The ledger gathers matters still open: questions the record cannot yet answer, dates and numbers the sources give two ways, places whose position or name is uncertain, and traditions that sit beside documents telling a different story. Each gives what is known on each side and where the matter is told in full.
Across the river
Who Jack was. The river had its name by 1849, or by 1852 at the latest, and the earliest explanation found was written down in 1939: “an old Indian, John Jacks, who lived near the head of the stream” in Texas County, given no tribe and no date. Later tellings make him a Shawnee who settled at the headwaters in the 1830s, or a Cherokee breeder of race horses, or Captain Jack, a Shawnee chief by the Shawnee creeks below Eminence, or Jack Thomas, a bear hunter whose camp a panther wrecked, and no record from Jack’s own lifetime names him (Chapter 4). The original slips of the 1930s place-name survey, kept with the State Historical Society of Missouri at Columbia, may name the person who told the John Jacks story, and the General Land Office field notes and Texas County land entries of the 1830s and 1840s are the likeliest places to find the man himself.
The name in print. The earliest dated uses found are the Jack’s Fork post office in Texas County, opened in December 1849 by one record and in 1860 by another, and the Jack’s Fork Township that Texas County formed in June 1852 (Chapters 4 and 5). A printed “Jack’s Fork” from the 1830s or 1840s, in a gazetteer, a map or an act of the legislature, would carry the name back further.
The springs that stopped. People who farmed and logged the upper basin through the twentieth century remembered small springs that ran year round and then went dry for good, one of them “probably in the ’40’s,” and a river that once ran deeper. The Eminence gauge shows the river’s average flow higher in each quarter-century since 1975 and its low flows trending upward from the middle 1950s, and the small hillside springs were never gauged, so the memories and the gauge records describe different water. Changes in land use, changes in climate and more of the river moving out of sight through built-up gravel have all been offered as causes, alone or together (Chapters 12 and 14).
Names with no explanation on record. Sanders Branch and Spargo Branch on the North Prong (Reach A), Clyde, a village surveyed in Pierce Township in 1871 and named by its merchant for reasons nobody could later recall (Reach B), Bay Creek (Reach F) and Rail Tree Hollow (Reach G) have no recorded origin. King’s Mountain, on the divide near Willow Springs, is said to be named for an early settler named King, for its height alone, or for the Revolutionary battle of King’s Mountain (Reach B). Of the 285 creeks in the watershed that drain a square kilometer or more, 189 have no recorded name at all (Chapter 18).
Part One: Deep Time
The marker bed. On the upper river the base of the Roubidoux is found by working up from the white Cryptozoon chert, and the distance between them is given as about 70 feet and as 80 to 100 feet (Chapter 1).
When the plateau rose. The plateau has probably risen at least a few hundred meters since the end of the Paleozoic. Whether its present height is left over from that early uplift or comes from later movement is still argued, and fission tracks in apatite crystals from the old granites are one of the clues being read (Chapter 2).
The ages of the terraces. No published study dates a terrace on the Jacks Fork. The nearest dates come from the Current above the mouth, where the low terrace at Round Spring had begun to build before about 3,000 years ago and the fill beneath a higher terrace at Akers Ferry was building up before about 45,500 years ago (Chapter 2). Charcoal or wood from a Jacks Fork terrace for radiocarbon, or luminescence dates on its buried sand, would give the river its own dates.
Part Two: The Human River
The first arrivals. Whether people lived in these valleys during the Paleoindian period in any number, or only passed through, is unsettled. The evidence is a few fluted points, mostly from the surface, and at Two Rivers the search for anything older than Clovis ended at the old gravel bar beneath the bench (Chapter 3).
The buried gravel mounds at Two Rivers. In 1987 excavators found mounds of gravel up to three and a half feet high buried in the bench and took them for human work, perhaps a windbreak. The work of 2016 found the mounds on the edge of a hollow in the gravel, with large flakes and a big flake scraper near its bottom. Early people may have taken over a scour hole or the pit of a fallen tree as a sheltered basin, or the hollow and its mounds may be the natural work of a tree blown over in a storm (Chapter 3).
Who the early people were. Nobody knows what the people of the Jacks Fork called themselves or what language they spoke. Their pottery ties them to the lowland towns of southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, and which modern nations carry that line forward is still argued (Chapter 3).
The village on the 1936 map. A Texas County tourist map of 1936 and a local informant put a former Indian village on the upper river, and an account written down in 1980 has other tribes using village sites there before the Delaware and Shawnee came. No village has been described there, and no archaeological report is known (Chapter 3).
How often the Osage came. Records of the Osage on the Current and the Jacks Fork are very few, and their use of the country may have been limited to occasional hunting. A history written down in 1980 has them making two hunting trips a year to the river country and camping a couple of months each time. Whether Osage hunters reached the Current in 1837, the year the Missouri militia drove Osage, Shawnee and Delaware hunting parties out of the state, is also open (Chapter 4).
The Delaware villages. William Anderson camped at a Delaware village on the Jacks Fork on his way to the James in 1821 and 1822, one of several the Delaware set up for a short time on the river southwest of present Eminence. A General Land Office plat of 1821 marked an Indian village in the township around Alley Spring, and commercial maps of 1844 and 1869 showed one near the spring, though where the mapmakers got it was not traced. Park Service archaeologists in the 1980s found nothing from the period in the fields they tested, with only a small part of the park surveyed. A search of 1992 that used the plat found a site on the river judged with high confidence to be Delaware or Shawnee, and no village has yet been confirmed (Chapter 4).
Anderson’s party. By one count 1,346 Delaware left the White River in Indiana with Anderson on September 20, 1821. The count and the date rest on a single source (Chapter 4).
Council Hollow. The place-name study of 1939 has a Council Hollow in Delaware Township, a narrow valley said to be where “the Indians held council meetings.” By an account of 1980, Council Hollow was another name for the Coppermine Hollow that comes in from the west below Eminence, at about mile 40.4, where the Shawnee held their councils. Whether these are one hollow or two is unsettled (Chapter 4; Reach J).
Jack’s Fork Township. In June 1852 Texas County created Jack’s Fork Township out of part of Carroll Township by one record, and out of the part of Texas Township southwest of Spring Valley by another. Among its first justices of the peace was an R. Harlow, probably Reuben Harlow (Chapter 5). The county court’s order creating the township, if it survived the burning of the Houston courthouse in the war, would settle the first point.
The first Jack’s Fork post office. Its dates are given as December 1849 to 1899 and as 1860 to 1902. By one account Reuben Harlow kept it from 1849 and it became the Arroll office, a change that account dates to 1899, the year after the first Arroll appointment. The office stood on the South Prong in 1871 and probably moved between the prongs with its postmasters, and it has also been mapped on the South Prong between Hattie and Wolf Creek (Chapters 4 and 5; Reaches A and B). The Post Office Department’s appointment records for Texas County would fix its dates and its sites.
Post office dates given two ways. Many of the river’s small offices carry two sets of dates. Eminence is dated 1874, and also 1867 and 1844; the second Delaware office 1923 or 1924; Nagle 1901, 1902 or 1904; Grogan 1897 or 1899; Louisa 1910 to 1922, or 1905 to 1923; Varvol 1892 to 1904, or 1891 to 1909; and Clear Spring July 12, 1880, to October 29, 1953, or August 1880 to December 1953 (Chapter 5; Reaches A and B). The first Delaware office, of 1871 to 1873, and Orchard Point, open twelve days in May 1874, rest on one account each (Chapter 5; Reach I).
Copper on Shawnee Creek. By one mining report about 160 tons of pig copper had been made at the Shawnee furnace before 1874; other reports gave 75 tons, and how much of it was Joseph Slater’s is unclear. By one account the Current River Mining Company quit the mine in 1857, and by another it had $30,000 invested there in 1860 (Chapter 5).
Who Alley was. When Charles Klepzig applied for a post office in 1884 he offered two names, Shannon and Alley, and the department took Alley. The name is presumed to honor John Alley, a farmer of fifty-one who lived about three miles east of the spring; an older account makes him a pioneer who came before the Civil War and built a mill on the river, and another has John Alley first keeping an office on his own farm and moving it later to the store by the spring. Every story about why the name was chosen appears to be apocryphal (Chapters 4 and 5; Reaches H and I).
Angeline’s name. The logging camp’s post office was named either by a settler for a woman in his family or, by another account, by E. B. Grandin of the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company for Mrs. Angeline Grandin (Chapter 5).
The killings on the Rolla road, August 1862. The Chilton family’s story and the officers’ papers agree on the night ride, on Joshua Chilton taken on the run and on the prisoners shot on the road, and differ over who died. The family counted eleven dead, John West and Sam West’s wife among them; the commanding officer’s report has one man killed and a woman slightly wounded at a house where his men were fired on, and the woman may have been Mrs. West. Where the family has Alexander Chilton escaping, the Salem papers list an Alexander Chilton among the dead and make Jackson Heron, probably the Jackson Herring taken at Big Creek, the man who got away (Chapter 6).
The Civil War Oak. By tradition, Alex Chilton, Joshua’s brother, hid in the oak on the Joshua Chilton farm while his four companions were shot; by another telling he hid in an old vine-covered oak at his aunt Betsy Chilton’s. The papers of 1862 list an Alexander Chilton among the dead on the Rolla road, an Aleck Chilton helped murder a storekeeper near the Reynolds County line in February 1863, and by one account an Alex Chilton was shot dead at Powell Spring in 1879 by his uncle Andy Chilton (Chapter 6; Reach J). Whether these are one man or several, and which Alexander died in 1862, is open, and the tradition and the record both stand.
Joshua Chilton’s election. Joshua Chilton was elected to the state senate on the eve of the war, in 1860 by one history and in 1861 by another (Chapter 6). The election returns at the Missouri State Archives would settle the year.
Hackwith and Graham. In August 1863 five Southern riders captured a man named Hackwith and two other Union men near Casto Valley, and the patrol that followed lost the trail and the prisoners along the Jacks Fork. In November a Union officer at Houston wrote that bushwhackers had carried N. P. Hackwith and a man named Graham to the Jacks Fork, murdered them and buried them there. His letter names no place on the river (Chapter 6).
The Stephens house and the Widow McCormick’s. In November 1863 Lieutenant Boyd burned the house of Miles and Jack Stephens where a fresh trail brought him to the river, rode ten miles down the Jacks Fork, camped at the Widow McCormick’s, where Anne McCormick lived with eight children, and burned her buildings the next morning. Neither place has been fixed, and the McCormick place may have been the McCormacks’ place at Alley (Chapter 6; Reach H).
James Mahan. In November 1863 a boy told Boyd that James Mahan had got him to carry word of the soldiers’ coming. James is described both as a cousin of Henry Mahan and as Billy Mahan’s twenty-two-year-old son, probably the son, and by one account he was shot that month where West Eminence stands now (Chapter 6; Reach I).
The guerrilla Clark. In December 1863 a scout sent after the robbers around Mountain Store killed a guerrilla named Clark on the Jacks Fork on its way back. In the upper river’s own telling the man was called Clarie and was killed at Mountain Store itself (Chapter 6; Reach B). A report of the scout among the Union army’s papers would settle both the name and the place.
The twins of a Union household. Two tellings of a raid on a Union farm on the Jacks Fork agree on the newborn twins and the mother’s bed carried into the yard and differ on who died, and neither gives a date or a name that can be checked against a record. A third telling, set on the old Buxton farm above Alley, names the family as Robert and Julianna Powell and makes the burners Lieutenant Boyd’s militia (Chapter 6; Reaches G and H).
The old courthouse. The courthouse at the old county seat on the Current burned during the war. Some accounts blame Union soldiers or militia, perhaps in return for the burning of the Texas County courthouse at Houston, and others say it was burned by persons unknown sometime after 1863 (Chapter 6).
The Grandin and Northwestern. The lumber company ran its line as the Salem, Winona and Southern, incorporated in 1908. By one account it was first chartered as the Grandin and Northwestern Railroad Company, and no charter under that name has been found (Chapter 7). The state’s corporation records would show whether one was filed.
West Eminence’s houses and the Grandin mill’s cut. The company built about three hundred houses at West Eminence, four hundred by another count. Estimates of the Grandin mill’s yearly cut run from fifty to seventy million board feet, and by one account more than seventy-five million by 1900, when Grandin had more than three thousand people (Chapter 7).
The railroad to Birch Tree. Mahans Creek farmers drove their stock more than fifty miles over the hills to the railroad at Salem until the Current River Railroad came through, in 1888 by one account and 1889 by another, and after that to Birch Tree or Winona (Chapter 7).
The West Eminence poor farm. The mill town was offered for sale on November 7, 1928, and the county bought part of the company’s land for a new poor farm. By one account the poor farm moved to West Eminence in 1927 and closed in 1948 (Chapter 7; Reach I). The Current Wave of 1927 to 1929 would show when the poor farm moved.
Route 17 at Buck Hollow. Route 17 appears on the state’s highway map from 1922, and at first it seems to have ended at Mountain View. When the number first ran over Buck Hollow has not been established (Chapter 8). The official state highway maps of the 1920s would settle both points.
The old Highway Y bridge and the name Low Water. The old bridge over the South Prong is remembered as very short, barely above the water and too narrow for cars to meet, and the state’s float guide of 1965, revised in 1972, already called it the Highway Y low-water bridge; the present bridge dates from 1986. An older low-water bridge on the county road at the junction of the prongs washed out again and again, and a map of 1980 letters that crossing “Low Water Bridge.” When the old Y bridge was built, and whether the name Low Water began with it, as one who grew up at the head of the river tells it, or with the county bridge at the Forks, is open (Chapters 8 and 18; Reach C). The state highway department’s records for Route Y and the Texas County road records would date the bridges.
Dixon, Lodder and Bacher. Dixon Ford on the South Prong, the three Lodder holes with their bluff and ford, and Bachers, the backcountry landing below Baptizing Hole, presumably carry family names, and none of the families has been traced (Chapter 8; Reaches B, D and F). The county deed books and the censuses would show who held the land.
The rope bridge near Eminence. Among the old bridge photographs families brought out in the 1990s was one of a rope bridge over the Jacks Fork near Eminence, probably a footbridge, with no builder or date attached (Chapter 8).
The pony express at Buck Hollow Ford. In the 1930s a floater was told that a stage line had come down the rocky road to the ford and that it had been “the route of a pony express,” and wagon-wheel scars could still be traced on rocks in the river there in 1980. The Pony Express of 1860–61 ran far to the north and west; a mail hack or stage on the Mountain View–Summersville road is easy to believe (Chapter 8). The tradition and the record both stand, and the Post Office Department’s route records would show what carried the mail across the ford.
Camp Witbeck’s opening. The camp’s opening is given as 1920, and Willie A. Whitbeck bought the land on the south bank below the bridge in 1921 (Chapter 9). A notice of the camp in a local paper of 1920 would show whether it ran before the purchase.
Cardinal Acres in Life. In 1950, by one local account, Cardinal Acres appeared in Life magazine, and business surged (Chapter 9). The magazine’s issues for 1950 would confirm it and give the story’s date.
The year of Dorrance’s float. Three Ozark Streams gives the days of the trip and no year. Its datelines, a Saturday, June 9, on the Black River and July 7 at Mountain View, fit both 1928 and 1934, and the drought fits the 1930s better, so the float is dated probably 1934 (Chapters 8, 9 and 13). A letter or a newspaper notice of the trip would settle the year.
When Rymer’s ranch began. Marian Rymer of Birch Tree managed Rymer’s Rustic Ranch in the 1920s and 1930s, and the place-name study of 1939 credited it to E. H. Rhymer and his daughter, who may have been Marian. By one account the ranch was already a popular resort in the early 1900s (Chapter 9; Reach E).
H. Kirkendall. The Birch Tree dentist who wrote to Governor Arthur M. Hyde in 1922 proposing a state park along the Jacks Fork, and tried again with a smaller plan in 1924, appears in the record by his initial only (Chapters 9 and 10). His letters to the governor would give his full name.
How many dams. In the 1930s Congress authorized the Corps of Engineers to build dams across Missouri, some thirty high dams by one count and fifty by another (Chapter 10).
When the Current River dams were dropped. Two dams on the Current were authorized in the original flood-control plan. The Corps withdrew its plans in 1950, and as late as 1958 Congress had not formally deauthorized the dams (Chapter 10). The acts of Congress on the White River basin projects would show when the authority ended.
Drey’s purchase. Leo Drey bought nearly 90,000 acres in Shannon and Reynolds counties from the National Distillers Products Company, then the largest land purchase in Missouri’s history, in 1953 or 1954; he learned in 1953 that the land was to be clear-cut (Chapter 10; Reach F). The deeds in the Shannon and Reynolds county recorders’ offices would give the date.
The Supreme Court and the wild horses. On June 15, 1993, a divided federal appeals court overturned the ruling that had kept the Park Service from removing the wild horses, and the superintendent of the time remembered that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case (Chapter 10). The Supreme Court’s docket for the 1993 term would confirm it.
Where the wild horses came from. In 1991 the Park Service believed the herd descended from a pair turned loose in the 1950s. The agency now calls the origin unknown and repeats that the horses were left behind in the Great Depression and, from local lore, that they may have been in the area since the seventeenth century. The trail ride’s owner told a Depression story of seven fillies and an Appaloosa stallion, and the John Jacks story has a Cherokee horse breeder putting his stallions to the wild horses long before (Chapters 4, 10 and 11). The stories and the agency’s accounts stand side by side.
The trail ride on park land. Before its lease ran out in 1981 the Cross-Country Trail Ride camped on more than a hundred acres of river bottom at the eastern edge of the park’s land, reached by a county road off Highway 106, perhaps the bottom where a ride of 1974 centered, about a mile and a half below Alley Spring. The year the ride began is not given in any account found (Chapters 10 and 11).
Harvey’s at Alley. The canoe rental, store, restaurant and motel at Alley ran under a term estate, to be torn down when the estate expired. When the estate ended, and when the buildings came down, has not been established (Chapter 11; Reach H). The park’s land-acquisition file for the Alley tract and the Current Wave would date both.
Roads older than the park. Field studies of 1986 counted 352 roads and traces inside the park, 318 miles in all, 93 of them giving access to the river. How many were older than the park has not been determined (Chapter 11). The topographic maps and aerial photographs of the early 1960s would show which roads were already there.
Part Three: How the River Works
A loss below the prongs. On August 14, 2006, the two prongs together carried about 29 cubic feet a second, and the river near the VFW campground, a few miles below the junction, carried 23.6. The shortfall of about five and a half cubic feet a second is an apparent loss: each measurement was accurate to within about 8 percent, part of the flow in a gravel channel moves through the bed where no meter reaches it, and the run as a whole found the rivers gaining. Whether any loss lies in the prongs or in the uppermost river is open (Chapter 12; Reach B).
The road from Jam Up Creek to Big Spring. Water that sinks into the bed of Jam Up Creek below Mountain View comes up at Big Spring on the Current, about thirty-eight miles away in a straight line. The route it takes underground, beneath country whose creeks drain the other way, has not been traced (Chapter 12).
Blue Spring’s recharge area. As drawn, Blue Spring is fed by about 56 square miles, but the drawing rests on a single successful dye trace and a cluster of sinkholes north-northeast of the spring. A trace reported in 2006 also reached Alley Spring from outside its mapped recharge area (Chapter 12). More traces would show how far each spring’s ground reaches.
Alley Spring’s flow. The spring’s flow is given as 81 million gallons a day, the Park Service’s figure, and as about 87 million, the average of the gauge records (Chapters 12 and 13; Reach H).
Hospital Cave. On his float of the mid-1930s Ward Dorrance passed a hand-lettered sign, “Hospital Cave Civil War,” in the bluff just above Blue Spring, and wrote that history had no memory of the place. The story of a wartime hospital there goes back no further than that sign, and no wartime letter, report or diary naming a hospital in the bluff has turned up, though the log courthouse at Old Eminence was in use as a hospital in February 1863 (Chapter 6). Nobody has yet established who painted the sign or what they had heard (Chapters 6 and 13; Reach D).
Meeting House Cave. The Park Service’s folder of 1977 gave the cave’s story as legend from the start: a hideout used by both sides in the war. By another account it was a meeting place in the troubled days of the war, and the name is generally said to come from that time. In older American usage a meeting house was also a house of worship, and the name may remember a church gathering as well as a war council (Chapter 13; Reach E).
Peter Renfro’s dates. The killing is settled: Renfro shot Constable Charles D. Dorris at Summersville about six in the evening of July 18, 1888. The dates after it are not. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld his conviction on October 10, 1892, by the court’s own report and in November by another record; his 1898 arrest is placed at the old Doniphan club house in Ripley County and, by a Michigan paper, in Lawrence County, Arkansas; and Governor Stephens commuted his sentence in May 1898 to life by one account and to twenty-five years by another, which by the second account Governor Dockery cut to end in May 1905 (Chapter 13). The Greene County court records and the Current Wave of June 29, 1893, would fill in the rest.
The dam in Blue Spring’s cave. Just inside the mouth of Blue Spring’s cave are the broken remains of a concrete dam, by one account dated 1938, and by 2007 an old retaining wall had fallen into the rise pool. No record yet says who built them or why (Chapter 13; Reach D).
How many caves. The caves identified inside the national riverways are given as more than 300 and as more than 400. At the higher figure the riverways hold more caves than any other unit of the National Park System (Chapter 13).
The flood of 1904. At Eminence the flood crested on March 8, 1904, at 27 feet, a mark that stood until 2017. The same crest is also given as 25 feet, measured at another place or on another datum. The Current at Van Buren rose to 29 feet that year, and since the first recorded peak there is dated March 26, its crest may belong to a later rise than the one at Eminence (Chapter 14). The Geological Survey’s peak records for the two gauges would settle both points.
The Alley flood: 1927 or 1928. By one account a flood in the spring of 1927 destroyed a large part of the dam at Alley, carried away the headgate and took out four bridges newly built across the spring branch in the state park. By another the bridges went in June 1928, with the park’s new store. The Eminence gauge favors 1928: its crest record lists nothing in 1927 higher than 8.8 feet, and the flood of June 1928 crested there at 18.24 feet on June 13, or June 15 by another record (Chapters 8 and 14; Reach H). The state park’s records for 1927 and 1928 would settle when the bridges went.
The Pebble Dam flash flood. A resident who moved to the area in 1979 remembered friends camping at Pebble Dam on the North Prong who were nearly swept away by a flash flood and lost both their vehicles. The memory gives no year, and the flood has not been matched to a gauge record or a newspaper (Chapters 8 and 14; Reach A).
The river line of 1917. Above Bay Creek the river line on the 1948 topographic map lies typically within about 65 feet of today’s channel, so the bends there have held for some 75 years. Below Bay Creek the only older map is the topographic sheet of 1917, and near miles 27, 28, 30 and 31 its river line lies 500 feet or more from today’s channel. Whether the river moved there or the 1917 surveyors drew it loosely is unsettled (Chapter 15; Reach G). Aerial photographs of the 1930s or early survey plats of that stretch would decide it.
The hole at Blue Spring. Blue Spring was already a three-thread bend in 2010, and if more of the river now runs down another thread, the water past the rock can shrink with no gravel dropped in the hole. The 2010 water outlines were not released, so which thread passed the rock then cannot be read from the published data, and whether the bar opposite the rock has grown up in trees is also open (Chapter 15). Photographs of the bar, old and new, would show it.
Sixty-six or sixty-seven fishes. The total of fish species recorded in the Jacks Fork is given as 67 and as 66, and the chapter’s table lists 66 by name (Chapter 16).
Why the mussels and the hellbenders declined. By the standard measures the Jacks Fork is in good health, its insects pollution-sensitive and its fish communities rated good to excellent. Its mussels and its hellbenders, the slowest-living animals in the river, have declined steeply over the last forty years, for reasons that have not been pinned down (Chapter 16).
Whether the old mussels still breed. The only mussels that gained in share in the recent counts are long-lived ones, the Ouachita kidneyshell and the Ozark pigtoe. Whether they are still raising young is open, and unless they are, they too can be expected to decline as the old animals die (Chapter 16).
Hellbenders in the Jacks Fork. None has been caught in the Jacks Fork since 2007, water samples tested for hellbender DNA at two sites in 2019 found none, and the river was thought to hold ten or fewer in 2019 and again in 2025. A few may remain, and the river still has the large rocks, bedrock and ledges that look like good habitat (Chapter 16).
Shovel bills and the Alley trout. An account of about 1980 listed “occasionally shovel bills” among the river’s fish without saying which fish it meant, and by the same account a few trout once lived in Alley Spring, though they were seldom taken from the river (Chapter 16).
The impaired stretch. In 1998 Missouri put the last stretch of the Jacks Fork, from Eminence to the Current, on its federal list of impaired waters for fecal coliform, and the stretch is given as five miles and as eight. In 2002 the listed reach was set at seven miles (Chapter 17).
The bacteria nobody matched. Of 501 bacteria from the lower river tested in 2003 and 2004, 181, about 36 percent, matched no source in the library. They could have come from pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, deer, raccoons, geese, ducks, or horses whose strains were not in the library (Chapter 17).
What fed the green holes. People described algae blooms on the upper river, and no one measured its nutrients while they lasted, so what fed them has not been settled. Park samples from 1973 to 1998 hinted at rising nitrogen and phosphorus at one site on the upper river, though the trend was not statistically significant (Chapter 17).
The Mountain View spill. On July 5, 2001, about 50,000 gallons of wastewater spilled from the Mountain View plant into Jam Up Creek. It is described both as partially treated and as untreated sewage (Chapters 12 and 17).
Part Four: River Life
Steel Bridge. Steel Bridge is the Mountain View name for the Highway 17 crossing; people from Eminence and Birch Tree say Buck Hollow or 17 Bridge Hole. The county’s bridge there went up in 1913–14 and the present one in 2005, and nobody has yet established when the name Steel Bridge came into use or which of the earlier bridges it described (Chapters 8 and 18; Reach D).
River Hill. The descent of Highway 17 to the bridge has a name that no map prints. It probably belongs to the descent on the Mountain View side, and a map of 1980 calls the road hill on the north side Buck Hollow Hill, but no record states the side (Chapter 18; Reach C).
Gar Hole and the Blue Holes. By one account the Blue Hole at about mile 4.8, above Coon Hollow, is the same pool as Gar Hole. A man from Winona said the upper river’s Blue Hole was “Same as gar hole”; a woman put Gar Hole near Highway Y without being sure where; a resident who came to Mountain View in 1979 marked a Blue Hole a little below Highway 17 and a Gar Hole near the mouth of Belew Hollow; and a Mountain View resident who grew up near Arroll wrote that “Lots of places get called blue hole on the upper.” Whether Gar Hole and Blue Hole were one pool or two, and where Gar Hole lay, is unsettled (Chapters 16 and 18; Reaches C and D).
Two Jam Up Hollows. In 1939 a Jam-Up Hollow reached only by horseback was one of the attractions of Rhymer’s Ranch, and the description fits the canyon at Jam Up Cave. The federal maps put their Jam Up Hollow far downstream, in the Mahans Creek drainage near Eminence. Whether these are two valleys that share a name, or one name that slid down the river onto the maps, is open (Chapter 18; Reach I).
Button Rock or Buttin Rock. The jumping rock across from the Circle B campground, at about mile 38.0 on the left, is Button Rock to a Mountain View resident and Buttin Rock to an Eminence resident who has done park work, and Lynne Norris of Winona has heard both. The federal maps give the name Buttin Rock to a different cliff, on the right bank about a quarter mile farther down. Whether the name once covered both, and how it was first spelled, is unsettled (Chapter 18; Reach J).
Which Steel Bridge Hole. Someone who grew up in Eminence, who calls the Highway 17 crossing “17 Bridge Hole,” listed “Steel Bridge Hole” among river names outsiders might not know. It is probably Eminence’s own Steel Bridge Hole, the pool above the Highway 19 bridge, named for the town’s first bridge; it could be the hole at Highway 17 (Chapter 18; Reach J).
The gigging ban of 1937. By one account the state’s new Conservation Commission, which took office in 1937, banned gigging outright that year to protect the game fish, and Ozark giggers organized until gigging came back with a short fall and winter season (Chapter 19). In March 1938 the attorney general, asked about a Reynolds County case, set out the gigging rules of the 1929 and 1931 statutes as they stood. The Conservation Commission’s orders of 1937 and 1938 would settle it.
The preachers at Buck Hollow Ford. The Mountain View Standard of March 21, 1913, reported that Reverends Crane and Gulley had baptized several candidates at the ford. Mountain View’s Baptist church dates its own records only from 1906, and nothing found ties the two preachers to it (Chapter 19).
Part Five: The River Mile by Mile
Reach A: The North Prong
Gist Ranch and Peter’s Ranch. The Western Land and Cattle Company’s tract along the North Prong, known as Peter’s Ranch, was still in one piece in 1980 at about 18,000 acres. Whether the Gist Ranch Conservation Area, bought from the Smith Flooring Company in 1997, is part of the same block has not been traced through the deeds, and its three local names, the Gist, Kinnard and Stoner ranches, have not been traced to their sources (Reach A). The Texas County deed books would settle the first point.
What Pebble Dam was built for. By the account of an Arroll resident who grew up there, the dam went in during the 1920s or 1930s “to power the gist ranch lodge.” No record of a lodge, a power plant or the dam’s building has been found (Reach A).
The Arroll Road crossing. A map of 1980 marks a ford at the crossing a little below Harmon Hollow, and a Mountain View resident who grew up at Arroll remembers “a dam and a bridge” at Pebble Dam. What carries the road over the prong there is open (Reach A; Chapter 19). The Texas County road records would say.
The Pine Branch and Rocky Ford cemeteries. The cemetery on the ridge above Pine Branch, where Criders and Farrars are buried, and the two Rocky Ford cemeteries, an old one partly washed away by 1980 and a newer one, are known from an account of 1980, and none carries a recorded name or date. A skirmish between Northern and Southern forces is said to have been fought near the first, with no date given (Reach A).
The North Prong mills. A gristmill a little above the mouth of Sanders Branch, at one time called Mahan’s Mill, was running before 1837. Reuben Harlow ran a mill in 1860 and the Campbell brothers another in 1880; which prong each stood on is open, and two of the mills above the Prongs may have shared one site (Reach A; Chapter 5).
Houston School. The school’s name is traced to T. J. Houston, “who was instrumental in building the school,” and to Houston Scalt, from Arkansas. District No. 15 is placed in Pierce Township, and whether the school by the cemetery lay in Pierce or in Date Township has not been settled (Reach A). A district map of Texas County’s schools would settle it.
Date. Date Township was probably named for Date, a post office of 1892 to 1896 whose site has not been found (Reach A).
Nagle and Grogan. The Nagle post office opened in 1901, 1902 or 1904, and it is also placed in Ozark Township. The Grogan office’s name is traced both to its first postmaster, William B. Grogan, and to J. E. Grogan, on whose land it stood, and it is dated from 1897 and from 1899 (Reach A).
The Harmon blue hole. A woman born in 1917 who farmed on the North Prong remembered her brothers fishing in the 1930s in “that blue hole” at her mother’s place, filled by the early 1990s until it was “not even much to wade in.” She did not say on which prong it lay (Reach A).
Reach B: The South Prong
The creek through Varvol. The creek from the west that comes in below Pine Hollow runs nearly six miles back toward Cabool, drains nearly thirteen square miles and is the largest creek in the watershed with no recorded name (Reach B; Chapter 18).
Mountain Store. Mountain Store is remembered as an early trading place on the Jacks Fork, where a patrol killed a guerrilla in 1863. A trading post of the same name stood a few miles east of present Mountain Grove and moved across the line into Wright County after the war. Whether these are one place is unsettled (Reach B; Chapter 6).
Gatons hole. A man from the upper river remembered a South Prong pool he called Gatons hole, with five acres of bottomland below it cleared and turned to gravel bar within a year. The spelling is uncertain and the position unknown, and the farm where a father-in-law tried to move the channel in the 1920s is also unplaced (Reach B).
The 27-foot dam. Around 2000 a reinforced-earth dam 27 feet high stood on a tributary of the South Prong. It has not been identified (Reach B).
Spout Spring. In the 1930s Spout Spring, on a hillside north of King’s Mountain, was said to send its water through Spout Spring Hollow to the Jacks Fork in Shannon County. On the map the hollow joins Pine Creek in Texas County, and the spring’s position has not been fixed (Reach B).
Freedom School. A Freedom School is counted among the early South Prong schools. The Freedom School of the 1930s, District 26, stood in Sargent Township near Willow Springs, and nothing yet shows whether the two are one school (Reach B).
The length of the South Prong. Measured from the head shown on the federal names map, the prong is 15.90 miles long; it is also given as 16.3 (Reach B).
Reach C: Low Water to Steel Bridge
The VFW camp. A Veterans of Foreign Wars camp stood below the Big Bend from at least the 1970s into the 1990s, probably on the right bank along the run below Rock-in-the-Hole, about miles 4.3 to 4.7. Its bank and limits rest on a map of 1980 and a sampling point of 1974, and who ran the camp and when it opened have not been traced (Reach C).
Sam Harlow’s granddaughter. The story goes that the film actress Jean Harlow was the granddaughter of Sam Harlow, who ran his father Greenberry’s mill at Harlow Ford. She was born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City in 1911 and took her mother’s name for the screen, and her mother’s father was a Samuel D. Harlow, a real-estate agent in Kansas City, Kansas. Whether he was Greenberry’s son Sam has not been traced, and the story and the record both stand (Reach C). The census and the Harlow family’s own records would settle it.
Hellum Spring. The good spring in Barn Hollow changed names with its owners, from Hellum to Rushing to McCollouck, and by 1937 it had lost its names. Where it is has not been found (Reach C; Chapter 18).
The Hiker Hole. A man who bought a farm on the upper river in 1960 knew a large hole there, deep throughout with a bluff on one side, half filled with gravel by the early 1990s. He lived at the VFW camp, and the hole may have been near it (Reach C; Chapter 15).
The Big Bend and Stoops mills. The dam and gristmill on the spring up the Big Bend’s hollow, and the Stoops grist and sawmill near the VFW camp, have not been fixed on the ground (Reach C; Chapter 5).
Reach D: Steel Bridge to Muck Forty
Camp Witbeck’s jumping bluff. The camp’s bluff was a jumping place, probably the bluff at the bridge pool, which a Howell County man called Buck Hollow Bluff. It could be the rocky bluff of Whitbeck Hole, the small pool below the cabins at about mile 7.2 (Reach D; Chapter 19).
The Salvation Army camp. In the 1920s the Salvation Army kept a camp on the left bank above Blue Spring, a retreat for its national officers with several buildings. Bluff View, the park’s primitive access on the same bank, may stand on part of its ground, though no deed has yet been found to show it (Reach D). The Shannon County deed books, if they survived the courthouse fire of 1938, would settle it.
McCubbin’s Mill. A William McCubbin is said to have lived in McCubbin Hollow and run a mill in the 1850s, still standing in November 1863. Its site is given two ways, on the spring branch in the hollow and on the river a little below Belew Hollow (Reach D; Chapters 5 and 6).
Bay Mill Hole. The name Bay Mill Hole has been placed beside Muck Forty Hole, at springs on the right bank, perhaps an older name for the pool or for one next to it. No mill has been found to explain the name, and people along the river today do not use it (Reach D).
Reach E: Muck Forty to Rymers
The Turnip Patch, Hickory Flat Hollow and Birch Prairie. A river map of 1980 letters the Turnip Patch on the right bank below Red Bluff, and Hickory Flat Hollow and Birch Prairie on the upland south of the river in the Jam Up Creek country. None has been fixed on the ground (Reach E).
Reach F: Rymers to Bay Creek
The mill on Bunker Hill. By one account the Bunker-Culler Lumber Company ran a large mill on the knoll late in the 1800s or early in the 1900s, until a flash flood washed the sawmill away and drowned several mules, and the company moved the mill to Pine Grove. Samuel and George Culler moved a big sawmill from Mountain View early in the 1900s to the high ground between Reynolds and Dent counties, where the town of Bunker was founded in 1907, and the company began cutting on the creeks of the upper Current in 1909. The two accounts have not been reconciled (Reach F; Chapter 7).
Chalk Bluff’s height. The face of Chalk Bluff rises about 200 feet above the water, and its height has also been given as about 120 (Reach F).
Low Gap Bluff and the Lodder bluff. An account of 1980 and its maps keep Low Gap Bluff, at the curve above Dark Hollow, apart from the long bluff of the three Lodder holes below it. A longtime angler, asked about a long curving bluff below Bunker Hill with several holes along it, named it “Low gap bluff,” and whether the name once reached down the bluff of the Lodder holes is open (Reach F).
Little Bear Hollow. Upper Kelly Hole is said to lie at the mouth of Big Bear Hollow, the federal maps’ Spring Hollow, and Lower Kelly Hole at the mouth of Little Bear Hollow a short way below. No federal map names Little Bear, and its mouth, at about mile 22.2, is placed from a map of 1980 alone (Reach F).
Fifteen Foot Hole and the Alfalfa Field. The park’s list of primitive campsites in 1981 ran “Rymer, Fifteen Foot Hole, Nickeloff Field, Bee Bluff to Bay Creek,” which, if the list runs downstream, puts a Fifteen Foot Hole between Rymers and Nickelhoff Hole, where Dark Hollow Hole, remembered as fifteen feet deep, and Eighteen Foot Hole both lie. A map of 1980 letters an Alfalfa Field on the left near False Teeth Hole, and neither has been placed (Reach F).
Jones, Searcy, Upper Dixon and Lower Dixon. In 2022 the park named four small backcountry areas between Rymers and Bay Creek, apparently in downstream order, and none has been placed on the ground. They are distinct from Dixon Ford on the South Prong (Reach F).
Reach G: Bay Creek to Alley
Lower Bay Creek and Buffington’s. The park’s campsite list of 1981 ended “Bee Bluff to Bay Creek, Buffington’s,” and in 2022 the park named a Lower Bay Creek backcountry area and a Buffington primitive area between the Bay Creek campground and Alley. Neither has been placed on the ground, and the Buffington name presumably comes from the old Buffington Place inside the bend above Fish Trap Hollow (Reach G).
Buxton Hollow, Barton Bay and Alley Hill. A map of 1980 brings Buxton Hollow down from the northwest toward the old Buxton farm, on the left below Rail Tree Hollow, and letters Barton Bay on the left in the last mile above Alley. Buxton Hollow is on no federal map and its stream has not been matched to a mapped channel, and Alley Hill, from which a photograph of about 1980 looks upriver toward Island Branch, is probably the hill west of Alley where Highway 106 comes down to the river (Reach G).
The photographs above Alley. A stretch of channel photographed about 1925 and again in 1992, and a field buried in gravel in an aerial photograph of November 1990, are described only as upstream from Alley Spring (Reach G).
Reach H: Alley
Alley Mill’s dates. The Boyds bought the mill in 1895, though some records give 1897. Its Leffel turbine is given as 35 inches and as 46, and its last year of grinding for trade as about 1922 and as 1927, after a flood (Reach H).
The shelter hole, the ferry and the old campground. One picnic-goer set the picnic grounds “right straight across from the shelter hole,” on a little island across a bridge, a name found in no other record, and the hole could have been on the spring branch or on the river. A ferry worked at Alley from 1906, by one account, at a crossing nobody recorded, and a map of 1980 marks an old campground on the left bank between the bridge and the spring branch, probably the state park’s (Reach H).
Lawrence Hollow Spring. One account names a big spring that feeds the branch out of Lawrence Hollow, and it has not been found on any map (Reach H).
Reach I: Alley to Eminence
Where Angeline stood. The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company’s big logging camp of Angeline, with a post office from 1909 or 1910 to 1929, stood in Horse Hollow. A little more than a mile up, the federal maps call the valley Angeline Hollow, and the camp may have stood there; an Eminence resident who has done park work placed it lower, not far above the river (Reach I; Chapters 5 and 7).
King’s Bluff. Cane Bluff, on the left at the outside of the bend at about miles 36.1 to 36.5, is probably the bluff also called King’s Bluff. An Eminence resident who has done park work placed King’s Bluff about a mile lower, on the left a little below the mouth of Mahans Creek (Reach I).
The fords of 1905 and 1906. In December 1905, by one account, Charley Smith’s team drowned when his wagon was swept off the ford below Alley, and in October 1906 a buggy carrying Mrs. Tripp, her two children and H. H. Smalley overturned at the ford near George Chrisco’s farm. Neither ford has been placed (Reach I).
Horse Creek and Old Horse Camp. By 2022 the park counted a Horse Creek river access and an Old Horse Camp primitive area below Alley, and neither has been placed on the ground (Reach I; Part Six).
Delaware Creek. In 1939 a stream rising in Delaware Township and flowing north to the Jacks Fork was called Delaware Creek, or Indian Creek. No stream carries either name today, and it may be the stream now called Mahans Creek (Reach I; Chapter 5).
Reach J: Eminence to the Mouth
Kell Bluff. Kell Bluff stands on the left a little below the Hole-in-the-Wall bluff, with the old Barnesville Road between it and the river, probably just below the mouth of McCabe Hollow at about mile 41.2. No measured face marks it there, and it may instead be the lower end of the Hole-in-the-Wall face, about 90 feet high at 41.0 to 41.1 (Reach J).
Part Six: On the River
Floating rights above the park. On a middle-sized stream that will float a canoe, the state reads the law to let the public fish, wade and boat within the stream bed, below the high-water mark. No court or agency is known to have classed the river above the park, where the prongs and the first miles float only after rain (Part Six; Chapter 10).
Fires on the gravel bars. A campfire on a gravel bar is long custom, but the park’s compendium allows fires only in the areas it designates, and its list of those areas names no gravel bars (Part Six).