Last Updated: September 9, 2026
From Eminence we drove west and then south, three hours across the width of the Ozarks, to Branson. Branson sits in the far southwestern corner of Missouri, in Taney County, close enough to the Arkansas line that the Boston Mountains start just over the horizon. It is a town of about 12,000 people that takes in something on the order of nine million visitors a year, and it got that way because of a novel.
The Ozarks cover about 47,000 square miles across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, which makes them the largest area of high ground between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The highest point reaches 2,561 feet, in Newton County, Arkansas — and it is no longer called Buffalo Lookout. On November 15, 2023, after our visit, the United States Board on Geographic Names renamed it Wahzhazhe Summit, at the request of the Osage Nation’s tribal historic preservation office, which argued that the peak should carry the name of the people who lived on this plateau for 1,300 years before removal rather than the name of a fire tower that used to stand on top of it. We met the Osage a week earlier, at Blue Spring near Eminence, in the name they gave that water.
And “plateau” is the right word, because the Ozarks are not mountains. Nothing collided here and nothing erupted. Around 300 million years ago the continental collision that built the Ouachitas to the south pressed down on the crust, and the Ozark block levered upward in response — a slow seesaw. Everything since has been water cutting down into a broad dome of limestone and dolomite. Which is why the country here reads the way it does — hilly, and full of rivers. The hills are what is left standing between the valleys, not anything that was pushed up. It is also why this is the fourth place in a month where the same soluble rock has run the story, after Mammoth Cave, Bowling Green and Eminence.
[Read more…] about Branson, Missouri: The Ozark Plateau, the Bald Knobbers and a Thousand Butterflies