How Two Con Men Drowned 8 Towns to Build Missouri's Biggest Playground: Lake of the Ozarks

In 1912, a Kansas City lawyer named Ralph Street looked at the Osage River cutting through the Missouri Ozarks and saw a hydroelectric dam. He couldn't finance it alone, so he partnered with Walter P. Cravens, president of the Kansas City Joint Stock Land Bank, who was sitting on hundreds of foreclosed Kansas farms nobody wanted to buy. Together they devised a scheme: trade that worthless farmland to Ozark families whose property was about to be flooded, acquiring tens of thousands of acres through a web of shell corporations. Cravens was indicted on 88 counts of misappropriation and sent to Leavenworth. Street pivoted to Union Electric of St. Louis, whose president, Louis Egan, built the Bagnell Dam for $30 million — the largest privately funded construction project in America — then used a 29-room log lodge overlooking the lake to bribe politicians until he, too, went to federal prison. Between 1929 and 1931, more than 20,000 workers earning 35 cents an hour raised a 148-foot concrete gravity dam that drowned eight towns, displaced thousands of families, and created the largest man-made lake in the United States. Old Linn Creek, the Camden County seat since 1855, now sits under forty feet of water. The iron smelter at Irontown still pokes above the surface. And the lake — 1,150 miles of shoreline, 54,000 acres, five million visitors a year — became Missouri's most beloved playground, a place whose beauty has almost completely overwritten the fraud, displacement, and corruption that brought it into existence. Sources A People's History of the Lake of the Ozarks by Dan William Peek and Kent Van Landuyt (2016) Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Dam by Leland and Crystal Payton (2012) Cravens v. United States, 62 F.2d 261, United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit (1932) "How Missouri Made the Lake of the Ozarks: Crimes, Sunken Homes and Dreams of a Midwest Oasis," KCUR, July 27, 2023 "'True Locals' From the Lake of the Ozarks Remember Its Nearly Forgotten History," KCUR, July 4, 2018 Bagnell Dam Photograph Collection, Missouri State Archives (Record Group 998.285)