The Buffalo River: The Fight to Save a Land of Prehistoric Beauty

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Buffalo Flows, a one-hour documentary that tells the story of the country’s first national river and the efforts to preserve its flowing waters and majestic woodlands, will premiere on AETN in March 2009 and will be shown later in the year in conjunction with Ken Burns’s “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

Emmy award-winning filmmaker Larry Foley spent two years researching, writing and producing the documentary, which features the talents of University of Arkansas faculty members George Sabo, James Greeson, Dale Carpenter, John King, David Stahle and Thomas Hapgood, as well as members of the community. Trey Marley of the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History shot 90 hours of high-definition video to help tell the story.

Copies of the DVD are now available through the University of Arkansas Press by calling 800-626-0090 or online at www.uapress.com; to view a clip, go to http://www.uark.edu/ua/buffriv/

The documentary will air on AETN at 5 p.m., March 8, 6:30 p.m., March 12; 9 p.m., March 23; and 1 p.m., March 29.

The biggest challenge Foley faced was putting the story of the Buffalo River — which singer Jimmy Driftwood called “Arkansas’ gift to the nation” — into perspective.

“I was really intrigued by what we saved: we saved a culture, an archeology, a habitat that included scraggly junipers, hiking trails, a haven for small mouth bass fishing,” said Foley, professor of journalism in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

On March 1, 1972, President Nixon signed a bill introduced by Sen. J. William Fulbright and Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt into law, establishing the Buffalo National River under the stewardship of the National Park Service.

“It was a botanical paradise, a place where even politicians from Nixon to Fulbright and former Governor Orville Faubus could find ground to agree,” Foley said.

Today no dams obstruct the 148 miles of river as it cuts through limestone bluffs, canyons and forests and winds eastward into the White River. Plans in the 1940s for Buffalo State Park, though, called for a dam that would have turned the river and valley below into a huge lake. The “Battle for the Buffalo” began.

Local doctor Neil Compton was an early leader of the Ozark Society in what was to become a long and hard fought battle against damming the Buffalo. One of his buddies who floated the river with him over the years was Sam Walton, then owner of a chain of small dime stores.

“The film tells a uniquely Arkansas story,” said Foley.

He discovered a man whose family had lived near the Buffalo for eight generations, the scenic Baptist church at Boxley where churchgoers hold a homecoming every year and sing “Shall we gather at the river ... .” He learned that people are still baptized in the Buffalo and talked to locals about the annual Elk Festival in Jasper, where a few lucky hunters draw the right to hunt elk during two short fall seasons.

In the end, not only was the Buffalo protected, but also the environment surrounding it — one of the greatest deciduous forests left in the world, more than 120 miles of cleared hiking trails, ancient cedars, and overhangs and caves visited by Indians hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago. The soaring bluffs rising along the sides of the Buffalo are composed of sandstone and limestone deposited hundreds of millions of years ago.

Since its premiere at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in October 2008, the film has attracted appreciative audiences around Arkansas, filling theaters and halls wherever it was screened.

“Never in my career have I done anything that had a response like this,” said Foley. “If it turns out to be the crowning jewel of my work as a filmmaker, that is just fine with me.”

Proceeds from the DVD, which is narrated by Academy Award winner Ray McKinnon, will go to the University of Arkansas Documentary Fund.

Sponsors of the film include the Arkansas Humanities Council, the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism Commission, Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, the Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History, AETN and the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.