Hey folks,

“Slow, stable, and quiet.”

That’s life in the Ozarks, and it’s the way of an old jonboat.

In a recent episode of the Ozark Podcast, we sat down with Larry Dablemont and talked through the history of jonboats in the Ozarks.

If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, allow us to whet your appetite.

Today, we’re getting into:

Let’s get to it.

— Kyle Veit

Larry Dablemont grew up on the Big Piney River in southern Missouri before spending 30 years living in Arkansas, where he worked for the National Park Service on the Buffalo River.

Today he’s back in Missouri but travels the region speaking at churches, wild game dinners, and fishing clubs. He’s written 12 books (with two more coming out this year). To say that he’s a true wealth of knowledge when it comes to rivers in the Ozarks is an understatement.

One of Larry’s first memories is riding in a jonboat at 5 years old, when his dad took him on a night trotline run by carbide lamp. They pulled up a 25-pound flathead that scared him half to death.

But jonboats in the Ozarks started about a hundred years earlier. Let’s rewind…

Larry’s great-grandfather came over from France and worked as a Canadian trapper. He eventually settled in Edgar Springs around 1901. Larry’s grandfather found a wrecked jonboat in a drift and figured he could make one too. He built his first one in 1914 and lived his whole life working off the land. He hunted, trapped, fished, and built boats to get by.

Back then, lumber was hard to come by. He’d have to drive from sawmill to sawmill looking for 15-foot pine boards. Over a lifetime, he managed to find enough lumber to build about 300 boats.

For floating down the Piney, they’d lay the bottom boards across the width of the boat, spaced with a knife blade so every gap was the same. Spacing mattered because if it was too wide, the boat leaked, but if it was too tight, the boards buckled when they swelled. They didn’t use caulking, since the wood swelled shut in the water.

For floating on the Current and White, the boats used long boards, with one down the center and one on each side. The seams were packed with tar and rags that sealed as the wood stayed damp.

Eventually they switched to marine plywood bottoms, which didn’t need soaking and could be used right away.

The board-bottomed boats had to stay wet, so families kept about 3 inches of water in them with wet burlap bags in the ends, rewetting them every few days.

Once they swelled, the boats were tight enough that the only water inside came off your boots.

The boats would have rudders on the bottom so the boat held a straight course without constant paddling. There’d be storage under the seats and even a live well in the middle.

With rough river use, a boat lasted about 15 years, maybe a little longer with constant patching. Larry remembered one boat that made it to 20 years but was “nothing but old paint and patches.”

In the 1920s, river resorts started placing orders because, as Larry said, nobody made a better boat than his dad and grandfather.

Over time, the boats evolved, adding features like a blind on the front for hunting and, eventually, a trolling motor to make it easier to come in after you’d caught your limit.

Even now, guides are floating the rivers in boats that are very reminiscent of those old jonboats.

These days, though, Larry says it’s far too common to see jet motors that scare off most of the wildlife that makes the river worth floating.

He said, “The faster you go, the less you’ll see.”

If you want the true experience, the real experience… you’ve got to go slow, stable, and quiet.

That’s how you do it in a jonboat, which is fitting, because that’s how we do it in the Ozarks.

— Kyle Veit

Be sure to catch the full episode! There’s plenty of gold we couldn’t cover in the newsletter like:

If you want to lear more about Larry check out his website and books here.

We’ve shifted to a monthly cadence of the newsletter, so here are all the episodes we’ve dropped since we’ve been in your inbox!

Our good buddy Joe Massey pulled the curtain back on his 30-day Ozark black bear bait hunt. Joe breaks down every dollar spent, every Friday afternoon in the summer heat filling barrels, and every bear that showed up on camera.

If you've ever thought about hunting Ozark black bears, this is the episode that tells you everything you actually need to know before you spend a pretty penny.

After 30 days of baiting, $1,000+ in food, and a week off work — Joe Massey drew back on a shooter bear at 17 yards and made a bad shot.

This episode doesn't end with a grip and grin. It ends with something rarer in outdoor media: honesty.

We already covered this one up above, but we sat down at Larry’s Lightning Ridge home to trace the full history of the Ozark jonboat from his grandfather finding a wrecked boat in a drift in 1914 and teaching himself to build one, to Hollywood celebrities floating the White River on multi-day guided trips, to the slow disappearance of the rivers themselves.

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