Ozark commercial tourism began on the rivers. By the 1870s wealthy sportsmen, many from St. Louis, were riding the Frisco and the Iron Mountain railroads to the end of the line to fish, bringing their own boats by rail and hiring local guides. Many of the guides worked for the timber companies, knew carpentry, and had floated railroad ties or lumber rafts down the same rivers. They built the boats that the visitors came to want.
The boat and its name
The first business to build and reuse flat-bottomed boats for floating opened in 1896, when the lumberman Perry Andres began outfitting St. Louis clubs on the Gasconade at Arlington and Jerome. The boats had square ends, a raked bow, plank seats and room for fifteen hundred pounds of gear, and a sportsman could stand up in one to fly-fish. The name johnboat came from Pennsylvania lumber camps by way of the Ohio River. Horace Kephart put a photograph of "The John-boat" in Forest and Stream in 1895, and in 1907 Ozark Ripley, the Current River writer John B. Thompson, ran a photograph of one at Doniphan in the same magazine.
The trip that made the White River country famous ran from Galena on the James River down into the White and on to Branson. Keith McCanse, the state's game and fish commissioner from 1925, made it with his father in the early 1900s, and in the 1920s he published rosters of float outfitters statewide.
Jim Owen's line
In 1935 Jim Owen, born at Elkland in 1903, who had come to Branson two years before to open a drugstore with his father, started a float business with half a dozen guides, johnboats and a truck. He sold the Galena-to-Branson float to corporate clients as a hillbilly adventure with more than a hundred comforts from the commissary: director's chairs, iced bar boats, steaks at night. His guides, among them the boatbuilder Charley Barnes and the storyteller Tom Yocum, set the camps, told the tales and ran trotlines after dark so there was catfish for supper. At its height the line had three dozen guides and forty boats. Life, the Saturday Evening Post and Field and Stream wrote it up, and Owen served three terms as Branson's mayor.
The lake
The Corps of Engineers built Table Rock Dam on the White River just upstream from Branson between 1954 and 1958. Owen's business gave way to the reservoirs behind Bull Shoals and Table Rock dams, and he ran his last float in 1958. Dan Saults, the conservation department's editor and spokesman, accepted that compromises had to be made and led the department's public support for Table Rock, then helped defeat the dams the Corps proposed for the Current River. The Current and the Jacks Fork became the Ozark National Scenic Riverways in 1964, and they are floated still. Below Table Rock, the cold water the dam releases has made Lake Taneycomo trout water.