity to quail-hunting territory. Once he became a famous billionaire, he delighted in upending reporters’ expectations. “I drove an old pickup truck with cages in the back for my bird dogs,” he wrote in his memoir. “I got my hair cut at the barbershop just off the town square.”

By 1981, this schtick reached an extreme: Walton invited Walmart’s shareholders to float an Ozark creek. The visitors were told that Walton’s daughter Alice would be serving a concoction of cooked snake and chicken known as “Ozark-Cajun ‘Bone-Mending’ River Stew.” In the accompanying flyer, Alice, heiress to one of the country’s great fortunes, was depicted wearing overalls and smoking a corncob pipe. The shareholders got too drunk and flipped their canoes, and Walton was never again so theatrical. Indeed, by the end of the decade, he seemed ready to wash Bentonville and the surrounding towns free of their hillbilly taint.

Walmart would soon become the nation’s largest retailer. Meanwhile, Tyson Foods — launched in the 1930s in a town 20 miles south of Bentonville — was on its way to becoming the nation’s largest meat processor. If the Ozarks had ever been marginal, they were no longer: This was, instead, a center of corporate power. The heads of these companies banded together to ensure the environs matched this distinction, launching an economic development nonprofit called the Northwest Arkansas Council. Alice Walton, then in her early 40s, took the helm in 1990 and, over the next decade, helped bring an airport and two interstates to the region. Northwest Arkansas became one of the fastest-growing and most prosperous regions in the state. (Today, the population of Bentonville is nearing 60,000, more than 20 times greater than when the Waltons arrived in 1950.) 

Alice’s next move was unusual: She built a world-class art museum; Crystal Bridges, as it’s known, is free to visitors — thanks to the largesse of the Waltons, who collectively own almost half of Walmart’s shares, worth over $200 billion, according to Business Insider. A few years after the art museum opened, two of Alice’s nephews launched a company meant to “enhance” Bentonville’s dining scene. Then one of those nephews decided that what Bentonville needed was trails.

Tom Walton figured all the intense businesspeople moving to Bentonville to work for Walmart and its vendors needed to relieve their stress. His way of doing so had always been cycling, so Tom built first a 5-mile trail that has expanded into a network of 70 miles just within the city, and hundreds more in the surrounding region. (The total investment is now over $85 million.) The trails fall under the umbrella of Runway LLC, a firm meant “to develop and transform northwest Arkansas” through “strategic investments,” as Tom’s brother and co-founder Steuart has put it. 

They appear to be proud of the results: In 2021, Runway LLC gave away one-way airline tickets to a handful of Austinites, implying that once Texans arrived in the Ozarks, they wouldn’t want to return. Over in Texas, “restaurant reservations are impossible to secure, trails are overpopulated, local attractions are swarming with tourists, housing is getting more expensive and bachelor and bachelorette parties have taken over downtown,” the press release for the promotion pointed out. Of course, if the Waltons are too successful, Bentonville could develop all the same flaws. Indeed, one of the area’s many Walton-aligned nonprofits has already noted that for low-income workers, affordable housing has become too scarce.

To the Waltons, though, the bigger danger is that people might stop building. “People ask, ‘What else could be possibly needed here?’”Steuart Walton said at a summit last fall, not long after news of the phone survey broke. “I think this is the biggest threat to this region, this sense of complacency.” Now Steuart and his brother are bringing their investment east, deeper into the rugged heart of the Ozarks. They seem to be trying to jettison not just the region’s hillbilly reputation but even its old name: “Join us in OZ,” reads the tagline for yet another Walton-funded initiative. 

According to the Outdoor Industry Association, nature offers the “economy of the future”; outdoor recreation accounts for 2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product — $454 billion — and is growing much faster than many other sectors. Dozens of states have created executive offices devoted to growing outdoor tourism. In the pamphlet touting its survey results, Runway embraced this idea, suggesting a status change for the river might bring more jobs and economic benefits. The justification for the park, then, was no longer to curb the perils of capitalism, but to give capitalism more juice. 

The numbers that Runway had collected in the survey suggested that nearly two-thirds of locals supported upgrading the Buffalo to national park status. But the discussions on the ground, especially in the rugged terrain near the Buffalo headwaters, did not match these numbers. Only 18 percent of responses were recorded in Searcy and Newton counties, which are home to the most rugged and scenic reaches of the river; nearly half the responses came from Baxter County, which holds just a small sliver of the watershed but is more settled and prosperous. (Most respondents reported household incomes far higher than the Newton County average of $50,000.)

“My phone has not stopped ringing in a while now,” the mayor of Marshall, the county seat of Searcy County, told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in early October. Every one of the callers was against the idea.

Peaceful paddling on the Buffalo near St. Joe, Arkansas.

On a Thursday in late October 2023, volunteers set up 400 chairs in the high school cafeteria in Jasper, the seat of Newton County, for a “town hall” meeting meant to discuss the survey. As the room filled, students began to carry in a hundred more chairs; eventually the crowd was recorded at 1,185. Nearly 2,000 more people tuned in online. Misty Langdon, the meeting’s organizer, apologized to the people who had to stand in the hallways and therefore had trouble hearing: she’d expected a meeting of 75 people. Langdon, a seventh-generation resident of Newton County — her ancestors arrived on the Buffalo in 1830 — is in the tourism business, renting cabins to visitors. Still, she likes the region the way it is now, she told me, quiet and uncluttered. 

The first presenter, a representative of a group that advocates for wilderness horseback riders, set the tone for the night: She was there to learn, she noted, but was determined that “all classes of citizens” be heard — “not just the people with a lot of money.” Then she had to pause to wait for the clapping and cheering to subside. A former ranger said, “Rich men not from here are pushing to change our way of life — again,” to more cheering. The calls for more protection were a scare tactic, he suggested. The existing protections, under the national river designation, were already plenty strong.

Runway had distributed flyers about the survey results that suggested the Buffalo River become not a traditional national park, but a national park preserve, a separate category of public space, still administered by the National Park Service, that allows for more flexibility. One presenter noted that the preserve designation could allow for oil extraction — which, while possible, seems unlikely. Representatives of Runway have pointed out that the point of the preserve designation was meant to ensure that hunting, which is currently allowed within the park boundaries, be allowed to continue. Such “consumptive” use would be forbidden in a national park. 

In statements to the press, Runway’s representatives took pains to point out that there was no actual proposal on the table, just some preliminary research into one potential future for the river. “We wanted to explore a new idea for our home state together,” one statement read. “However, this is not our decision to make. There is no new action being taken.” This appears to be true.

For many locals, though, the process had hardly felt collaborative. Reporting from Kreth and others revealed that Runway Group had approached an Arkansas congressman named Bruce Westerman more than a year earlier, during the summer of 2022, as the Buffalo National River celebrated its 50th anniversary. There had been for several decades a second national river in West Virginia, but in 2020 the New River Gorge was elevated to become the country’s latest national park. Runway wanted to discuss whether a similar change might be possible for the Buffalo. (Westerman, whose districts overlap with the national river, is also the chair of the Natural Resources Committee, through which any parks legislation must pass; after the news about the survey broke, he met with locals and indicated that he had no plans to introduce any legislation about the river.)

The idea got a boost in 2023, after newly seated Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear that she was jumping on the outdoor tourism economy bandwagon. She formed an advisory council and set her husband, Bryan Sanders, in charge. (He has since said that he aims to double the size of the Arkansas recreation economy over the next 10 years.) Tom Walton was also named to the group. Kreth’s reporting showed that the Buffalo was repeatedly discussed by executive officials throughout the spring and summer — suggesting the river figured in the Sanderses’ plans. In June, the governor suddenly fired Mike Mills, the director of the state’s Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism. Mills owns the Buffalo Outdoor Center, and rumors swirled that he’d been removed for opposing the state’s goals.

But these could only be rumors, as Mills did not speak to the press. Because no one from the state government had reached out to locals to hear their thoughts on the river’s future, no one along the Buffalo was sure what the state hoped to accomplish. Not even elected officials had been clued in: Gov. Sanders and her husband “have not had one conversation with me about tourism in my area,” said Bryan King, a state senator whose district includes parts of Madison and Newton counties, and who spoke at the October meeting in Jasper. “It’s very frustrating.” (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to the materials published by the Runway Group, the redesignation could increase visitation by 60 percent. During the pandemic, though, visitation increased by 6.5 percent — and that  strained local resources. Redesignation would not automatically bring more funding to improve local infrastructure, or to offset the costs of running search-and-rescue operations, King pointed out. “They say a rising tide lifts all boats, but that’s not always true,” he said. “It sinks some of them.”

When the phone calls first started, some people asked Gordon Watkins, the Delta hippie-turned-organic farmer, whether he was behind them. He was not, and “the more we learned, the more concerned we got,” he says. He was not necessarily opposed to redesignation, but it looked like a marketing scheme, and before the Buffalo River got more marketing, he thought it needed more investment and better protections. 

So Watkins spoke at the meeting — as did an official from the county office of Farm Bureau. The two groups had been the main antagonists throughout the recent fight over the local hog farm. Langdon felt that having them on the same stage felt like something from “The Twilight Zone.” “These are the two most polarized groups in our community that have come together to say this will not benefit our community or the river in any way,” she said. One question, though, is whether the alliance can last.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is surrounded by Grand Teton National Park, offers a vision of the worst-case future for Buffalo River: An influx of billionaires seeking beauty has turned Teton County into one of the nation’s wealthiest counties — and also its most unequal. The median home now costs over $3 million; meanwhile, food pantries are overrun. Even if you make $60,000 a year working at a ski resort, you have to choose between sleeping in a car or commuting 45 minutes, notes sociologist Justin Farrell, who has studied wealth inequality in the region. National parks were a good idea, but perhaps everyone deserves more than just beauty. And for that, our country may need an idea even better than national parks.

Farrell notes that many of the billionaires in Wyoming dress as though they are ranch hands, positioning themselves as akin to their simple homestead predecessors. This is a familiar tactic in the Ozarks, too: Sam Walton refused to remove his trademark trucker’s cap, even while wearing a tuxedo. The contortions have grown tougher through the years, though, since Walton’s grandchildren have never experienced anything close to a middle-class existence. When a local newspaper profiled Tom Walton in 2015, they asked as a fun aside a series of oddball questions, including his favorite scent. Walton’s choice was the “forest floor tones” he could discern in a good French red wine. The odor, he added, brought him “back to the deep woods behind my house where I played in the dirt as a kid.” (His parents had forbidden him from watching television, so he and his siblings had to play in the creek.) 

“They very much lean into this we’re-not-different-from-you image,” Olivia Paschal, a journalist and historian who grew up in the Ozarks and studies the region, told me. She thinks the approach worked for a long time — perhaps until the past decade, as Bentonville and its surrounding municipalities became so stratified by wealth. But the fight over the Buffalo, Paschal says, is the first time she’s seen rural residents in places like Madison and Newton counties expressing collective anger at the corporation. They might not know it, but this places them in solidarity with other people caught in the grinds of the economic policy pushed by the Waltons and their corporate peers, from store cashiers to poultry plant workers. “Folks out here are fighting the same powers-that-be as people in the cities,” Paschal says. “This is a real opportunity to recognize that commonality — and solidarity.”

The icons celebrated in the Ozarks tend to be closer to Eva Barnes Henderson, the last person to be kicked off the land along the Buffalo. Known as “Granny Henderson,” she serves as a powerful symbol: She was kind to canoeists, allowing them to camp on land, and sometimes cooking them breakfast; but she had pioneer gusto, too, and into her 80s walked to the creek every day to water her cattle. She died not long after she lost her land to the park, and today her old cabin is a popular stop for hikers.

This spring, the Arkansas Farm Bureau featured Henderson’s story in a podcast series about the Buffalo River’s controversial past and precarious future. The locals interviewed made it clear that the influx of money into these mountains was already having an impact: Johnny Morris is redeveloping Dogpatch; Tom Walton is rebranding Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, the dude ranch he recently purchased in Newton County, as a mecca for rock climbing and mountain biking. “Right up where I live, Buffalo Outdoor Center has got several cabins through there,” Randy Gibbons, Henderson’s great-grandson, complains in one episode. “They’ve got a trailer park. Now they have started a bicycle trail right in front of my home. Got a zip line.” He noted that all this development is driving up property values.

The Farm Bureau — which did not respond to requests for comment — seems to suggest that the answer to these woes lies in the boilerplate policy statement appended to every episode: The group opposes any change to the national river designation “and any further negative impact on agriculture lands or infringement on private land ownership and its use within the Buffalo River watershed.” The answer, then, is to protect property rights.

Paddlers make their way down the Buffalo River near St. Joe, Arkansas. Worries over corporate overreach are clouding nature lovers’ prospects.

Gordon Watkins, too, is concerned about gentrification: He told me enough long-term rentals near the river have already been converted to short-term units for tourists to create a housing shortage for locals. But Watkins is skeptical of the Farm Bureau, whose podcast, he says, was “not based in reality — they were fearmongering.” In multiple segments, the host suggests that all of the Buffalo River watershed might soon become federal property, an idea that Runway LLC has explicitly rejected. (“No private land would be taken to create the national park and preserve,” the callers noted in their survey.) Indeed, the trend since the early 2000s has been the reverse; the National Park Service has transferred some land back to private owners. But the Farm Bureau is invoking an ugly past — “Granny Had to Go, Who Will Be Next?” one episode is titled — to simplify the issue and justify their favored policies.

If the first Battle for the Buffalo was over property rights — pitting local landowners against the federal government and their out-of-town backers — in this second round, the contestants have changed. The Waltons and Morris are snapping up property from willing sellers, Watkins notes, and once it’s their property, “they can do whatever the hell they want with it. That’s what ‘property rights’ is all about.” 

The second Battle for the Buffalo appears to be about wealth — how it distorts democracy, how it grants overwhelming power. To slow gentrification, locals may need to band together and decide that certain restrictions on private property are necessary and just. They could pose limits on short-term rentals, for example, or declare certain regions to be reserved for residential and agricultural use, or restrict the scale of future construction. 

Arkansas counties are governed by what are known as quorum courts, elected groups that meet monthly and have broad power over zoning. Ellen Kreth noted that in Newton County, at least, the quorum court has a staunchly libertarian view: it’s not their place to tell their neighbors what they can and can’t do on their land. In November, in the wake of the survey, the quorum court passed a resolution that, like the Farm Bureau’s policy statement, opposed any infringement on property rights. “So as it stands right now, members of the quorum court have kind of said, ‘Nope, no zoning ordinances for us,’” Kreth said. “Well, if you don’t have zoning ordinances, and this development is coming into your area, how are you going to regulate it?” A commitment to the myth of the self-sufficient farmer — the ridge runner who just needs to be left alone with his freedom — may be, ironically, what drives out descendants of the original ridge runners. 

As the development continues, people remain on edge. Misty Langdon, the seventh-generation local who organized the October meeting in Jasper, told me her mother is worried that she’s become too outspoken: “She said, ‘You’re gonna keep on talking about this until they end up coming here and taking our land.’ There is a fear and a mistrust, and people are very leery.” Watkins pointed out that Tom Walton still sits on the advisory committee meant to increase outdoor tourism. “I hear a lot of people saying it’s not over yet,” he said. He worries that controversy may mark a step backward, making it harder to institute other protections that are needed to ensure development and tourism don’t ruin water quality.

In March, the issue percolated back into the news, after Axios confirmed the long-standing rumors that Runway had purchased Horseshoe Canyon Ranch. Tom Walton, who had recently been named Runway’s CEO, appeared at the ranch a few weeks later for an open house. Wearing a camo trucker hat, standing in the lodge — its gleaming wood walls adorned with horns and hides of cattle — he explained his vision for his latest property.

To the dismay of some locals, that future would not include horses — “we don’t have a core competency in our organization around horses,” Walton said — but he thought people would be delighted with the zippy new e-bikes. He raved, too, about the property’s “via ferrata,” a climbing route that, thanks to fixed steel structures, removes any risk of a fall. (“In terms of great experiences, a true Ozark experience, I think it’s one of the best things we have.”) Finally, Walton came around to the room’s hulking elephant. He wanted to apologize, he said: While the river’s redesignation wasn’t Runway’s idea, while social media had birthed many wild ideas, he was nonetheless guilty of not talking early enough with local officials.

The whole open house felt like a way to prove his generosity and goodwill. The restaurant would, for the first time, be open to the public, and anyone from Newton County who wanted to visit this playground could receive a day pass for free. “So I hope that you all can come here when you need a good walk,” Walton said.  ◊

This story is featured in Issue No. 9