Glossary

Each term is defined as it is used along the Jacks Fork. The chapter, reach or part where it matters most follows in parentheses. Names of places are in the Gazetteer Index.

A

Access. A public place to put a boat in or take one out, with a road down to the water. The accesses are few on the upper river and closer together below Alley (Chapter 20).

Accretionary lapilli. Small pellets of volcanic ash, formed when rain falls through a drifting ash cloud and rolls the ash into balls. They lie in the tuff of Mule Mountain in the Eminence caldera and record water in an eruption plume (Chapter 1).

Action stage. The lowest of the Weather Service’s flood categories, a gauge reading at about bankfull, when the river is near the top of its banks. At Eminence it is 6.4 feet (Chapter 14).

Alluvium. Sand, gravel and silt laid down by a river. Along the Jacks Fork the alluvium of the bars and bottoms is up to about 20 feet thick (Chapter 2).

Americanism. A word, or a sense of a word, that grew up in North America. A study of 1939 gathered 109 of them from the names of five counties around the river, and bluff, branch, fork and lick are among the river’s words of American origin (Chapter 18).

Aquatic invertebrates. The small animals without backbones that live on and in the riverbed, mostly the larvae of mayflies, caddisflies, midges and other insects, along with crayfish and snails. Some 200 kinds have been collected in the watershed since 1961 (Chapter 16).

Aquifer. A body of rock that holds groundwater and lets it move. Every formation from the Potosi Dolomite up through the Jefferson City and Cotter belongs to one great water-bearing body, the Ozark aquifer (Chapter 12).

Archaic. The long period of hunting, fishing and gathering after the Paleoindian, about 7500 to 600 B.C. in radiocarbon years, divided into Early, Middle and Late. Late Archaic sites are many more, larger and denser than those before them (Chapter 3).

Artesian flow. Groundwater pressed upward by the weight of water standing higher in the hills, rising where a tight layer above it has been broken through. Alley Spring wells up this way into its pool (Chapter 12).

Atlatl. A spear-thrower, a short stick that adds leverage to the throw of a dart. The bow had replaced it in the Midwest by about A.D. 750 (Chapter 3).

B

Backcountry campsite. One of the park’s designated camping places along the river away from the developed campgrounds. On the Jacks Fork they are at Blue Spring, Baptizing Hole, Bachers, Rymers, Bay Creek and Shawnee Creek (Chapter 11; Part Six).

Baptizing. A baptism by immersion in the river. Between 1885 and 1910 a baptizing in rural Missouri drew a neighborhood out much as a picnic did, and Buck Hollow Ford and Baptizing Hole were places for it (Chapter 19).

Base flow. The flow that keeps a river running between rains. On the Jacks Fork most of it comes from springs (Chapter 12).

Base level. The lowest level a river can work down toward, set in the end by the sea. A drop in base level sets the rivers upstream cutting into their beds (Chapter 2).

Basket dinner. A meal that families brought in baskets to share at a church gathering on the riverbank (Chapter 19).

Blowhole. An opening in a hillside from which cold air pours out of a cave. A floater in the 1930s was shown one above Jam Up that has not been found since (Chapter 13; Reach E).

Blue hole. A deep, still pool. On the upper river the name has been given to more than one pool (Chapter 18).

Bluff. A cliff along the river, usually on the outside of a bend, where the river has cut sideways into the hill. In this sense the word was first used in North America (Chapter 2; Chapter 18).

Board foot. A piece of wood a foot square and an inch thick, the unit in which lumber and standing timber are both measured (Chapter 7).

Bottom. The flat land along a river or creek, built of its deposits and open to its floods. In the 1920s the bottoms near Eminence averaged about a quarter of a mile wide (Chapter 2; Chapter 5).

Branch. A small creek. The sense is American, on record from 1674 (Chapter 18).

Breakdown. The falling of slabs from a cave’s ceiling and walls along their joints once a passage drains and the rock bears its full weight. Breakdown made much of Jam Up Cave’s river entrance (Chapter 13).

Brush arbor. A shelter of upright poles roofed with leafy boughs, put up for a revival meeting (Chapter 19).

Bushwhacker. In the hills during the Civil War, an irregular fighter of any side who struck from the brush and then scattered (Chapter 6).

C

Caldera. The basin left when an eruption empties the magma chamber beneath a volcano and the ground above it collapses. The Eminence caldera, about a billion and a half years old, lies around the meeting of the Jacks Fork and the Current (Chapter 1).

Cambrian. The geologic period that ended about 485 million years ago. The Potosi and Eminence dolomites of the lower river were laid down in its late part (Chapter 1).

Chert. A hard, fine-grained form of silica that forms in nodules and beds inside dolomite and stays behind when the dolomite dissolves. Most Ozark people call it flint. It makes up the river’s gravel and was the stone of the first people’s tools (Chapter 1; Chapter 3).

Chute. A narrow, fast slot of water through a shoal or past an obstacle. A smooth V of water pointing downstream marks the deepest path through it (Chapter 20).

Civilian Conservation Corps. The New Deal program that put young men in camps to work on forests and parks. Its camp at Alley, set up in 1933, rebuilt the mill dam and built much of the old state park (Chapter 9; Reach H).

Class I, Class II. The two gentlest grades on the paddlers’ six-class scale for moving water: riffles and small waves, and plain rapids with clear channels. The whole Jacks Fork is Class I and II (Chapter 20).

Clovis. The best-known style of fluted spear point. A redating in 2020 gave it a life of about three hundred years, from about 13,050 to 12,750 calendar years ago (Chapter 3).

Compendium. The superintendent’s compendium, a document the park reissues every year to set the local limits that the federal park regulations leave to each park. It carries the force of regulation (Part Six).

Concession. A business under contract with the Park Service to serve visitors inside the park, such as the canoe rentals at Alley Spring and Two Rivers. The canoe-rental permits became concessions in 1973 (Chapter 10; Chapter 11).

Condemnation. The taking of private land for public use by court order, with payment at fair market value. Some land for the Riverways was taken this way in trials from 1967 to 1970 (Chapter 10).

Conodont. A tiny, tooth-like fossil of an eel-shaped sea animal. Conodont species changed fast, which makes them the most useful fossils for dating the Ozark dolomites (Chapter 1).

Crawdad. The local word for a crayfish, an alteration of crawfish used chiefly west of the Appalachians (Chapter 18).

Cryptozoon chert. A persistent bed of white chert, 2 to 10 feet thick, made of fossil stromatolites, near the top of the Gasconade Dolomite. Geologists use it as the marker for the base of the Roubidoux, and near Blue Spring it juts into the river as a reef (Chapter 1).

Cubic feet per second. The usual measure of a river’s flow, the volume of water passing a point each second. A flow of 100 cubic feet a second is about 65 million gallons a day (Chapter 12; Chapter 14).

Cultural resource management. Archaeology done because a federal agency must take account of sites before it disturbs the ground. Since 1974 it has made up the great bulk of the archaeology in the park (Chapter 3).

Cutover. Land from which the timber has been cut. The lumber companies left much of the Jacks Fork country cutover by about 1920 (Chapter 7).

D

Dalton. The late Paleoindian way of life of about 8950 to 7900 B.C. in radiocarbon years, known by serrated Dalton points and adzes. A buried Dalton base camp lies at Alley Mill (Chapter 3).

Dog-trot. A house of two log rooms under one roof with an open hall between them, where tools and saddles were kept and the hunting dogs slept (Chapter 5).

Dolomite. Calcium magnesium carbonate rock, a close relative of limestone, formed from lime mud on the floor of a warm, shallow sea. Nearly every bluff on the Jacks Fork is dolomite (Chapter 1).

Draw. A valley, in the usage of the Eleven Point side of the divide in Howell County (Chapter 18).

Dye trace. A test of where underground water goes: a harmless fluorescent dye is put into a sinking stream or a sinkhole, and the springs are watched for it. Traces showed water lost from Jam Up Creek reaching Big Spring on the Current (Chapter 12).

E

E. coli. A bacterium of the gut of warm-blooded animals. Finding it means feces are in the water, and Missouri now measures swimming-water quality by it (Chapter 17).

Ebb-and-flow spring. A spring that runs strongly, slows or stops, and comes back again, over and over, probably by the working of a natural siphon in the rock. Ebb and Flow Spring above Rymers is one (Chapter 12).

Eddy. Slack water behind a rock, a gravel point or the end of a bar, turning slowly back upstream along the bank. In the 1930s speech of the Black River, an eddy was a still stretch between rapids (Chapter 18; Chapter 20).

Elder v. Delcour. The Missouri Supreme Court case of 1954 holding that a stream able to float small boats is a public highway for floating and wading, and that the public may fish it (Part Six).

Emergent Mississippian. The name given in the 1980s to the people of the valleys who made shell-tempered pottery from the 600s or 700s, earlier than the great Mississippian centers took it up (Chapter 3).

Eminence Dolomite. A light-gray Cambrian dolomite, weathering bluish gray, named in 1911 for exposures at Eminence. It forms knobs and pinnacles, lies at river level in stretches below Horse Hollow and is one of the two main levels where caves form (Chapter 1).

Enrolled Missouri Militia. The Union militia raised under the order of July 1862 that every able-bodied man of military age in Missouri enroll (Chapter 6).

Entrenched meander. A meander is a loop of a river, and an entrenched meander is one cut hundreds of feet down into rock, as the loops of the Jacks Fork are (Chapter 2).

Extinction debt. A loss that has already happened but shows in the counts only as the old animals die, as when long-lived mussels outlast the end of their own breeding (Chapter 16).

F

Fault. A break in the rock along which one side has moved. The faults that mark the Eminence caldera run northeast and northwest (Chapter 1).

Fecal coliform. Bacteria of the gut of warm-blooded animals, the older measure of whether feces were in the water. By 2020 Missouri had replaced it with E. coli (Chapter 17).

Fen. A small open wetland where groundwater seeps out so steadily that the ground stays soaked all year, too wet for trees (Chapter 16).

Fire scar. A healed wound in a tree’s growth rings left by a ground fire. Scars on old pines near Alley Spring record 39 fires between 1706 and 1915 (Chapter 16).

Fish fry. The meal on a gravel bar that traditionally ends a Saturday night of gigging, for the giggers’ families and neighbors, with the men doing the cleaning and cooking (Chapter 19).

Flash flood. A sudden, fast rise of water after heavy rain, fed by quick runoff from steep slopes (Chapter 14).

Float trip. A trip down the river by boat, from a few hours to several days, with a way back arranged at the end (Chapter 20).

Flood stage. A gauge reading at which the river floods. Above the action stage the Weather Service sets minor, moderate and major flood stages for each gauge (Chapter 14).

Floodplain. The flat valley floor that a river builds and floods (Chapter 2).

Flowstone. Calcite laid down in layers by water flowing across a cave floor or wall (Chapter 13).

Fluted point. A spear point with a channel, or flute, chipped up the middle of each face, made by Paleoindian hunters (Chapter 3).

Ford. A place where a road crosses through the water. Many of the river’s fords took the names of the families who lived beside them (Chapter 8).

Fork. A tributary, or the place where two streams meet, a chiefly American sense from 1753. The river’s full name was once the Jack’s Fork of Current River (Chapter 4; Chapter 18).

Forks, the. The North and South Prongs and their junction, where the Jacks Fork begins; also called the Prongs (Chapter 18).

Forty. Forty acres, a quarter of a quarter section. A hill farm was often one or two forties (Chapter 5).

Furriner. The hill word for an outsider, such as the lumbermen who came from Wisconsin and other lumber states (Chapter 7).

G

Gasconade Dolomite. The main rock of the Jacks Fork’s bluffs, a light-gray Early Ordovician dolomite with much chert, about 148 to 770 feet thick. The river runs on it for most of its length, and most of the riverways’ caves are in its upper part (Chapter 1).

Gauge. A station of the Geological Survey that records the river’s stage, from which its flow is figured. The Jacks Fork has gauges at Highway 17, Alley and Eminence (Chapter 14).

General Land Office. The federal office that surveyed and sold the public land. Its township plats and surveyors’ notes are among the oldest records of the river (Chapter 4; Chapter 5).

General management plan. A park’s long-range guide, setting out what each part of it is for and what may be done there. The Riverways’ first was adopted in 1984 and its second approved in 2015 (Chapter 10).

Gig, gigging. A gig is a spear of three or four barbed iron tines on a pole as much as fourteen feet long. Gigging is spearing fish with it from a boat in clear, shallow water, chiefly suckers, by night under lights or by day (Chapter 19).

Giraffe-stone house. A house faced with irregular slabs of orange, red, yellow and white Roubidoux sandstone outlined by raised bands of mortar, popular since about 1900 (Chapter 5).

Glacial relict. A plant left from a colder time, surviving on cool, damp cliffs, such as the harebell of the Jacks Fork Natural Area (Chapter 1; Chapter 16; Reach E).

Glade. An opening where bedrock lies at or near the surface and the soil is too thin and dry for trees, usually on a south-facing slope (Chapter 16).

Glochidia. The microscopic larvae of a mussel, which clamp onto the gills or fins of a fish and ride there for two to four weeks before dropping off as young mussels (Chapter 16).

Goggle-eye. The river’s name for the shadow bass, a sunfish, and in the state’s rules for the rock bass and its kin. The name was in use by 1840 (Chapter 16; Chapter 18; Part Six).

Grabbling. Fishing by hand, feeling under the rocks of the bank for a fish (Chapter 19).

Grade. The slope at which a river carries its load without cutting down or building up (Chapter 2).

Graduation Act. The federal law of 1854 that cut the price of public land according to how long it had gone unsold, down to twelve and a half cents an acre, and set off a land rush in the 1850s (Chapter 5).

Grandmaing. A hill word of the 1930s for stealing timber from public land or from absent owners and saying it came from “grandma’s” land (Chapter 7).

Granite. A coarse-grained rock made of magma that cooled slowly underground. Granite near Big Spring has been dated at about 1.46 billion years (Chapter 1).

Gravel bar. A bank of chert gravel and sand, usually on the inside of a bend, bare at low water (Chapter 15; Chapter 18).

Gravel wave. A body of gravel set loose by land clearing that moves slowly down a river over decades (Chapter 15).

Guerrilla. An irregular fighter of the Civil War. In the Mahans Creek country many were farmers who fought between crops (Chapter 6).

Gunter Sandstone. The sandstone at the base of the Gasconade, 10 to 25 feet thick. Water held against its underside dissolves the dolomite beneath, and the most complex caves of the riverways lie below it (Chapter 1).

H

Hellbender. A giant salamander up to nearly two feet long, flat and mottled brown, that needs cold, clean, flowing water. The Ozark hellbender was described from a Current River specimen in 1943, and by 2019 the Jacks Fork was thought to hold ten or fewer (Chapter 16).

Helictite. A cave formation that twists off in any direction, fed by water seeping through tiny internal canals (Chapter 13).

High-water mark. The edge of a stream bed, in practice the line where trees and other permanent plants grow. The public’s right to float, wade and fish runs to it (Part Six).

Hog sucker. The northern hog sucker, a bottom fish with a broad head that turns over the stones of the riverbed with its snout; also called hog molly. It is one of the giggers’ main fish, along with their “yellow sucker,” chiefly the golden redhorse (Chapter 19).

Hole. Any pool deep enough to swim or fish in, named or not, the basic unit of the river in local speech; also “hole of water” (Chapter 18).

Hollow (holler). A narrow valley running back into the hills. “Holler” was written in 1934 to catch the way the word was said (Chapter 2; Chapter 18).

Homestead. Public land claimed under the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres to a settler who lived on it and farmed it for five years (Chapter 5).

Hundred-year flood. A flood with a 1 percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year. A 500-year flood has a 0.2 percent chance. The names describe odds, and a 500-year flood can come twice in a decade (Chapter 14).

Hypsithermal. A long warm, dry spell from about 7000 B.C., when prairie pushed east into Missouri (Chapter 3).

I

Impaired water. A stream on the list the state keeps under the federal Clean Water Act of waters that fail a standard. The Jacks Fork below Eminence was listed for fecal bacteria in 1998 (Chapter 17).

J

Jack salmon. The Ozark name for the walleye, a fish not collected in the Jacks Fork since 1980 (Chapter 9; Chapter 16).

Jefferson City Dolomite. A light-brown, earthy Early Ordovician dolomite above the Roubidoux. With the Cotter above it, it is the youngest bedrock of the watershed, on the uplands around Summersville (Chapter 1).

Jet unit. A boat motor with no propeller below the hull. An impeller inside its housing draws water in through a grate and drives it out astern, so the boat can run riffles only inches deep (Chapter 19).

Johnboat. A long, narrow, flat-bottomed, square-ended boat, poled, paddled or motored. It was the guide boat of the Eminence outfitters and is still the fishing and gigging boat of the river. The word is in print from 1894 (Chapter 9; Chapter 18).

Joint. A crack along which rock has split without moving. In the riverways the main sets run north-south and east-northeast (Chapter 1).

K

Karst. Country shaped by dissolving rock, with caves, springs, sinkholes and losing streams. About 99 percent of the national riverways is karst (Chapter 1; Chapter 12).

Knob. The old Missouri name for a hill of hard volcanic rock, such as those near Eminence and the mouth (Chapter 1).

L

Left bank, right bank. The banks as seen facing downstream. Because the river loops, the left bank is the west bank in some places and the north or south bank in others (Part Five).

Lenape. The name the Delaware call themselves, meaning something like “the People” (Chapter 4).

Lick. A spot where animals come to lick salt or salty earth, an American word from 1751 (Chapter 18).

Life estate. A right to go on living in a house for life after selling the land to the government, offered to homeowners under the law of 1964 (Chapter 10).

Limestone. Calcium carbonate rock formed from lime mud and shells on a sea floor. Most of the limestone laid down here later became dolomite (Chapter 1).

Loess. Fine silt blown from the floodplains of the ice ages, lying as thin veneers across the riverways (Chapter 2).

Losing stream. A creek that gives up its flow to the bedrock and runs dry for long stretches. Jam Up Creek, Pine Hollow and Johnny Hollow are the officially listed losing streams of the watershed (Chapter 12).

Low Water. The local name for the Highway Y bridge over the South Prong, the access beside it and the county’s low-water crossing where the prongs meet, and so for the head of the river (Chapter 8; Chapter 18).

Low-water bridge, low-water crossing. A road crossing built low across a stream, a ford with a floor, often a concrete slab with culvert pipes beneath it, which water overtops in a rise (Chapter 8; Chapter 18).

M

Magnitude. The rank hydrologists give a spring by its average flow, in steps of ten. A first-magnitude spring averages at least 100 cubic feet a second, and a second-magnitude spring between 10 and 100 (Chapter 12).

Mile. Distances on the river are measured along the surveyed channel from the junction of the North and South Prongs, mile 0.0, to the mouth at mile 46.21 (Chapter 20).

Mississippian. In prehistory, the period from about A.D. 900 to after 1400 in radiocarbon years, of shell-tempered pottery, small arrow points and farmsteads on terraces. In geology, the period of about 359 to 323 million years ago, when the sea returned to the region at least once (Chapter 1; Chapter 3).

Missouri State Militia. A full-time Union force, most of it cavalry, raised in 1861, paid and armed by the federal government and serving only inside Missouri (Chapter 6).

Moonshine. Whiskey made and sold outside the law. Moonshining was active along the Jacks Fork before, during and after Prohibition (Chapter 13).

Mussel. A freshwater clam that lives half-buried in the riverbed and filters its food from the water. Mussels on the Jacks Fork fell sharply between the surveys of 1982 and 2017–19 (Chapter 16).

N

Natural area. A Missouri tract set aside as one of the best remaining examples of the state’s native communities, to be managed to keep it that way. The Jacks Fork and Barn Hollow natural areas were designated on May 27, 1980 (Chapter 11).

Natural tunnel. A cave open at both ends. Jam Up is a natural tunnel (Chapter 13; Reach E).

O

Open range. The old rule that a farmer fenced his crops in and let his animals run on all unfenced land; also called free range. Shannon County kept it the longest in Missouri, until a state law of 1969 (Chapter 5).

Ordovician. The geologic period after the Cambrian. Its early part, about 485 to 470 million years ago, laid down the Gunter, Gasconade, Roubidoux and Jefferson City rocks of the river’s bluffs and uplands (Chapter 1).

Outfitter. A business that rents boats to floaters and runs their shuttles (Chapter 20).

Outstanding National Resource Water. Missouri’s highest classification for a stream, one whose quality may not be allowed to decline measurably. The Jacks Fork carries it for 46.5 miles upstream from its mouth (Chapter 17).

Overshot wheel. An upright water wheel fed at the top, turned by the weight of water in its buckets (Chapter 5).

Ozark dome. The broad uplift of southern Missouri and its neighbors, with the oldest rocks at its center and younger layers in rings outward. Its rise is tied to the late Paleozoic (Chapter 2).

P

Paleoindian. The earliest period of people in the region, about 9250 to 7500 B.C. in radiocarbon years, known here from a few fluted points (Chapter 3).

Paleozoic. The geologic era that includes the Cambrian, Ordovician and Mississippian periods and ended about 252 million years ago. Near its end, roughly 300 million years ago, mountain-building to the south opened faults and joints in the region and raised the Ozark dome (Chapter 1; Chapter 2).

Peak season. The summer season of the federal motorboat rule, from the end of the state’s spring trapping season to the opening of gigging (Part Six).

Peneplain. A broad plain worn nearly flat by rivers. An older reading took the even hilltops of the Ozarks for the remnant of one (Chapter 2).

Pine knot. The base of a pine limb where it grows into the trunk, so full of resin that it outlasts the rest of a dead tree and burns hot and bright. Pine knots lit the gigging boats, burning in a fire box or metal basket called a firejack in the middle of the boat (Chapter 19).

Pleistocene. The epoch of the ice ages, from about 2.6 million to about 12,000 years ago. The ice stopped near the Missouri River (Chapter 1).

Pool. A deep, slow stretch of river between riffles (Chapter 16).

Popular etymology. An explanation thought up for a name after the fact, built from the sound of the word, such as the story that a creek “butts on” Button Rock (Chapter 18).

Porphyry. The old Missouri name for rhyolite, from the scattered crystals in its fine-grained body (Chapter 1).

Pot-hole. A 1930s word for a still pool under a bluff, between shoals (Chapter 18).

Potosi Dolomite. A brownish, massive Cambrian dolomite full of small cavities lined with quartz crystals, the oldest rock at river level on the Jacks Fork, in stretches from a couple of miles above Eminence to the mouth (Chapter 1).

Prong. A branch or arm of a creek, set down in 1860 as Southern usage. The North and South Prongs join to form the Jacks Fork (Chapter 18).

Put-in, take-out. The places where a float begins and ends (Chapter 20).

R

Radiocarbon dating. Dating charcoal and other once-living matter by the decay of the small share of radioactive carbon it took up while alive. A radiocarbon age differs somewhat from a calendar date and is corrected to one (Chapter 3).

Rating. The curve that gives a river’s flow for each stage at a gauge, built from measurements across the channel and redrawn as moving gravel shifts the channel (Chapter 14).

Recharge area. The land that feeds a spring. It can reach under a ridge into a neighboring watershed, and its underground edge, the groundwater divide, can lie miles from the ridge that divides the streams on the surface (Chapter 12).

Residuum. The blanket of red or reddish-orange sandy clay full of chert left on the uplands as dolomite dissolves, typically about 40 feet thick in the riverways (Chapter 1; Chapter 2).

Rhyolite. A volcanic rock at least 72 percent silica, the rock of the knobs near Eminence and the mouth. Much of the rhyolite here is tuff (Chapter 1).

Riffle. A fast, shallow, rocky stretch between pools. The riffles are the gardens of the riverbed: in July a square meter of riffle produced more than six times as much as a square meter of pool (Chapter 16).

Rime. A rapid, in the 1930s speech of the Black River (Chapter 18).

Rimstone. Calcite dams built around the edges of shallow cave pools (Chapter 13).

Rise pool. A spring pool fed from beneath, where the water wells up from a lower cave passage, as at Blue Spring (Chapter 12; Chapter 13).

River’s up, the. The river is rising or high (Chapter 18).

Rock shelter. An overhang wider than it is deep, with no passage behind it. Many held the camps of the first people (Chapter 3; Chapter 13).

Roller mill. A mill that grinds grain between steel rollers. Alley Mill, finished in 1894, is one (Reach H).

Roubidoux Formation. The sandstone, sandy dolomite and chert above the Gasconade, laid down along a shoreline more than 470 million years ago. It makes the upper bluffs of the upper river and much of the upland around Mountain View (Chapter 1).

Run. A stretch of steady current between a riffle and a pool (Chapter 16).

S

Scallop. A shallow, spoon-shaped hollow carved in a cave wall by fast water. Smaller scallops mark faster flow, and the steep end of each faces upstream (Chapter 13).

Scenic easement. A right bought by the government that leaves an owner the land, the house and the right to farm and gives up the right to develop. The law of 1964 used them along the Riverways (Chapter 10).

Scrip. Company coupons paid as part of wages, good for rent and goods at the company’s stores. Missouri outlawed the coupon system in 1912 (Chapter 7).

Sculpin. A small, big-headed bottom fish of cold, clear water. The fish of the Current River system was named a separate species, the knobfin sculpin, in 2010 (Chapter 16).

Section. A square mile of 640 acres, one thirty-sixth of a township. A quarter section is 160 acres (Chapter 5).

Seepage run. Measurements of a river and every tributary within a few days of a dry spell, to find where water enters and leaves. The Jacks Fork was measured this way in 1966 and 2006 (Chapter 12).

Shoal. A fast, shallow, rocky stretch between pools; a riffle. Suckers crowd onto the shoals in spring, and the old saying is that “the dogwoods bloom when the suckers are shoaling” (Chapter 18; Chapter 19).

Shut-in. A narrow, rocky gorge where a stream cuts through hard rock (Chapter 2).

Shuttle. The trip that brings vehicles from the put-in to the take-out, so floaters can get back (Chapter 20).

Sinkhole. A hollow in the ground where rock below has dissolved or caved in, through which water drains underground; also called a sink, an American use (Chapter 2; Chapter 12).

Slip-off slope. The long, gentle slope on the inside of a river loop, left as the river slid away from its earlier positions (Chapter 2).

Soda straw. A hollow calcite tube the width of a drop of water, hanging from a cave ceiling. Every stalactite begins as one (Chapter 13).

Source tracking. Matching the strains of E. coli in the water to the animals or sewage they came from (Chapter 17).

Speleothem. Any mineral formation in a cave, such as a stalactite or flowstone (Chapter 13).

Spring branch. The stream that runs from a spring to the river, such as the branch below Alley Spring (Reach H).

Springhouse. A small building over or beside a spring, where cream, milk, butter and meat were kept cool (Chapter 12).

Stage. The height of the water surface above a gauge’s datum, the reading a gauge records. A stage differs from the depth of the water. At Eminence the datum stands 616.18 feet above sea level (Chapter 14).

Stalactite, stalagmite. A stalactite hangs from a cave ceiling, built from dripping water. A stalagmite builds up from the floor where the drip lands (Chapter 13).

Stillhouse. A building where whiskey was distilled. Several hollows on the river carry the name (Chapter 18; Reach F).

Stock law. A local law that made each owner answer for his animals wherever they went, so that stock had to be fenced in. Stock laws closed the open range township by township (Chapter 5).

Strainer. A tangle of fallen trees, branches or roots that lets water through and stops anything larger. Rootwads, the tangled roots of fallen trees, are one kind. The current can pin a boat or a person against a strainer (Chapter 14; Part Six).

Stream piracy. The capture of a creek’s water by a cave growing beneath its bed. Jam Up Creek was captured this way by Jam Up Cave (Chapter 13).

Stromatolite. A mound or column of rock built layer on layer by mats of microbes in shallow water. Many beds of the Eminence Dolomite are stromatolites (Chapter 1).

Subscription school. A school built and paid for by the families who used it, the usual kind in Missouri before 1850 (Chapter 5).

T

Talus. A slope at the foot of a bluff covered with loose rock fallen from the cliff above (Chapter 2).

Tap line. A short railroad that a lumber company built from its mill to a main line and incorporated as a common carrier, so as to share in the freight charges. The Salem, Winona and Southern was one (Chapter 7).

Temper. Material mixed into clay to keep a pot from cracking. Here it was sand, crushed limestone or crushed mussel shell, and the choice helps date a sherd, a broken piece of pottery (Chapter 3).

Term estate. A right of private use that ran for a fixed term after the government bought the land, as Harvey’s at Alley held (Chapter 11).

Terrace. A level bench above a river, the remains of an older floodplain left high when the river cut down (Chapter 2).

Thalweg. The line of deepest water along a river’s course (Chapter 15).

Thermoluminescence. Dating fired pottery by the faint glow it gives off when reheated, which measures the energy gathered since it was last fired. Optically stimulated luminescence works on the same principle for buried sediment (Chapter 3).

Tie. A railroad crosstie, hewn or sawn from oak. By the 1910s ties were the most important hardwood product of the Ozarks (Chapter 7).

Tie drive. Floating loose ties down a river in a mass. Missouri limited loose drives to 50,000 ties in 1909 and in 1919 required that all ties be rafted, laid crosswise and fastened together (Chapter 7).

Tie hacker. A man who hewed ties in the woods for a living, moving on when the tie timber ran out. Farmers hewed ties too, and tie hacking outlasted the pine by decades (Chapter 7).

Timber scrapping. Cutting and selling immature trees for whatever they would bring, as families on poor hill farms did in the 1930s (Chapter 7).

Township. A survey square of six miles on a side, holding thirty-six sections; also a division of a county, such as Jack’s Fork Township (Chapter 5).

Trail ride. An organized gathering of hundreds or thousands of horseback riders, camping for several days and riding the trails and river crossings. The trail rides grew into a large business on the lower Jacks Fork (Chapter 11).

Tram, tramway. A light logging railroad laid up a hollow, such as Cordz-Fisher’s line down Pine Hollow (Chapter 7).

Troglobite. An animal that lives only underground, usually pale and eyeless, with long feelers (Chapter 13).

Tuff. Rock made of volcanic ash. Where the ash was still hot when it came to rest, the grains welded together into hard rock (Chapter 1).

Twilight zone. The part of a cave inside the entrance, where some daylight reaches and the air still swings with the weather. Outside it the entrance zone runs out to the dripline, where rain falls from the overhang, and deeper in lies the dark zone, with no light at all and nearly steady temperature and humidity (Chapter 13).

U

Unconformity. A buried erosion surface, a gap in the rock record. Beneath the Jacks Fork the Great Unconformity, between the volcanic basement and the first sea-laid rocks, marks more than 800 million missing years (Chapter 1).

W

Wall-trench house. A house whose walls were set as rows of upright poles in a narrow ditch along each side. The one at the Shawnee Creek site, on a terrace of the lower river, was the first found anywhere in the Current River region (Chapter 3).

Wassie. A rain wash or a swamp, in the local dialect (Chapter 18).

Water table. The level below which every crack and pore in the ground is full of water (Chapter 12; Chapter 13).

Wet-weather creek, wet-weather spring. A creek or spring that runs only after rain (Chapter 18).

White-nose syndrome. A fungal disease that wakes hibernating bats again and again until they starve. The fungus reached Missouri in 2010, and the park closed its caves that year (Chapter 13).

Wilderness. Federal land designated by law to be kept without roads or development. About 4,000 acres around Jam Up Cave were studied for it in 1981 and judged unsuitable (Chapter 10).

Woodland. The period of prehistory from about 600 B.C. to A.D. 900 in radiocarbon years, when people here first made pottery and took up the bow (Chapter 3).

WPA. The Works Progress Administration, the New Deal works program whose labor built most of the farm-to-market roads of the late 1930s (Chapter 8).