The River Becomes a Destination

In a drought summer of the 1930s a Chicago woman who had just bought a farm in Texas County1 was taken to see the Jacks Fork, “crystal-clear, ice-cold,” a mile from the house, and told the tradition of the hills: “If you take a drink of water from Jack’s Forks, you will always come back to the Ozarks no matter how far you roam.” Marguerite Lyon took a big gulp and laughed, sure she would never see the place again. She had been an advertising copywriter in Chicago, and she and her husband, Robert, a salesman, had paid $1,000 for the farm after a scare about their jobs over Labor Day of 1935. They stayed. Robert served as the local justice of the peace, the couple started a jelly business with fruit from the neighborhood that grew into a small factory in Mountain View, and Marge Lyon wrote a book about their life in the hills, Take to the Hills (1941). A reviewer in the Mountain View Standard did not care for the way it drew the neighbors2.

For most of its history the Jacks Fork was a working river. It watered the stock, turned the mills, carried the ties and stopped the mail. Between the coming of the railroad and the creation of the national riverways it also became a place people traveled to for its own sake, from St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and Chicago. First came sportsmen with hired guides and boats built on the bank. Then came the camps and clubs, the state park at Alley, the writers, the Eminence outfitters, and finally the aluminum canoe, which put the river within reach of anyone with a weekend and a few dollars. By the time the riverways were created in 1964 (Chapter 10), the river had sorted itself into two parts, and the line between them fell at Alley Spring.

Boats built on the bank

The craft that made the Jacks Fork a fishing river was the johnboat. It was built of light planking, sixteen to twenty-four feet long, narrow and flat-bottomed, with sides that leaned out a little and not much freeboard, the height of the side above the water. Both ends were blunt, and the bottom curved up toward them, so that only the middle of the boat sat hard on the water. A boatman in the stern with a single paddle could swing a boat built that way easily in the current, and its flat bottom drew so little water that it cleared the shoals of a small river. It handled easily as long as it ran with the current. Turned crosswise, it met the full push of the water4 on its long, low side, and it swamped3 (Fig. 9.1).

Settlers had poled and paddled such boats to neighbors and mills5 long before anyone floated for pleasure, and they gigged fish from them at night by the light of pine-knot fires6 (Chapter 19). When the sportsmen came, the skill was already on the river. In the early years of the century a party bound for a float set out by wagon over roads that barely existed for the head of the river, carrying enough seasoned pine lumber for one or two boats, with a tent, tools, tackle, guns and a few supplies such as flour and bacon. At the bank the best carpenters in the party built the boats while the others set up camp. A new plank boat leaks at every seam, so it was sunk in the river for a couple of days7, until the dry boards drank up water, swelled8 and pressed tight against each other, and the party fished and hunted squirrels while it waited. Then it floated downstream for a week or more, camping on gravel bars, and at the end the boats were shipped home, taken apart9 or left behind10.

The tackle matched the boats. A fisherman tied ten feet of stout line to a sixteen-foot cane pole and on the end of it a red-and-white plug about eight inches long, hung with “a dozen or so gangs of triple hooks and a propeller at each end.” Everyone called it a Dowagiac, whatever its maker, after the Michigan town12 whose factory made the best-known plugs of the kind. The angler heaved it at the bank on either side as the boat drifted down the middle of the river. The fish had never seen such a thing, and doubles11 on a single cast were common.

Wooden johnboats carried most guided parties on the Current until about 1950. They were cheap to build, and parties often bought boats from one outfitter and abandoned them downstream, which led to feuds between outfitters on the Current. When an outfitter at Van Buren put the abandoned boats to use and refused to pay the upriver builder for them, guides from upriver took to knocking holes13 in the boats left there. The johnboat outlasted the guiding trade, though only just. In 1977 a Park Service folder listed johnboats, “long, flat-bottom boats,” some with motors, among the craft for rent on the Riverways and suggested them for fishing14. By 1997 johnboats made up about one percent15 of the craft on the Jacks Fork. In the 1970s the park revived Current River boatbuilding with local craftsmen and made it one of its craft demonstrations17, and it kept several Eminence guide boats of the 1950s and 1960s16.

Sportsmen and the railroad

The railroad that made the Jacks Fork a sportsman’s river was built for timber (Chapter 7). The Current River branch of the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis ran east from Willow Springs through Mountain View, Birch Tree and Winona18 and reached the Grandin mill near the Current in 188819. In 1888 four officials20 of the railroad founded the Carter County Fishing and Shooting Club and built a clubhouse with lumber from the Grandin mill on a bluff six to eight miles below Van Buren21. Boats could be hauled by rail to a dozen points upstream22 on the Current and the Jacks Fork and floated back down to the clubhouse. Parties bound for the Jacks Fork left the train at Birch Tree or Winona and went overland by wagon23 to the water. One of the earliest entries in the club’s register reads: “Left train at Birch Tree24 Tuesday p. m., Aug. 22nd and entered Current River at Mouth of Jacks Fork the morning of 24th. Floated to Club House arriving Sunday evening the 27th.”

The register recorded catches for every year from 1889 to 194025, and the club’s members wrote down more than fish. On May 24, 190726, a party from Carthage put in on the Jacks Fork about three miles above Eminence with the river “about 18 inches high,” caught sixty bass27, a jack salmon (the Ozark name for a walleye28) and a shad, and “had a fine time and good ride with Andy Pitman (guide) in gasoline boat.” The same entry records the first locomotive crossing the river on the new logging railroad (Chapter 7). In 194629 the register’s catches were worked out as fish per man-day, and the figures are the nearest thing to a fish count on the two rivers before modern sampling (Table 9.1). A man-day is one man fishing for one day, so a party of four on the water for a week fished twenty-eight man-days. At the rate of 1889–1890 such a party would have brought in about four hundred fish, and at the rate of the 1930s about sixty-five30.

The catch fell as the timber boom passed. The cutting came first. Then the cutover hills were burned year after year31 in the hope of turning them into farms, stock overgrazed them, and the plow helped lay the land bare. With the cover gone, rain carried the topsoil down the slopes and into the creeks, and after the soil the gravel beneath it. “The good old days were good, all right,” a conservation writer concluded in 194632, “but it didn’t take man long to spoil them.” The years from about 1920 to 1935 were probably a low point for the natural resources33 of the Current River country. In November 1936 Missouri’s voters passed Amendment No. 4, an initiative petition that the Conservation Federation of Missouri had carried, and wrote into the constitution a Conservation Commission of four members appointed by the governor and kept apart from party politics, to run the state’s fish, game and forests35 on license money34. How the gravel changed the river is taken up in Chapter 15.

The upper Jacks Fork got a club of its own in 191236, when a Springfield group incorporated the Shannon County Hunting and Fishing Club. Its charter promised to bring together “gentlemen in commercial, manufacturing and professional pursuits throughout Southern Missouri.” The members built ten cabins on the river above Rymers, near Ebb and Flow Spring37. In the early 1920s a Birch Tree dentist, H. Kirkendall, spoke for the club in letters to the governor proposing a state park along the Jacks Fork itself, as much as 45,000 to 60,000 acres, that would take in Alley38. The state chose the spring39 instead, and the idea of a park that followed the river came back forty years later (Chapter 10). The club outlasted the other early clubs and still existed in the 1980s. Most of its cabins were standing in 199140. One, photographed in 1990, burned the next year41, and the rest have since fallen in or been taken down42.

The bridge at Buck Hollow, in use by early 1915 (Chapter 8), opened the upper river to the same trade. In June 191543 the Mountain View Standard reported that six local men had floated from Buck Hollow down the Jacks Fork and the Current to Van Buren, “returning on the train.” They caught “all the fish they could eat and brought thirty pounds home. Pet Padgett landed the largest bass, a five-pounder, and Will Arthur got so excited he caught two good bass at one time.” Frank McGrath, “as usual, succeeded in getting overboard, but this time was generous enough to take boat and all over with him,” and the party fished out everything but “a fine diamond ring, a $5 pair of shoes, a tent fly, and a bundle of bedding,” all of them Joe Starkey’s. “Somebody thought to take a gallon of lubricating oil for Arthur’s reel, and consequently were able to hear themselves think.”

Camps on the upper river

The resort era on the upper river began at Buck Hollow. Charles Whitbeck had run a large hunting and fishing camp in the Adirondacks before he and his wife, Willie, came to the Ozarks. The camp’s opening is given as 1920, and in 1921 Willie A. Whitbeck45 bought the land on the south bank just below the bridge. In the newspapers of the day the name was spelled Witbeck. By August 1922 the West Plains Semi-Weekly Quill called Camp Witbeck, “four and one-half miles north of Mountain View46 on Jack’s Fork River,” “fast becoming one of the most popular playgrounds of the southern Ozarks,” with “many visitors from distant cities” and its cabins and tents “full throughout the season.” The Whitbecks advertised in the local papers and in Kansas City and St. Louis44.

The cabins stood in a single row about twenty feet apart on a narrow terrace above the river, just above the hundred-year flood line, so that each one looked out on the water. A hundred-year flood is one with about one chance in a hundred48 of being reached or passed in any given year (Chapter 14). Stone steps led down to a grassy lower terrace on the bank, and across the river a dolomite bluff49 rose from a swimming hole that gave the camp its jumping rock50. At least seven cabins47 and their outbuildings went up in the 1920s and 1930s. In September 1929 the rural mail carriers of Howell, Texas and Wright counties held their annual picnic and business meeting there. The story goes that Mrs. Whitbeck once saw a Mountain View auctioneer arguing with her husband and, believing he meant him harm, shot the auctioneer, who sued the couple for ten thousand dollars52. The camp ran through the Depression and closed only when Charles Whitbeck died in 1940, at seventy. He is buried in the Mountain View City Cemetery51.

In 1941 his widow sold the camp to the Beckman family, who renamed it Cardinal Acres. It passed to Dr. Charles R. Hawker and in 1948 to Jo Eickhoff and her cousin Joe Schmitt53 of Chicago. In 1950, by one local account, Cardinal Acres appeared in Life magazine, and business surged. Later the cabins were owned separately or rented months ahead54. The last private owner, Vernon C. Campbell, ran a lime quarry nearby and owned several hundred acres around the bridge. Most of the cabins were razed between 1966 and 1969, and on October 15, 1969, Campbell sold 600 acres to the United States for $83,000. In 2013 two cabins and two privies still stood among stone foundations and retaining walls, with daffodils and irises from the resort years blooming in the second-growth woods, and the 5.4-acre site was the largest complex of cabins and cabin ruins55 the government owns anywhere in the Riverways (Reach D).

Mountain View had a second camp at Buck Hollow from 192957. The year before, a group of the town’s business and professional men had bought land at Radcliff Ford to build a clubhouse and bungalows56 for an outing club (Chapter 8).

Downstream at the place still called Rymers, Marian Rymer of Birch Tree managed Rymer’s Rustic Ranch in the 1920s and 1930s. A study of the county’s place names made in 1939 credited the ranch to E. H. Rhymer and his daughter59, and Marian may have been the daughter. By one account the ranch, a few cabins at first, was already a popular resort in the early 1900s and ran down after a second generation61 of Rymers inherited it. Guests fished, took boats on the river, rode horseback and danced to music. The same study called it “a large farm modeled after the dude ranches of the West,” and one of its attractions was a narrow valley, Jam-Up Hollow, that “can only be reached by horseback.” Marian Rymer catered to a small circle of St. Louis friends58, though she advertised to the public, and local people worked there. A man born in 1916 who logged timber in the upper basin, and his wife, both worked at the ranch60 in the 1930s. She is remembered on the river as the “lady who greeted us as we went to river.” By 1977 a Park Service folder put the Rymers access “at the site of an old resort.”

A short float below Rymers is the one camp of that era that still operates. In 1929 E. T. Behrens, a retired newspaper editor and cigar maker from Sedalia, came to Shannon County after his doctor gave him six months to live. He was sixty-three. He settled where a small settlement called Bunker Hill had stood, called the place “paradise,” and built a fishing camp of a few cabins. The 1938 state highway map showed “Bunker Hill Ranch”63 as a tourist resort. Behrens lived eighteen more years, and in 1947, at eighty-one and failing, he deeded the camp to the Missouri State Teachers Association and died a month later. The association brought in electricity, improved the road and added cabins, a dining hall, a recreation hall, a one-room schoolhouse and a small chapel. For more than sixty years it was a members’ retreat, remembered along the river as “a teachers camp”64 or the “teacher cabins,” and a Park Service river folder of 1977 asked floaters to “respect the private property rights66 of the Missouri State Teachers Association.” In the middle and late 1980s, by one account, the place went by the name Bunker Hill Ranch Resort, and a Mountain View swimmer of those years worked a summer there67. A Mountain View writer told in 1976 of friends staying at “Bunker Hill, a teacher’s resort on Jacks Fork,” who fished a mile or a mile and a half down the river at “a big hole of water by a big rock cliff” and brought back bass of three and a half and four pounds65. In 2013 the property passed to a nonprofit, Friends of Bunker Hill, which opened it to the public. It sits on 2,080 mostly undeveloped acres inside the park boundary, and in 2018 it still served family-style meals three times a day62 (Reach F).

At the foot of the upper river, Alley Spring had been a gathering place since the 1890s. George McCaskill, who built the mill there in 1893–94, laid out a picnic ground68 by the millpond for boating, dancing and ball games, and people came from around the county for the Fourth of July. In 1912 a Kansas City company bought Alley meaning to promote it as a “pleasure resort,” and that August an estimated five hundred Odd Fellows came by chartered train to West Eminence and walked or rode the last four miles69 to the picnic ground. The state bought the spring, mill and 427 acres in 192470 for one of Missouri’s first state parks (Chapter 10). By 1927 it had a swimming beach and beach house71 on the spring branch. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program73 that put young men in camps to work on forests and parks, arrived in 1933, and in its later years as a state park Alley drew as many as a quarter of a million72 visitors a year (Reach H). By the 1930s the foot of the upper river had a public park with a beach, a campground and a highway, and the canyon above it had a handful of private camps and almost no roads.

A poet in a twelve-foot boat

In early July of a drought summer, probably 193474, two men arrived in Mountain View meaning to float the Jacks Fork. Ward Allison Dorrance, born in Jefferson City in 1904, taught at the University of Missouri75. His friend George, “six feet three,” is never given a surname. They had just come off the Black River. Dorrance’s book of the trip, Three Ozark Streams: Log of the Moccasin and the Wilma, appeared in 1937 and went into a second edition76 the next year. Its eleven pages on the Jacks Fork are the fullest early account of floating the river (Fig. 9.2).

He wrote it as an antidote. In his foreword he mocked the booster guidebooks of the day, with their lists of every spot “which you must avoid77: the lodge with ‘Dancing Sat. Nite,’ the cavern lighted by electricity.” In Mountain View an old man offered to build them a boat if they would wait a week, but the proprietor of the meat market had one for sale, and they bought her. The Wilma was nothing like a johnboat. “She is twelve feet long, deep and wide, with inward-sloping sides. She has a keel.” A keel is a fin along the bottom that holds a boat to a straight course in open water, and on a shoaly river it sits lower than the rest of the hull, catches on the rocks and makes the boat slow to turn79. She was painted white with black and yellow trim, and her builder had been born and raised on the Mississippi78.

Nobody could tell them whether the river could be floated. The answers were “baffling, no two alike,” and after the first day Dorrance wished they had listened to the old man who said only, “I hain’t a-sayin’. Mebbe ye kin . . .” In drought the upper river was, as the people along it said, “shoals and pot-holes, jest shoals and pot-holes.” A pot-hole was a still pool under a bluff, with Virginia creeper trailing down to a bed of cow lilies, and below it came a shoal that turned at right angles80 through jagged rock. Loaded with a fortnight’s supplies81, the boat could not be lightened, and they dragged her over stones that were “slippery being moist” and that “act as rollers, being round.” That evening they camped on a gravel bar. “There is no dirt here82 on the bar of the river,” Dorrance wrote. “There are no men.”

The book’s best-known lines come from those first days. “In spite of its awkward frontier name83, this is the poet’s river. . . . The river is personal, trusting, chatty. It romps but like a Mozart quintet . . .” Nearly eighty years later the state’s conservation magazine opened a float story by calling the upper Jacks Fork “the Mozart of rivers.” Below Blue Spring the water changed: “The Fork jumps out84 like a trout stream now, deep and clear and indigo,” and “from here there are long, full-lipped ways between the shoals.” They passed the Hospital Cave sign, the spring’s blind fish85 and a cave that blew cold air86 from a hillside (Chapter 13), and climbed into a great cave Dorrance called “Jimjam,” which is Jam Up.

He liked the people he met, though he called them “natives” and spelled their speech by ear. A ridge family too embarrassed to name a price for a chicken, and short of change87, told him to pay the wife’s father down the river. Who, and where? “Aw, jest give it to the first feller ye meet with a peeled head!” A landowner who rode up “a-muleback”88 offered them the run of his thousand acres: “If anybuddy tries to run ye off, tell ’em yo’re boss here!” As the valley widened toward Alley the pools grew “wider, deeper, longer,” and they saw “women washing clothes in the river, men ‘grabblin’’ for a wounded bass in the rocks of the shore,” feeling for it with their hands89 under the ledges, and a granny driving geese down a lane.

At Alley they stood astonished at the spring and the mill, “an honest block,” with the spring stream thundering down its chute. They camped a mile below and left “nowhere so much as a match,” and a morning or two later, not quite knowing where they were, they were swept out onto the Current, “a river so clean, so full90, so broad, so swift that it has forced four races to name it Current.” On the Current they found outing parties along the banks near Van Buren and a concession at Big Spring91. The Jacks Fork above Alley had shown them almost nobody. At the end they trailered the Wilma back to Mountain View, their “point of departure,” and to the Commercial, an inn with a pepper-box tower under honeysuckle, for a supper of cold chicken and biscuits.

Dorrance exaggerated freely, and his Jam Up mouth is “two hundred feet high,” more than double92 its real size. He also saw the upper river in drought and before the crowds and wrote down what he saw: deep pools under bluffs in a dry year, rippled gravel bars between them, and solitude.

Guides from Eminence

The professional guide trade came to the Jacks Fork from Eminence. David Bales, who published a weekly paper in Eminence before he went to the state legislature, had fished the Current and the Jacks Fork since the early years of the century, and his son Walter opened a grocery and general store93 in town. In 192694 the elder Bales headed the advertising committee for the Outdoor Life Exposition in St. Louis, which Missouri business and sporting interests put on to promote the Ozarks for recreation, and where the Missouri Ozarks Chamber of Commerce showed a display on the “Big Springs Country.” In 1928 Walter Bales began guiding johnboat floats from the store. The business grew into the Bales Boating and Mercantile Company, with a dozen good fishing boats, a stock of tents96 and camp gear and a crew of young rivermen he trained as guides. His “deluxe float trips” were popular with city business leaders and their political allies95. “We’ll start from our boat landing97,” Bales would tell his clerks, “and you have the truck meet us at the mouth of Mill Creek to haul the boats home.”

A floater who made his first trip with a Bales outfit in the late 1920s98 remembered Bales as the only merchant he knew “into whose store you could walk at eight o’clock on any Thursday morning during the bass season and say ‘Let’s go fishing’ and know you wouldn’t be turned down.” In the early days the guides were told “to bring in the legal limits for their sportsmen by any means short of dynamiting the stream,” and if the fisherman was an amateur, the guide caught the fish for him99. In the 1930s Bales put away his bait-casting rods and took up fly fishing, and with a single hook he could let most of his catch go unharmed. A fly on a single hook usually catches a bass in the lip and comes out cleanly, where a plug hung with gangs of treble hooks can tear its mouth and gills101. His guides came to believe that a fish left in the stream was worth as much100 as one in the livebox or on the stringer, or more.

Other outfitters grew out of his. Garland Winterbottom, one of Bales’s top commissary guides, started his own float service in Eminence, and Walter Martin102, another Bales trainee, carried it on after Winterbottom died. A guided float ran as a small flotilla. The fishing boats carried the sportsmen and their guides, and the commissary boat carried the tents, the camp gear and the food, with a guide who made camp and cooked. By the late 1950s Eminence was the headquarters for fishermen and other visitors to the two rivers, and several outfitters there could equip a party of any size with fishing and commissary boats103, guides, tents and food. Walter Bales was later killed in a highway accident, and his widow and their daughter Shannon104 kept the business going.

A Shannon County boy born in 1932 ran boats for the Bales company as a teenager, about 1949 or 1950, and remembered the work half a century later. A guide had to hold a state license. He was paid eight dollars a day and his room and board, or ten if he brought his own outboard, and room meant a tent and board meant meals cooked over a campfire. The old wooden johnboats were heavy and “made like a barge,” not built for outboard motors, and a guide who used a motor hung it on a block of wood fastened to the stern. One man built most of the Bales boats. The customers came from all over, and the boy’s first float was with the president of the International Shoe Company of St. Louis106. Between trips he drove fishermen’s cars around to the take-outs, and he kept at it part-time even after he came home from the Navy. The river he guided on, as he remembered it, carried more water and ran faster, down a stair-step of pools and chutes105 that have since flattened out (Chapter 15).

In 1931 Otto Ernest Rayburn, a former schoolteacher and Ozark booster who did as much as anyone to make Ozark folklore popular108, wrote to a friend in Eminence who owned a garage. He had never been to that part of the Ozarks, but he came, and started a little magazine, The Arcadian, in connection with the Eminence newspaper. The Depression and his partner’s poor health ended it in 1932, after about a year, and Rayburn moved on to Galena and then to Texas107.

The upper river in 1957

Leonard Hall, born at Seneca in 1899, wrote an outdoor column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 1943 and in 1945 settled for good at Possum Trot Farm near Caledonia, in Washington County110. In June 1957, after five years of drought and then a wet spring, he and his wife, Virginia109, whom he called Ginnie, put a seventeen-foot aluminum canoe111 in at “the forks of the creek,” the head of the Jacks Fork, where the gravel road from Buck Hollow reached the stream “at a little low-water bridge.” The stream there was so small “that I could have easily jumped across” it. The Forks were “a full day’s run above the bridge at Buck Hollow on Highway 17, which is the normal starting point for float trips,” and Hall thought the chance to float that stretch came “no more than once in a dozen years or so.” “Just one road touches this part of Jacks Fork valley,” he wrote, “and the chances are you will spend the entire day without seeing so much as a native fisherman along the bank.”

The upper river’s season was short. The Jacks Fork above Alley is a small stream, fed by rain and by springs too small113 to hold it up for long, so it can be floated only in seasons of more than normal rainfall112, and even then the floater has to catch it as it drops after a rise (Chapter 14). By late June floating there was generally over, and in some years the headwaters could not be run at all. When the water was up, though, Hall thought that “nothing else in Missouri can equal it as canoe water.” To him the upper Jacks Fork was the closest thing to wilderness in the Current River country, because the valley held almost no farmland and few roads114 had reached it. The bluffs and pools up there might well have names, he wrote, but “the names would be known only to the local people.”

At a chute that dropped about five feet in a quarter mile they let the canoe down on a rope, wading or walking the edge while the current carried the boat ahead of them, then ran the last of it, sighted “the high Buck Hollow bridge” at dusk and unloaded at Cardinal Acres115, “a pleasant cottage camp located just below Buck Hollow.” As they came ashore, two aluminum canoes116 came around the bend, each paddled by a couple with a pair of children sitting on top of the duffel in life jackets. They had put in at Buck Hollow, had turned over once already, and were bound for Bunker Hill, a day’s float below. They made it, Hall heard later, “with two more spills but no damage to themselves.” The guided johnboat party was giving way to the family in a rented or borrowed canoe.

The aluminum years

After the Second World War, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the Ozark float trip changed from a sport for the well-off in nearly wild country into a cheap family outing. Better roads and cars opened nearly every floatable stream (Chapter 8). Fiberglass and then aluminum boats and canoes replaced the heavy wooden johnboat. An aluminum canoe was light enough for two people to lift118 onto a car, and a scrape on a shoal left only a dent. Two books helped spread the word: Hall’s Stars Upstream (1958119) and Oscar Hawksley’s Missouri Ozark Waterways, a guide to thirty-seven float streams that the state Conservation Commission published in 1965 and revised in 1972. The revised edition sold for a dollar. It called the Jacks Fork “one of the wildest and most scenic of the Missouri Ozark streams,” its valley “nearly a canyon, with no bottomland fields for the first 25 floatable miles,” and told floaters with loaded canoes to try the river above Alley only in spring or after good summer rains120. Canoe-rental businesses sprang up to serve floaters from Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, Tulsa, Little Rock and Memphis, and it became common to see vans pull up at a put-in towing trailers stacked with a dozen canoes. Guides were seldom hired any more, and a newcomer who brought one would have felt out of place117. In 1963 a party on the upper Current rented seventeen-foot aluminum canoes from a tavern keeper between Salem and Eminence for five dollars a day121. Some of the early renters pulled root wads and drift out of the channel to save their canoes, by the account of a former johnboat guide, who wondered later122 whether that had helped change the river. In 1976 the Eminence calendar listed a Jacks Fork canoe race on May 15123.

The national park arrived in the middle of the boom and sped it up. In the park’s early years canoeist-days grew by more than 40 percent a year, and in the late 1960s sixteen canoe-rental businesses worked in the park under special permits. A canoeist-day is one person on the river for one day127, so a couple on a two-day float counts four. Canoeists on the Riverways numbered 145,792 in 1973 and 295,400128 in 1979, most of them in rented canoes, and in 1982 they put in 308,000124 canoeist-days. The question of who could rent canoes on a federal river led to years of argument and lawsuits125 between the Park Service and the canoe renters (Chapter 10). The superintendent who came to the park in 1976 remembered that the trouble began with a little under 1,800 commercial canoes, that at one time more than 3,000 were working the rivers, and that after ten years of litigation the number permitted settled at about 2,400126. In 1981 a canoe concession, restaurant, store and motel called Harvey’s was operating at Alley Spring under a term estate129, a right of private use that ran for a fixed term after the government bought the land.

The crowd was a city crowd. In the early 1980s nearly half of all canoeists on the Riverways came from St. Louis, and people from the area accounted for only 1.1 percent of river use. Twenty years before, as a writer on the two rivers put it in 1984131, “almost every boat contained at least one Ozark riverman as a guide.” Almost 70 percent of trips lasted a single day, about 90 percent of floaters rented their boats locally, nearly two-thirds traveled in groups of ten or more, and Saturday brought five times130 as many boats as any weekday. On some summer weekends132, the same writer found, a visitor looking for wilderness “may well wonder if he hasn’t found a canoe parking lot rather than a free-flowing stream.” A Park Service river folder of 1977 advised floaters that the rental agencies would shuttle133 them and their canoes, and it warned anyone running the upper river to be “prepared to sacrifice some aluminum from your canoe to the underlying rocks.”

People who had grown up on the upper river measured the change partly by the boats. A woman who had played along the river as a child in the 1920s and 1930s remembered in the early 1990s, “You see there was no canoe floating134, just the john boats. I’ve seen the canoes coming down and even the canoes can’t float over the rapids; they have to get out and guide them along.” A longtime resident said the fish were far fewer135 “because we got so many people anymore.” A Current River trapper and former fishing guide said in 1998 that there were “a lot of otters over here on Jacks Fork,” and that many people said there wasn’t “near the fish on Jacks Fork as there was,” though he blamed the crowds on the river136 more than the otters.

By the late 1990s the canoe owned the river. Between mid-May and mid-August 1997 counters on the Jacks Fork tallied 3,734137 boats and tubes. About 89 percent were canoes, 9 percent inner tubes, 1 percent johnboats, and kayaks less than 1 percent. Weekends carried four-fifths of the traffic, an average of 214 craft a day against 44 on weekdays (Table 9.2). The crowd was a regional one. Visitors to the park were questioned at intervals from 1987 to 2010138, in 2010 in the Jacks Fork district at Alley Spring, Two Rivers and Powder Mill, and across the park nearly nine in ten lived within about 275 miles. Most were casual visitors who came about once a year, probably because a trip cost little and rental boats were to be had all around the park. Over those two decades the same crowd grew older, and the average age of the visitors questioned rose from about 32 to about 39.

Two rivers in one

The Jacks Fork took its share of the traffic, and it took it almost entirely below Alley. In July and August 1979 the river carried an average of 410 canoes on a weekend day, about twelve to the mile, against thirty-six139 to the mile on the upper Current. In the early 1980s almost 90 percent of the floaters on the Jacks Fork were on the fourteen miles140 between Alley Spring and Two Rivers. In 1981 the Jacks Fork and the lower Current were still wilder and less developed than the upper Current141, and the upper Jacks Fork drew floaters mainly in the spring high water142 and in summer was often too low143 for canoes at all. The canoe-use zones drawn in 1985 split the river at Alley: Zone 9 from the Prongs to Alley Spring and Zone 10 from Alley to Two Rivers, reckoned at 24.5 and 14.9144 miles; measured along the channel they are about 32 and 14145. In 2010 the park’s interviewers stood at Alley Spring, Two Rivers and Powder Mill146, and none at Buck Hollow, Blue Spring, Rymers or Bay Creek.

The division rests on water. Above Alley the Jacks Fork is a rain river (Chapters 12 and 14). Dorrance dragged a loaded skiff over its shoals in the mid-1930s, Hall found its season over by late June in 1957, and through the 1980s the section above Alley Spring could be floated in summer only after soaking rains, though in the low-water months it kept many pools where people could fish and swim in privacy147. Alley Spring changes that. In a dry August the spring can nearly triple the river148 (Chapter 12), and below it the river floats in any month. Roads widened the gap. Below Alley, Highway 106 and the town of Eminence sit beside the river, and a rented canoe can be put in and picked up within a few hours. Above Alley, the canyon from Highway 17 to Bay Creek has few roads and long gaps between public accesses.

History widened it further. The lower river’s trade grew out of the Eminence guides, the state park at Alley and the canoe liveries, all built to serve visitors. The upper river’s camps were few and small, and most belonged to people from the region: Mountain View businessmen at Radcliff Ford, a Birch Tree woman at Rymers, Springfield men at the club cabins, a Sedalia149 editor and then the state’s teachers at Bunker Hill. The swimming hole at the Highway 17 bridge is remembered mostly by people who grew up nearby150 (Chapter 19).

The upper river still floats differently. A volunteer stream team, the Upper Jacks Fork River Rats, monitors its water and has hauled tons of trash out of the canyon, and the state manages its smallmouth bass under special rules (Part Six). On a spring float from Buck Hollow to Bay Creek, written up in the state’s conservation magazine in April 2013152, the usual sights of a float trip were missing: overpasses, roads, power lines, crowded gravel-bar camps and the drone of outboard motors151. Dorrance had found the same water empty in the mid-1930s. The people who came for the river in the century since have changed it, through their fishing, their cabins and their numbers, and in the end by persuading the nation to protect it. How that protection was won, and what it cost the people who lived along the river, is the subject of Chapter 10.