Carson/Clampett/Bodine
In the Mountains and valleys
along the Missouri/Arkansas border, as in the rest of the Ozarks, and indeed
most of Appalchia, the lifestyle and culture from the Civil War to the mid 20th
century was literally stratified. Along the Missisippi, Missouri, Ohio, and
Tennessee rivers were cities as modern as New York or Chicago. Smaller towns
along smaller rivers did not have all the latest advances, but otherwise were
basically up-to-date. The valleys in the foothills usually knew about how
things were "faster" in the big cities, but were content to have such
innovations as telephones available mainly in public places like the general
store or the Sheriff’s Office. As you climbed higher into the mountains,
conditions became more "primitive" until you got to the
"hillbillies" who were little changed from the "mountain
men" and Scots-Irish borderers who originally settled the area.
This page is considering three
branches of one family who, though they lived only a few miles from one
another, came to represent three different Ozark cultures. They all descend
from Jedediah Clampett, a Confederate veteran who returned to the hills that he
loved to settle down and raise a family. Jedediah was the grandnephew of George
Russel.
George
Russel (right) and his friend, Davy Crockett.
Jedediah had three children. Daughter
Ruby married James Robert (Jim-Bob) Carson and had two children of her own,
Catherine (Kate), and Joseph (Joe). The family settled down in one of the lower
valleys in the foothills, on a farm between the towns of Hooterville and
Pixley. Jim-Bob was not much of a farmer, however, and so he took out a loan
and prepared to build a hotel in Hooterville, between the official train
station and the general store (about 100 yards down the track) which functioned
as the de facto station, just as it functioned as post office, bank, newspaper
office, etc. When the baggage car carrying the building supplies jumped the
track going around "Dead Man’s Curve," it spilled the supplies onto
that part of the right-of-way that ran through Jim-Bob’s own farm. He took that
as an omen and built the hotel, which he named "The Shady Rest," on
that spot. While the bulk of the baggage was the building supplies, there was
also a rather large shipment of women’s undergarments bound for the general
store, so some of the locals began to jokingly refer to the spot as "the
petticoat junction."
Kate Carson Bradley and her daughters
Kate Carson, Jim-Bob and
Ruby’s daughter, fell in love with a travelling salesman named Greg Bradley, Jr.
who was tired of life on the road and only too willing to settle down and
manage the hotel. Greg and Kate married and started a family of their own. They
had three lovely daughters whom they named Billie-Jo, Bobbie-Jo, and Betty-Jo.
When Jim-Bob passed on, he left the hotel to Greg and Kate. When Greg also
died, leaving Kate a young widow trying to raise three children and run a
business all on her own, her brother Joe offered to help manage the hotel. Even
though she knew that he was too much of a dreamer and schemer to be much help,
he was family, so she took him in.
Jedediah Clampett’s second
child was a son named Luke. Luke couldn’t stand living in the Flatlands, and so
he stayed in the high country and raised a family there. From his little
homestead it was a day’s walk down the mountain to the nearest settlement, a
small outcropping of buildings barely worthy of the title hamlet. Its
inhabitants called it Bugtussle. Luke’s nearest neighbor was a widow named
Daisy Moses (known far and wide as "Granny") who had made a name for
herself with her country potions and witchy-woman cures. She also made the most
powerful White Lightning in the county. Luke’s son, Jed (named for his
grandfather) married Granny’s daughter Rose Ellen and had one daughter, Ellie
May.
Pearl Clampett
Bodine and Jed Clampett Daisy
“Granny” Moses and Ellie May
Jedediah’s third child,
another son, was named Amos. Although Amos lived all his life in the house in
which he was born, his daughter Pearl was ambitious. She would not settle for
any of her mountain neighbors, or even for the townspeople of Bugtussle. She
set her cap for Ephraim ("Ep") Bodine, the most prominent bachelor in
the nearby town of Oxford, and the only man in a fifty-mile radius to have
completed eighth grade. They had two children, a boy named Jethro and a girl
named Jethrine. Oxford, and Ep in particular, had much more contact with the
outside world than Pearl’s cousins back on the Clampett homestead, but they
were still more isolated and provincial than her cousins in Hooterville.
Oil was discovered in the
slough on Jed Clampett’s homestead, and things changed for Jed and his family.
His cousin Pearl convinced him to move out to California with Granny and Ellie
May. She loaned him her truck and her son Jethro as driver to get them out
there. It was her intention to move in with him as soon as she got her daughter
Jethrine settled and married off. So Jed, his mother-in-law, Granny, his
daughter, Ellie May and his "nephew”*
Jethro packed up and relocated to Beverly Hills, California.
*Following standard usage that cousins
who are of different generations address one another as "uncle/aunt"
and "nephew/niece".
Jedediah Clampett, Ruby
Clampett, James Robert Carson, Luke Clampett, Amos Clampett, Ephraim Bodine,
Greg Bradley: Speculation
George Russel: Davy
Crockett
Kate Bradley, Joe Carson,
Billie-Jo Bradley, Bobbie-Jo Bradley, Betty-Jo Bradley: Petticoat
Junction
Jed Clampett, Daisy "Granny"
Moses, Rose Ellen Moses Clampett, Ellie-May Clampett, Pearl Bodine, Jethro
Bodine, Jethrine Bodine: The Beverly Hillbillies
