This book is written for those who want to know more about the historic Missouri & North Arkansas Railroad. Published 70 years after the railroad's abandonment in 1949, it provides a description of the railroad's route and answers the questions "where are we and what once happened here?" The Missouri & North Arkansas took numerous railroads to create, and finished broken up into several small, failing railroads. Its history lasted less than 100 years, and was the largest railroad abandonment until the 1950s in the United States. It also involved numerous court cases, labor strife, and the creation of many industries and communities. However, it is probably one of the least known railroads in the country. To help solve this problem, this book provides information on the railroad's history, as well as a mile-by-mile route guide.

On January 15, 1923, a crowd of more than a thousand angry men assembled in Harrison, Arkansas, near the headquarters of the M&NA Railroad, which ran through the heart of the Ozark Mountains. The mob was prepared to use any measure necessary to end the strike of railroad employees that had dragged on for nearly two years, endangering livelihoods and businesses in an area with few other means of transportation. Supported by local officials, the mob terrorized strikers and sympathizers—many were stripped and beaten, and one man was lynched, hanged from the railroad bridge south of town. Over the next several days, similar riots broke out in other towns along the M&NA line, including Leslie and Heber Springs. This violence effectively brought to a close one of the longest rail strikes in American history—the only one, in fact, ended by a mob uprising. In Mob Rule in the Ozarks, Kenneth C. Barnes documents how the M&NA Railroad strike reflected some of the major economic concerns that preoccupied the United States in the wake of World War I, and created a rupture within communities of the Ozarks that would take years to heal. The conflict also foreshadowed, for both the region and the country, the pendulum’s swing back to moneyed interests, away from Progressive Era gains for labor. Poignantly for Barnes, who sees parallels between this historic struggle and present-day political tensions, the strike revealed the fragile line between civil order and mob rule.