People in North Arkansas are upset about the new proposal to make the Buffalo National River a “Park Preserve.” Congress is being urged to do it because it would open it up to development. The biggest pushers behind it are some very rich developers, John Morris, Bass Pro Shops owner, and the Walton brothers who own Wal-Mart, and Governor Huckabee’s husband. She may lose a lot of votes next election because of that. You can make things happen when you have more money than most Ozark hanks combined, and the Walton brothers and Morris are already buying up land there in anticipation of building onto their empires.
I have talked to several people in North Arkansas who figure nothing can stop Morris’s desire to build more five-star hotels and mansions on top of the bluffs overlooking that wild and beautiful river. The Waltons just recently bought a thousand acres adjacent to the National Park Service boundary. I think they may be wrong, but it will take congress to stop it. Will they? Depends on where they get their re-election money.
The Park Preserve would be great for the millionaires who want to flee Chicago, New York, and California, even Kansas City and St. Louis, and for real estate companies. They could build their multi-million dollar homes right above the flood lines, and post the land so that no one could get out on a gravel bar without being fined. They could build their own private access to the river.
It is a horrible idea and brought more than 1500 local people to a recent meeting in Jasper, people who are angry and willing to fight against it. Most figured that the money that Morris and the Waltons have will give them the power to make it happen in time. One lady I talked to said, “My mother and I live on a one-hundred-acre farm next to the park boundary. It was a two-hundred-acre farm once that had been in our family through generations. In the early seventies the government took one hundred acres of it and paid my father almost nothing for it. He had no choice in the matter. Now I figure it will happen to us again.”
Morris became a millionaire with help from the Missouri Department of Conservation, that gave him millions of dollars, and continues to help him in any way he desires. State employees did free work on lands he bought up next to MDC land. The MDC helicopter and three employees gave him several weeks of free help in killing 43 wild hogs on one of his properties. His museum, which costs everyone who enters it, was started and much of it paid for with taxpayer dollars given to him by the MDC. When it happened, the Director of the MDC, Jerry Presley, went to work for Morris. Morris instigated the MDC’s elk program and is given one of the five elk permits they allow each year. The whole story has never been told by the news media. That is the kind of power he has.
He has never really preserved anything that helps common people, everything he has developed makes him money and no one can go on any land he owns without paying to do so. I have written him letters asking if there is anvthing he has purchased which can be used by others free of charge. He has never answered. Thousands of acres in Missouri he owns gives no access to anyone but him. As for the Waltons, who needs to be told the power they have?
Now there is a good chance that the Buffalo River may be the same way, a part of his empire that the people of this nation can no longer use. I can’t help but think that surely the river can continue to be protected as it is, but it will take a heck of a fight.
Governor Huckabee will not oppose what they want to do. Her husband stands to make lots of money from a park preserve. More about this as I learn details. Many of the 40 newspapers I write this column for cannot print this column. Why? If the truth will set you free, as the Bible says, it has to be heard somehow.
Larry Dablemont is author of 11 books and more than 3500 newspaper columns on Ozarks outdoors. He was Chief Naturalist for Arkansas State Parks at the Buffalo River.
There are numerous inaccuracies in this article: 1) Morris had nothing to do with the re-designation of the Buffalo. It was Waltons’ Runway Group’s idea. 2) Changing to a National Park and Preserve (two separate areas) would in no case allow “multi-million dollar homes right above the flood lines or 3) “post the land so that no one could get out on a gravel bar without being fined”, or 4) “build their own private access to the river”. That’s alarmist. I am not in favor of changing the designation of the Buffalo but I am in favor of the facts. Research “National Preserves”.
All of the property that Johnny Morris, all of the property that the Stewart foundation that the Waltons bought was all private property before and no one had access to it. It was not public property, so nothing has changed. People with money have been buying private property in Arkansas for years and years and years.