Stretch 27 of 28 · river miles 43½ to 45½

Fursman Hole

In Reach J, Eminence to the Mouth · on Plate A12, Plate A13

Shawnee Creek

Creek · right bank · mile 43.5 · Plate A13

Shawnee Creek, also called Big Shawnee, comes in from the south at mile 43.5. It is the largest creek on the lower river, draining about twenty square miles, and runs about ten miles north to the river, all year in about its lower eight and a half. Its upper course comes down Black Valley and South Hollow. Hay Hollow, its largest , was in 1939 a valley “from which grass is cut for hay” (Chapter 18).

The two Shawnee creeks carry the name of the Shawnee who were in this country early in the nineteenth century (Chapter 4). By one account a band of them lived on Shawnee Field, the between the two creeks, and the creeks’ names are the only trace of their stay. By 1840 a Colonel Thomas Chilton farmed at the mouth of this one (Chapter 5), and Joseph Slater’s cabin and copper furnace stood up the creek.

Up the creek, by one account, George N. Deatherage, known as Rumsey, ran a mill built by the millwright John C. McCaskill that was better known for its poker game and corn liquor than for the wheat and corn it ground. In the tie-cutting days there was a tie yard at its mouth. The story is told that after the war a farmer found the bones of two men killed on the creek, outlaws or Union soldiers. Nelson Chilton, Joshua Chilton’s son, is said to have escaped the Federals with a wounded arm in 1864 and to have been killed later, with a kinsman, when they met a patrol on the road up Big Shawnee (Chapter 6).

At the mouth the park keeps the Shawnee Creek campground, a backcountry camp with a staging area for riders (Chapter 11). Visitors there often meet the Shawnee Creek band of wild horses, which ranges along the lower river toward Two Rivers (Chapter 11). A water-quality station on the river above the creek’s mouth has been sampled since 1973 (Chapter 17).

Little Shawnee Creek and Fursman Spring

Creek, spring and mill sites · right bank · about miles 43.9 to 44.0 · Plate A13

Little Shawnee Creek comes in from the south at about mile 43.9, less than half a mile below Shawnee Creek. It drains about nine and a half square miles down Slick Rock, Despain and Odell hollows and runs about six miles, all year in nearly four miles of it. In 1939 it was said to be “named for the Indians who lived along the banks.” By one account Thomas Dent, from North Carolina by way of Tennessee, moved to a farm near the mouth after the Civil War and built a small water-powered gristmill on the creek, and his son Hiram ran it until the early 1900s. A flour mill of Hiram Dent’s was on the creek in 1901. By 1980 no sign of it was left.

About three miles up are Betheny Chapel and its cemetery, the chapel named for Bethenia Hawkins Adair, the wife of Henry Lee Adair, who settled on the creek in the 1840s. The cemetery began as the Adair family’s burying ground and by 1980 held more than 250 graves. The Little Shawnee School stood about a mile and a half up the creek, and a post office called Shawnee served the creek from 1891 to 1918 (Chapter 5). By one account John Chilton, taken by a Union patrol, was brought home to Little Shawnee, allowed to see his family and then shot.

On the right below the mouth of Little Shawnee, back from the river, Fursman Spring flows from under a small and runs into a small lake down its ravine. By one account the Fursmans lived there in the Depression. A map drawn from the federal surveyors’ notes of 1821 and 1840 shows a mill beside a spring near the mouth of Little Shawnee, probably the mill later called the Fursman Spring Mill (Chapter 5), and at one time a sawmill stood up the hollow from the spring. By one account Sam West built a new cabin near the spring in 1861. When riders came looking for him during the war, he hid under the bed and then fired on them, and they killed his father, John West, and mortally wounded his wife (Chapter 6).

Fursman Hole and the run north

Pool and bluff · right bank (bluff) · about miles 44.0 to 44.6 · Plate A13

Below Little Shawnee the river turns north for about two-thirds of a mile. Fursman Hole, about 5 feet deep at , lies just below the creek mouth next to a bluff on the right that rises about 80 feet. An unnamed hollow of about half a square mile comes in on the left at about mile 44.3.

The Garr Town Stretch

Stretch and spring · about miles 44.8 to 45.4 · Plate A13

At about mile 44.8 the river swings east along the Garr Town Stretch, also written Gar Town, under a bluff on the left at about mile 45 that rises about 160 feet, the tallest face on the river below Alley. The stretch is said to be named for the gar that once stayed along it in numbers, and a good spring comes out of a small hollow above it. The gar most likely here is the longnose, the most widespread gar in Missouri and the commonest gar of clear Ozark streams. It keeps to the larger, deeper and slow backwaters, often basks near the surface and commonly grows to about three feet, and from early May to mid-June it moves onto shallow gravelly to spawn. By one account the wife of Doss Chilton, who lived on the ridge between the Current and the Jacks Fork, killed with a club a mountain lion her dogs had attacked, and killed a deer by rolling a large rock onto it from a bluff. The last known native mountain lion in Missouri was killed in the Bootheel in 1927.