“The most beautiful rivers for making drawings and paintings are these rather small ones, with their bluffs in Missouri and Northwest Arkansas, like the Buffalo, which is one of the most beautiful in the United States.”

—Thomas Hart Benton

The Buffalo River, in the heart of the Ozarks, is renowned for its pristine waters and dramatic limestone bluffs. Thomas Hart Benton loved to “float” the Buffalo. In 1970, Sports Illustrated published “The Old Man and the River,” a feature on a five-day canoe trip Benton made along the Buffalo at age 81.