Dick Coatney, 90, recalls his big family’s move to a little cabin in ‘the refuge’

Brothers Dick and Chuck Coatney grew up 25 years apart in a kids’ wonderland – what is now the 7,900-acre Caney Mountain Conservation Area. 

It might not have seemed so wonderful for their parents – well, at least not for Dick’s mother, Daisy Coatney, when she moved to what’s known locally as “the refuge” in 1941 or 42 with her husband, Charlie, and their six children. The Coatneys’ seventh child, Denny, was born later while they lived in the refuge. Another baby died at birth.

“There was a house there – a little old three-room deal,” Dick said recently, recalling the move to Caney Mountain when he was 11. “There was a little log house – that was the kitchen. My parents slept there, and I slept upstairs in the loft of that old log part. When it snowed, it blew in through the cracks. But we didn’t know any different.”

The old log part of the house had been occupied previously by, among others, Robert and Amelia Luna Grisham, who were married in 1881 and had a family of five children in the cabin by time Robert Grisham died in the early 1890s. A two-room, two-story addition was built onto the log cabin to accommodate the Coatney family. Part of the original log cabin stands today in the conservation area’s headquarters section, where it was moved several years ago.

Chuck Coatney came along several years later, after Charles Coatney’s divorce and second marriage.

Opening the refuge, rebuilding deer, 

turkey populations

Dick was around 11 years old when his family moved to the refuge. The family’s arrival in Ozark County occurred during a time when America was coming out of the Great Depression. “Nobody had a job. If you had a job, you were in good shape,” said Dick, who was born in 1930. 

Before moving to Caney Mountain, his family was living on a farm in Elk Creek, a community between Houston and Cabool. His dad had gone to Kansas and other places to work in the wheat and corn harvests. In the wintertime, Charles Coatney was a trapper and a hunter. And, to feed their large family, the Coatneys tended a garden “as big as court square,” Dick said. 

Representatives of the Missouri Department of Conservation “came and recruited Dad to run the game refuge there at Caney Mountain,” Dick said. “Dad had a friend who was a government trapper, and he recommended Dad for the job.”

Dick says he doesn’t think he’d ever seen a wild turkey or deer before his family moved to the refuge, which had been known as the Cook Ranch until 1940, when it was purchased by the Missouri Conservation Commission at the suggestion of noted conservationist Starker Leopold, whose father, Aldo Leopold, is widely recognized as “the father of wildlife ecology.”

As refuge manager, Charles Coatney worked with Bernice Morrison, whose father, Joe Morrison, was the refuge’s first ranger until his death in August 1942. Charles and Bernice worked together on the crew that cleared a 30-foot right-of-way around the entire refuge with axes and crosscut saws – no chainsaws back then. Then they enclosed the refuge in fencing, pounding in the fence posts with 16-pound mauls. 

With Starker Leopold guiding the project, Caney Mountain refuge served as an incubator site to rebuild Missouri’s wild turkey population and then its deer population. Both had been nearly wiped out during the previous decades by poorly regulated or totally unregulated hunting.

The conservation department built a cabin where Starkey stayed whenever he was at the refuge doing his wildlife research. 

A new house in the refuge

As Charles Coatney worked in the new game refuge, his son tagged along. “Whatever Dad was doing, I was doing too,” Dick said. “We raised wheat and cane for the deer and turkeys. We had a cornpatch for them – and we ate some of the corn too.”

The Coatneys also had two Jersey milkcows, chickens and “a hog or two,” Dick said. They used the conservation department’s two workhorses and a saddle horse.

The family’s other children included Elva, Freida, Laveta, Charlotte, Retha and finally Denver “Denny,” the only one of the seven who was born in the refuge.

 At first, the big family all lived in the rugged little house that had no running water or electricity. But they did have “a telephone that you cranked,” Dick said, adding that the family’s “number” was “long-short-long.” He and his sisters walked a path through the woods and over the hill to the one-room Nebraska School. 

Dick and his dad also hunted and fished together. “We went squirrel hunting back there on that ridge by Ralph Mahan’s,” Dick said. “I growed up on Bryant River. We had a boat. Below Hodgson, there was Keith Tillman. He lived on the river, and we would fish on him and trade him fish for watermelons. Life “was hard, but it was happy too,”  he said. 

Dick and his dad helped carpenters Harrison and Herbert Allen build a six-room rock-faced house with a full basement that the family moved into a few years after settling on the refuge. “Me and Dad did the rock work,” said Dick, who was 15 or 16 when the house was built. “We picked up rock everywhere. We’d drive up and down the county roads, and where the graders had throwed the rock out, we picked it up for the house.”

The house still stands next to the remaining part of the original log cabin that was moved down to the headquarters area. 

The new house had electricity and running water. “We was uptown!” Dick said.

Hanging out with Starker Leopold

Dick remembers spending time with Starker Leopold when the biologist would return to the refuge to continue his wildlife research, staying a month to six weeks in the simple, one-room cabin that was built for him. Sometimes Starker’s famous father, Aldo, would come and stay with Starker. “I went fishing with them,” Dick said. “We set trot lines. They were nice guys.” 

Other times, Starker’s wife, Betty, and son, Fritz, would come to stay a week or two, Dick said.

Leopold got water from the spring below the cabin and used a gas lantern for light, Dick said. He remembers frequently riding the horse up the creek to visit Leopold at the cabin, which still stands, after being rebuilt and maintained through the decades.  

The Leopolds were scientists who “talked about everything. One time they were taking pictures of a snake. Leopold wanted me to punch it. He said, “Heckle it.”

The world outside Ozark County

Dick and his siblings attended Gainesville High School, catching the school bus at the refuge gate. His class visited the new Norfork Dam on their senior trip. And then, after the class of 1949 graduated on a Wednesday, “the next Monday I went to work on a pipeline in Washington, Missouri.” He paused his pipeline-worker career to serve five years in the Navy from 1950 until 1955.

By then, Charles and Daisy Coatney had divorced, and Daisy had moved into Gainesville with the younger kids who were still living at home. To support his mother, “I made her out my allotment check while I was in the Navy,” Dick said. 

Dick’s father, Charles, later married Clem Kaufman, and they had a son together, Chuck, who also grew up in the refuge. (Chuck’s story will appear in an upcoming issue of the  Times.)

During his military years, Dick traveled “all over the Caribbean and Europe.” After his honorable discharge, he worked all over the country – “Alaska, California, Pennsyl-vania, everywhere” – when he returned to his career as in pipeline construction.

When Dick was in his 50s, mutual friend Maxine Terry introduced him to Ann Hackler. They’ve been married 35 years. Now long retired, Dick and Ann own a farm across from the Gainesville Livestock Auction but live on W Highway, near Pontiac. Last week he celebrated his 90th birthday.