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Book Review
| Opening the Ozarks: Historical Geography of Missouri's Ste. Genevieve District, 1760–1830. By Walter A. Schroeder. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. xxi + 551 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95.
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| Opening the Ozarks is the product of more than two decades of research and writing by Walter A. Schroeder, geographer at the University of Missouri. The combination of Schroeder's meticulous attention to detail and pleasant writing style results in a dual anomaly—a socio-scientific book that is easy to read and what is in effect a broad community study that, as Terry G. Jordan writes in the foreword, "has profound relevance not just for the Ozarks, but for half a continent as well" (p. xv). |
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Schroeder's geographical focus is a corner of the Ozarks south of St. Louis, a topographically and geologically diverse area anchored by the little Mississippi River village of Ste. Genevieve. Established in the mid-eighteenth century as a western, trans-Mississippi extension of French-Canadian settlements along the left bank of the river, the village of Ste. Genevieve, with its traditional, French tripartite village design, served as both an administrative and economic center for the settlements and villages in the Ozark interior to the west or south during the periods of French and Spanish control of the territory and, to a significantly lesser degree, into the post-Louisiana Purchase American era. |
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Schroeder modestly asserts that his book "is an account of how the people who entered the Ozarks from the 1760s to the 1820s acquired and occupied land" (pp. 3–4). Most of the book is, in fact, devoted to fleshing out available records—many of them first gathered two decades ago as part of the University of Missouri's Ste. Genevieve Project—to provide an in-depth study of the various settlements (and seven types of settlement patterns) of both French-Creole and American settlers, from the planned French village (Ste. Genevieve, e.g.) and American town (Potosi) to the large land grant (Mine la Motte) and linear valley settlement (River Aux Vases). Ultimately, however, the book is much more than that, and much more than just a study of local geography and history. Schroeder's is a model for the right way to do a local study, the right way to ask big questions and draw broad and substantiated conclusions from historical development in a small and relatively isolated area. He observes the ways in which people of differing cultural backgrounds and their governments interacted with the environments they encountered in the eastern Ozarks, the ways that terrain and topography affected settlement decisions, the role of politics in human interaction on the frontier, and the importance of wealth and political connections in influencing land ownership patterns and power relationships and dynamics. |
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If the book has a shortcoming, it is one that emanates from the source of its strength. The very thoroughness and attention to detail that make the book valuable—the footnotes are so densely packed as to constitute a veritable volume two—will likely serve as a deterrent to the general reader. But this really should not intimidate those most likely to seek out or come across this book, and, besides, how many general readers actually read academic books anyhow? Opening the Ozarks is a first-rate study that should be of interest to scholars of the American frontier, to those of the Ozarks, and to anyone interested in understanding the nuances of the interplay of culture, political economy, and geography in the American heartland. |
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Reviewed by Brooks Blevins, Director of the Regional Studies Center at Lyon College. |
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