The book’s memories of the river come from people who know the Jacks Fork and took the time to say what they call its places, to mark those places on maps of the river and to tell what they remember. Thanks go to Marshana Phillips, Bill O’Donnell, Classena Dawson, Lynne Norris, John Stephens, P. C. of Mountain View and dB, and to everyone else who shared memories of the river, among them those who asked not to be named.
The book leans hardest on the work of earlier writers and compilers. David Lewis’s 1980 history of the Jacks Fork, gathered from old-timers and from visits to the places themselves, is cited more than any other source, and a debt of gratitude is owed as well to Thomas F. Wilkerson Jr., who prepared the Missouri Department of Conservation’s inventory and assessment of the Jacks Fork watershed; to Donald L. Stevens Jr., Trista L. Thornberry-Ehrlich and Jane W. Gibson, whose history, geology and interviews for the National Park Service are cited throughout; to Robert B. Jacobson and Alexander T. Primm, and to Douglas N. Mugel, Joseph M. Richards and John G. Schumacher, for their studies for the U.S. Geological Survey; to Carl O. Sauer, for his 1920 geography of the Ozark Highland; to Anna O’Brien and Cora Ann Pottenger, who went into the counties to ask where the names came from, for place-name studies finished in 1939 and 1945; to William R. Eddleman, R. Scott House and the cavers of the Missouri Speleological Survey whose 1982 report on the caves of the valley underlies Chapter 13; and to Benjamin G. Rader, William Monks and the compilers of the Goodspeed county histories.
The records behind the book are kept by the State Historical Society of Missouri, at Columbia and Rolla, whose collections hold the place-name files and recorded interviews cited in the Endnotes; the Missouri State Archives; the Missouri Historical Society; the National Park Service, at Ozark National Scenic Riverways and the Midwest Archeological Center; the Missouri Department of Conservation; the U.S. Geological Survey, whose gauges supply the river’s measured record; and the museums and herbaria whose specimen records are cited for the river’s plants and animals.