The Ozarks conveys a different mental image for everyone. Some visualize long black beards, moonshine whiskey, and corncob pipes, while others imagine canoe trips down clear, free-flowing, gravel-bottom streams, oak and hickory forests, a log cabin nestled in a wooded grove, and a wisp of blue-gray smoke floating above a native stone chimney. Life in the Missouri Ozarks was hard and taken seriously. At the same time, the folks who scratched out a living from the rocky ground never lost the...