Project captures stories of those living along the Missouri River

LUPUS, Mo. -- In 77 years of life on the Missouri River banks, there's not much Doris Brizendine hasn't seen.

As a child, she watched her grandfather cross the frozen Mighty Mo from their Moniteau County perch to reach the general store in southern Boone County.

She has seen the river giveth -- abundant crops on fertile farmland in its moist, rich bottom --and, during the Great Flood of 1993 and other, less catastrophic surges of water, taketh away.

She has watched the old-timers move out, or pass on, replaced by the artsy exiles from Columbia looking for an authentic small-town experience in Lupus, current population 29. Since her husband died 13 years ago, Brizendine has been on her own in a town she never imagined leaving.

But leave she must, as the incessant march of time and poor health have conspired to force Brizendine to abandon the only hometown she has ever known for a move to nearby California, Mo., where she can be closer to a grown daughter and an array of doctors.

Her boxes packed, Brizendine will leave behind a lifetime of memories. But thanks to a peripatetic writer and theater buff from Chicago with her own, more recent Missouri River love affair, Brizendine's tales of life on the river have been preserved for posterity.

Meredith Ludwig moved to central Missouri three years ago to work in a Boonville nursery. Tired of the rat race in Chicago, she quickly embraced the small-town ways of Boonville, Rocheport and especially Lupus, a town founded nearly 200 years ago when it was known as Wolf's Point (Lupus means wolf in Latin).

A sense of permanence

In those river towns, Ludwig found a sense of permanence and deep connections to community -- a revelation to someone who had moved nine times in her life.

"I was fascinated that one family had stayed in one spot for so long," she said, recalling her first conversation with Hudson Clay, a 90-year-old Lupus resident whose ancestors helped settle the community.

Meanwhile, the not-for-profit Missouri River Communities Network was traveling the state with a mobile Lewis and Clark exhibit commemorating the 200th anniversary of the explorers' westward march.

Visitors recounted their own, deeply personal stories of life along the Missouri River, said Steve Johnson, the community network's executive director.

"We had people come into our booth, read some of the displays and then start telling us their own stories," he said.

A plan was hatched. With a modest amount of grant money and the help of an AmeriCorps volunteer with experience in video production, Johnson and Ludwig collaborated to collect 40 oral histories from longtime river rats in Missouri -- from Miami Station in the west to Washington in the east.

They found folks like Joe Reeder, a commercial fisherman and trapper who skinned hundreds of beaver hides as he spoke to Ludwig, and Lucille Coleman, born and raised on a river island that no longer exists.

Ludwig and Johnson hope to obtain additional grant money to make the interviews more widely accessible, perhaps by using a Web site where people could watch snippets of the recordings.

They heard about the river's brute strength, tragic tales of children and barge workers drowning beneath the powerful currents. They heard of its healing powers, with some people saying the river sometimes helped break down racial barriers, uniting blacks and whites even when mixing of the races was frowned upon, if not downright illegal.

"It's bigger than anybody," said Ludwig. "It keeps you humble."

---

For Don White, 56, the river is practically a member of the family. Born and raised in Glasgow, Mo., White has spent his working life with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, living on the river for weeks at a time.

Those long stretches on the river weren't always idyllic: White, like many of his co-workers, missed the birth of a child while working the locks and dams. Yet it's all he has known.

"It grows on you," White said. "I've enjoyed the river all my life. I'm still there."

The collection of interviews, dubbed "Save Our Stories," will be stored in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-Columbia, a part of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Ludwig and Johnson hope to obtain additional grant money to make the interviews more widely accessible, perhaps by using a Web site where people could watch snippets of the recordings.

Ludwig is also working on a musical, "Gumbo Bottoms," that incorporates the river stories.

To do anything less would risk abandoning the river's rich past, she suggested.

"We're going to lose a way of life. These people are going to be gone. And with them, we lose another generation of stories," said Ludwig.