When Daniel Boone died in 1820 in the Femme Osage district west of St Louis, the Missouri territory remained a marcher land, an unsettled locale between frontiers, of which there were several, each seemingly incommensurate. One frontier was political, the division between slave state and free. One was historical, the place where the old Trans-Appalachian frontier ended, having spilled over the mountains and flooded over a vast interior, and where the Trans-Mississippi frontier was aborn, poised between St Louis and Independence, ready to sweep across the wide Missouri to the Pacific. And one was environmental, where the eastern woodlands thinned and the western grasslands thickened. For all this Boone became a reluctant folk hero thanks to John Filson's 1784 biography. One generation, Boone's, liberated by the American Revolution, had made that long hunt from the hinterlands of the Atlantic to the western tributaries of the Mississippi. 

    It was their sheer westering that sparked these proliferating frontiers. What had been separated, joined. What had found common cause in expelling the British now split over who would control the West. The progeny of that Great Migration came to rest in Missouri. Those new lands destabilized the old political equilibriums, particularly between slave and free states. The entry of Missouri into statehood nearly stressed the system to the breaking point, and forced an accommodation, the first of several. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was enacted the year Daniel Boone died.

    Something similar may follow America’s fire revolution that raged from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Insurgent groups that could unite against a common foe – in this case a hegemonic commitment to suppression – might split when that threat receded and as lands become available to admit to the new regime. So it is that America's fire polity has split into two dominant confederations. One looks to wilderness as a guide, and tolerates human activities insofar as they lead ultimately to their own removal. The other looks to working landscapes for which fire remains an implement for hunting, herding, logging, and other forms of sustenance that serve human economies. There is little common ground between them: a land must ultimately subscribe to one or the other. The lines between, often with legal and political sanction, are rigidly drawn. This time the national polarities do not align North and South but east and west. The wilderness ideal remains firmly anchored in the public domain of the West; the working landscape, in private ownership for the most part, or on the public lands providing recreational services, in the East. 

    Missouri sits between them, a middle ground; middle geographically, middle thematically, middle politically. It remains fundamentally a landscape of the border, settled when the public domain was being sold off or handed out as quickly as possible and brought into production. Over the past few decades this landscape has become again unsettled, a frontier in the environmental contest between the wild and the working. Out of it perhaps is emerging a new Missouri Compromise.

Overview of the rumpled landscape of Missouri Ozarks, St Joseph Plateau. Photo: Stephen Pyne. View Middle Ground slideshow

    The Ozarks form a modest uplands, spanning southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, grading into foothills eastward along the Ohio River and westward into eastern Oklahoma. Its core is a granitic dome, long ago leveled, and then raised again into a shallow plateau. That uplift entrenched the major rivers, complete with meanders, and it kindled a new era of erosion that dissected the plateau into an intricate lacework of hills and hollows.[i]

    They constitute a distinct landscape for fire. Compared to the Great Plains, they broke down the capacity of fire to free-range. The bluffs, the spring-fed streams, the ravines – all fragment the ability of wind-fetched flame to soar untrammeled. Compared to the eastern plains, etched primarily by streams, they add texture to the terrain, thus doubling the resistance offered to fire’s spread. It was possible in the east to amass burned patch by patch into extensive prairie peninsulas and barrens. But the topographic texture of the Ozarks fractured even those features into smaller parcels, many of which were less readily fired or given to grasses. Early observers thought the biota similar to the prairies and the terrain similar to Appalachian hills.[ii] 

    Both biotic realms, western prairie and eastern woodlands, thrived in the Ozarks but in different settings. The rolling uplands were savanna woodlands; the ravines held the thick forest, tucked away from wind-driven flame. Perhaps a third of such woods was shortleaf pine; the rest, a mixed oak-hickory hardwoods. Dry lightning is rare. Fires are set by people, and like people they have to struggle to overcome the tendency to split and diminish any movement through the hills into ever-tinier tributaries, a kind of reverse stream, splintering into rills and springs of fire as the process proceeds deeper into the plateau.

    As the entrenched rivers deepened, and then meandered, mesas were sometimes left within oxbows which further eroded into a still deeper isolation, what became known locally as “lost hills.” Geographically and historically, the Ozarks were themselves a lost hills. The Ozarks stand as an outlier and muted echo of the southern Appalachians, much as the Black Hills do for the Northern Rockies.

 The Ozarks are not prime farmland, and the interior was shunned by colonizing agriculturalists. It knew the usual sequence of prehistoric inhabitants, from Archaic to Woodland peoples, before feeling the outer touch of the Mississippian civilizations. It lay on the margins of those cultivating civilizations that claimed the humid bottomlands of eastern North America, raising maize and building mounds. While relics remain to testify of these various occupations, those peoples themselves had gone, perhaps through that mysterious collapse that swept away so many societies across 14^th- and 15^th-century North America, from the Anasazi to the Hohokam to the Mississippian Oneota. Throughout, the Ozarks were likely occupied seasonally, part of an annual cycle of hunting and foraging. The hills abounded with game from turkey to bison, deer, and elk. By the time exploring naturalists arrived, and trees in the mid-17^th century began recording fire scars, permanent occupants had vanished. Their fires left with them. The Ozarks became a fire sink.[iii]

    That changed in the early 19^th century when the Cherokees, dislocated by the border wars in the southern Appalachians, began to arrive. They found a kindred landscape, well suited to their economies of hunting, forest farming, and foraging, but one they set about fashioning into still more usable forms, for which fire served as a universal catalyst. The record of burning ticked upward; and when drought overlay the hills, it became widespread. The burning dappled the Ozarks with prairie pockets and barrens, balds and glades, and where the prevailing westerlies could blow freely, as on the uplands, savannas emerged of varying purity. Early observers reported that “both the bottoms and the high ground” were “alternately divided into woodlands and prairies,” that it was overall “a region of open woods, large areas being almost treeless,” and that the prevailing cause of this action was fire, for “it was common practice among Indians and other hunters to set the woods and prairies on fire.” Later naturalists like Curtis Marbut concluded that the open character of the scene was “without doubt, wholly or principally due to the annual burning of the grass.”[iv]