Swimming, Baptizing and Gigging

The people who grew up along the Jacks Fork used the same few pools the year around. The children swam in them and jumped from the bluffs above them, the churches walked their converts down into them, and in winter men poled johnboats over them after dark and speared suckers off the bottom by firelight. When people set out for the water, a Mountain View resident remembers, what they said was “Going to the river.”

Of thirteen people who have told of their years on the river, twelve swam in it and ten fished or gigged there. Six1 named church, baptisms and gatherings among the reasons they went.

Learning the water

Old-timers of the Riverways country, looking back in the late 1990s, spoke of having “lived on the river”2 as children. Everyone who lived along it kept an old boat or two tied up3, one man remembered, though none of them had motors, and he and his cousins spent “a lot of time on the river, swimming and fishing.”

In Eminence a whole generation learned from Luther Rowlett4. After he came back from the army, one of his pupils thought, he never held a job in town again. He never married, wore an old pith helmet and called himself a “Retriever,” because he spent his days searching the river bottom for the valuables that floaters lost when their canoes turned over. He could stay under so long that the children sometimes thought he had drowned. He made them diving gear by setting glass into the bottoms of buckets, wrote little pieces for the newspaper, and hitchhiked to Florida for the winters. “Luther taught us all to swim,” the same pupil said. Parents slipped him a little money now and then, “because he was kind of like the Pied Piper. The town babysitter actually.”

Farther up the river a Chicago writer whose family bought a Texas County farm north of the river in 19355 (Chapter 9) learned the water from her neighbors. The farm lay about a mile6 from what everyone there called “Jack’s Forks.” “It was nice,” she wrote, “but it didn’t run through our farm.” A neighbor girl knew to the drop how much rain it took to flood a branch at Barn Hollow to swimming depth7, and after a wet spell the family swam there8. When a carload of boys and girls with “wet stringy hair”9 came rattling up the hill to an old woman’s gate on the way home from swimming in Jack’s Forks, she muttered about “Sech goin’s-on.”

Decades later a writer who homesteaded10 in the hills near the river used a pond on his land, formed in a basin of stone with warm shallows, for “preparing our toddlers to swim in the nearby Jacks Fork River.”

The swimming holes

A Jacks Fork swimming hole is nearly always the same arrangement. The river swings against a bluff on the outside of a bend, where the current runs fastest and scours its bed deepest, and keeps a deep pool at the bluff’s foot. On the inside of the bend the water slows and drops its gravel11, building a bar that slopes gently into the pool. The bar is where people go in, sit and watch, and the bluff is what they jump from (Chapters 2 and 15). At the lower end of the pool a riffle of coarse gravel crosses the channel like a low natural dam and holds the water up12 when the river falls. Measured on the riverbed survey of 2021–23, the deepest pools lay 8 to 10 feet below the riffles that hold them, and that is roughly how deep they stand at low water. Among them are Lower Kelly Hole, about 10 feet, Dark Hollow Hole about 9, and Jam-Up Hole and Fish Trap Hole13, about 8 (Map 12).

On the forks. On the North Prong a Mountain View resident who grew up at Arroll spent “most summer afternoons” at Pebble Rock Dam, several miles above the junction where Arroll Road crosses the North Prong near the Houston Rural Cemetery15, “with the rest of the people from that area.” The resident remembers a dam, a bridge and a swimming hole with “a large rock to jump off of”14 (Reach A). The same resident’s memories of Dixon Ford16 on the South Prong, closed by its new owners, are in Chapter 11. At Low Water, where the Highway Y bridge crosses the South Prong a short way above the junction17, the new bridge “changed the river and the swimming hole quite a bit”18 (Chapters 8 and 15).

Steel Bridge and Blue Spring. At the Highway 17 bridge the swimming was along the bluff, with a gravel bar to go in from and several places to jump19 (Chapter 15; Reach D). A Mountain View swimmer who grew up in the town spent every summer day of 1984, 1985 and 198620 there. A Howell County columnist’s family preferred Ratliff Ford, a short way upstream, unless they were camping at Alley21. Below Steel Bridge, Blue Spring had its jumping rock, and the old resort at the bridge had its own jumping bluff22 (Reach D). Both holes have changed since the 1990s23 (Chapter 15).

Rymers. The same Mountain View swimmer camped at Rymers as a child and remembered getting there in an uncle’s Jeep, across the neighbors’ fields24.

Alley. In 1926 and 1927, soon after the state bought Alley Spring for a park, it built a swimming hole with a beach and a beach house on the spring branch25 (Chapter 9; Reach H). The river nearby had its own holes. Someone who grew up in Eminence, born in 196726, swam “all along the Alley access from Bluff Hole all the way down to where Alley Spring runs into the river.” Bluff Hole, a short way upstream of Alley, was the jumping place: “Tall bluff with well beaten paths to the top, where we jumped off the bluff. With a big sand bar on the other side for people to watch.” A Birch Tree resident born in the 1940s named Bluff Hole27 too. Lynne Norris of Winona, who swam there in the 1970s, listed “Bluff Hole, Button Rock, in Eminence at the bridge, about anywhere you wanted to.” When she went back, Bluff Hole was “about gone.”

Eminence. In town the boys’ hole was Button Rock, near the Circle B campground29. Old-timers knew it as a boys-only swimming hole and called it the Naked Hole28, after what the boys preferred to wear. Lynne Norris has heard it spelled both Button and Buttin30 (Chapter 18). In the late 1990s a favorite riverside hangout for Eminence young people was the old Pickin’ and Grinnin’ campground, by then renamed Jack’s Fork campground31. Below town a big gravel bar above Lick Log Hollow32 drew boaters and swimmers to stop and picnic (Chapter 17).

Jumping

Every hole with a bluff had a jumping place, and children measured themselves against it. At the old resort below the Highway 17 bridge it was a rite of passage for the youngest guests to swim across, climb the bluff and belly-flop33 off it (Reach D). At Bluff Hole above Alley the paths to the top of the bluff were “well beaten.” At Pebble Rock Dam there was a big rock to jump from and a rope swing34 that the Mountain View resident who grew up there calls “treacherous.”

The Howell County columnist floated the river in the 1960s in a homemade fiberglass canoe35 that a friend and his father had built. As “reckless daredevils,” he remembered, “we often jumped from overhanging trees or ridiculously high bluffs.”

Gravel moves36 in every flood, and water deep enough under a bluff one summer may be shallow the next (Chapter 15). The park’s rules on jumping and rope swings37 are in Part Six.

Down to the water

The churches of the Jacks Fork country are mostly evangelical Protestant. By 1906 four denominations, the Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ and Cumberland Presbyterians, counted more than 83 percent of church members in the interior counties of the Ozarks, and Baptists and Methodists alone made up more than three-quarters38 of churchgoers in sixteen counties. The Baptists and the Disciples baptize by immersion. The convert, old enough to profess the faith, is laid back under the water by the preacher and raised up again, all the way under, as a sign of burial and rising, so the water has to be deep enough to take a grown person. Before a congregation had an indoor baptistry39, a tank built into the church for the purpose, the nearest deep water was the river. In rural Missouri between 1885 and 1910 a baptizing was also a public event. It drew a neighborhood out much as a picnic did, or a debate, a program at the close of the school term, or a brush-arbor revival40 held under a roof of poles and leafy boughs.

A baptizing in the Jacks Fork might follow a day of snow. Buck Hollow Ford, where Highway 17 crosses today, was a natural place for one, a broad, rocky crossing41 that a congregation could walk into (Chapter 8), and it seems to have served as a baptizing place in all weathers into modern times42. At a river baptizing the preacher usually stood about waist-deep and the candidates waded out to him one at a time43. The ford is above Blue Spring, where the river takes its temperature from the weather, and in 2012 the water at the bridge fell as low as about 36°F44 (Chapter 16).

A record of one baptizing at the ford survives in a short notice in the Mountain View Standard of March 21, 1913, headed “Baptists Baptise Sunday.” Reverends Crane and Gulley had baptized several candidates at the ford. “Owing to the threatening weather that morning,” the paper reported, “few thought there would be any baptizing, and there was a smaller crowd present than usual.” The “than usual” suggests that a baptizing at the ford ordinarily drew a crowd. The next Arroll column reported another light snow45 on the Saturday before.

Mountain View, whose paper printed the notice, had a Baptist church of its own. It was founded in 1875 as Mount Olivet Baptist Church, though its own records begin only with a reorganization in 1906. In 1913 it left the Union Baptist Association for the newly organized Howell County Baptist Association, and in 1938 it took the name First Baptist Church of Mountain View46.

On a chilly Sunday afternoon in March 195847, Reverend Fuller, pastor of the Church of God of Prophecy at Montier, baptized several converts in the Jacks Fork. One of them was the Howell County columnist, who had asked whether baptism was required for salvation and never got a specific answer. After Brother Fuller’s “fiery sermons,” as he put it, “I did not want to take any chances. Apparently, neither did he.” Where on the river the baptizing took place is not recorded. The memory comes back to him every spring, when he drives home from the family graves at Montier and detours up Highway 17 to Buck Hollow. Years later he joined the Baptist church in Willow Springs, and its pastor, Floyd Gentry, baptized him again in the baptistry behind the choir loft, “apparently” not trusting the Jacks Fork dunking. “Perhaps,” he added, “he was not taking any chances either.”

The river’s best-known baptizing place, by its name, lies near Blue Spring, where the old valley road came down to a wide, level bank. A Park Service folder of 1977 told floaters that the road “seemed to pause at this wide level bank48 and invite the community to basket dinners and camping recreation. Church groups often gathered for services at Baptizing Hole.” Four people who know the upper river still call it Baptizing Hole (one says Baptism Hole), and the two who have marked it on a map put it below the spring49 (Reach D).

Baptizings in the river did not end with the old roads. The Mountain View resident who grew up at Arroll has a daughter who was baptized in the Jacks Fork50. On the Current, a Van Buren resident remembered “big baptizings”51 among the carnivals and get-togethers of earlier days, as part of a time when there were “just more gatherings and more love and more care for each other.” When a letter from the park in 2013 was read to mean that churches needed a federal permit to baptize in the river, it drew a protest from the district’s congressman52 (Chapter 10).

The river at night

A gig is a spear, an iron head of three or four barbed tines, forged and tempered by a blacksmith53 and socketed onto a wooden pole, often of pine and as much as fourteen feet long54. Gigging is spearing fish with it from a boat in clear, shallow water. The quarry is suckers, chiefly the northern hog sucker and the redhorses that Ozark giggers call yellow suckers55. Suckers are bottom fish. The hog sucker has a broad head with its mouth set underneath, and it feeds by turning over the small stones56 of the riverbed with its snout for the insect larvae beneath them, so it stays on the bottom, where a light from above can show it. Its coloring makes it almost invisible against the gravel it lives on. Most hog suckers run 8 to 15 inches long, and one may live eleven years. Smallmouth bass, longear sunfish and minnows often trail a feeding hog sucker to pick up what its rooting stirs loose. It goes by hog molly and box head as well, and its big, bony head leaves less meat57 on it than other suckers carry. The giggers’ yellow sucker is chiefly the golden redhorse, a fish of about the same size and lifespan that forages for the larvae of midges, mayflies and caddisflies on the bottoms of pools, and much of the redhorse harvest by gig and snag in Ozark streams is golden redhorse. The black redhorse, which some call the white sucker58, is taken too. Which fish may be gigged, and when59, is set out in Part Six.

The gigger has to see the fish on the bottom before he throws, and that needs water as clear as it runs here, which is one reason the Jacks Fork and the Current are among the few places in the country60 where gigging is still done regularly. Gigging began as a way to feed a family through the lean months of winter61, and because the season falls in the cold months, after the tourists have gone, it has stayed a local kind of fishing62. “When the water’s hot, the fish are no good,” an old gigger of the Eminence country said, and by his rule a sucker has to come out of very cold water to be good to eat.

The suckers have their own season too. Hog suckers spawn in April or early May near the heads of gravelly riffles63, and in spring suckers crowd onto the shallow gravel shoals at about the time the dogwoods64 flower in the woods above the river. In the late 1990s several people in the Riverways country gave the same sign for it: “The dogwoods bloom when the suckers are shoaling.”

Fire fishing. The method is as old as settlement. By one account nothing archaeologists have found shows gigging in this country before the settlers came, and the settlers had made it common by the middle 1800s, bringing the gig from the southern Appalachians, where it had been used mostly for frogs and small game65. A gigger of the Eminence country, seventy-four in 2011, whose great-great-grandfather came to the area in 1820, believed that people had gigged these fish for food ever since the first settlers reached the river66. When the big sawmills closed in the early twentieth century (Chapter 7), many men left without work are said to have turned to gigging67 to feed their families. Hunters floated furs downriver in dugout canoes twenty to thirty feet long, and settlers later made the dugout over into a plank-built gigging canoe68; the johnboat’s history is in Chapter 9. Old-timers in the Riverways country called night gigging “fire fishing,” and one man remembered how it went. In the afternoon they poled the boat a mile and a half or two miles upriver, and as they drifted back down after dark they kept a fire going in the middle of the boat, in a fire box or metal basket69 they called a “firejack,” with pine knots they had split that day. A pine knot is the base of a pine limb, where it grows into the trunk, so full of resin70 that it outlasts the rest of a dead tree, and it burns hot and bright for a long while. “That was the only light you had.” A Park Service folder of 1977 told of the same arrangement on the Jacks Fork, with pine knots “burning on clay mud in the middle of their John Boat,” the clay presumably keeping the fire off the boards. The best-known gigging story on the river, of the man who fell overboard at Muck Forty71, goes with the hole’s name (Chapter 18).

Getting upstream took two men. A Carter County boatbuilder72 described the poling, one man in the bow keeping the boat pushed off the rocks and the other in the stern supplying the power, two men who knew their business being “more good than a dozen men a trying.” On the Current, by his account, he and a friend once poled a boat home about twenty miles upriver between seven in the morning and noon, with poles about ten feet long that they cut on a gravel bar73.

On the Black River, east of the Current, Ward Dorrance, whose float down the Jacks Fork is told in Chapter 9, watched a gigging boat come downstream one night, probably in 1934. A bearded man stood bare to the waist in the prow, holding a three-tined gig “strapped to the wrist with a deer-hide thong.” Amidships a ball of wire on a pole held the fire, and the steersman, white with ash74, doused his head with river water and poled among the rocks (Fig. 19.175).

Brighter lights. The fire gave way to kerosene lamps fixed to the bow, then to gasoline burners on a pipe that spewed fire on both sides, and then to electric lights77, powered first by gas generators and more and more by batteries running LED lights, which do away with the noise of a generator. The gigger whose family came in 1820 remembered his family going out with gas lanterns, in wooden johnboats that had no motors78. By 2010 a typical gigging trip ran at night in a johnboat with a gasoline engine and halogen lamps79. Giggers set the lights at the front of the boat with a shield over them, so that the fish look up into the glare and cannot see the men behind it. “It’s just like lightin’ up the river bottom,” one gigger explained, “but the fish can’t see past the light and the shield.” The jet motor opened the shallows. It has no propeller hanging below the hull; an impeller inside the housing draws water in through a grate and drives it out astern, so the boat can run riffles only inches deep. That made the shallow rivers far easier to get around on, and it helped turn what had been winter food-getting into a sport80. The modern gigging boat is usually a flat-bottomed johnboat with a jet motor, a bright light and a rail76 across the bow for the gigger to lean on. When the Park Service set new motor limits on the upper rivers, it kept them open to motors in gigging season81 (Chapters 10 and 11).

The throw. Water bends light82 where it crosses the surface, so a fish on the bottom lies deeper than it looks from the boat, and a pole seems to kink where it enters the water. “You anticipate where the fish is gonna be, not where the fish is at,” the same gigger said, allowing both for the bend and for the fish’s movement. The gig is tied to a string, and if he misses, a hard jerk as the gig reaches the end of its run brings it back to throw again. At night the light dazzles the fish and slows them. By day they can see the boat and the man in it, and moving from night gigging to day gigging, he said, “It’s kind of like going from high school to college.” A folklorist83 living in the southwestern Ozarks around 1930, who had once denounced giggers “as loudly as anybody,” watched daylight gigging in still pools four to six feet deep and found it “more like shooting quail on the wing with a small-bore shotgun” than he had imagined. The best gigger he ever saw, by his count, “scores ten or twelve misses for every fish he kills.”

Gigs and giggers. A good gig, well forged and tempered, lasts for many years, many giggers remember the first gig given to them84, and collectors prize the work of particular makers. A Shannon County man who owned a never-used gig by Herb Ellerman85 said he would probably never put it in the water. He compared it to a fine rifle: “it throws straight and slices the water.” People who never gig sometimes display gigs88 in their homes and businesses. In 1996 a gigmaker of Doniphan served an apprenticeship to Paul Martin of Bunker, in the Reynolds County hills east of the Current87, and went on to teach apprentices of his own in 2003, 2007 and 201186. The best giggers are widely admired, and stories of gigging off bridges, or in the deep water of the Current near Doniphan, are told with pride and amazement. One man said of a friend, “one of the best giggers in the country,” that “He can run the boat with one leg and gig with the other.” A boy in the late 1990s said his father’s whole instruction had been to get up on the front of the boat “and try not to fall in the river.”

Giggers in seven towns of the two rivers’ country, Winona, Birch Tree, Eminence, Van Buren, Grandin, Fremont and Ellsinore, had in 2009 been at it for close to twenty-four years on average, having started at about nineteen. They went out about eleven times a season, in parties of five or six. Most had learned it from friends or from a parent, and more than a quarter of them were women. Nearly half named the yellow sucker as the fish they preferred, and about a third the hog sucker. October was the favorite month, followed by December and November, and about one gigger in seven liked opening day89 best.

The fish fry. A Saturday night90 of gigging traditionally ends with a fish fry on a gravel bar for the giggers’ families and neighbors, and by custom the men do all of it, the gigging, the cleaning and the cooking. A sucker’s flesh is laced with small forked bones, so the fillet is scored with close, shallow cuts that chop the bones into short pieces, and hot fat softens them until they can be eaten. The scored fillets are rolled in seasoned cornmeal and fried light brown; an Eleven Point River angler recommends home-rendered hog lard. One man summed up a night of it: “you’re just down there, lying to everybody, telling stories, and drinking beer. It’s great!” Opening night of the season was long an event of its own, with families crowding the boat ramps91 across the Ozarks to gig, fry fish and visit. At one December fry on the Current in Shannon County in 2011 the cooks set up ironing boards on the gravel bar to scale, fillet and bone the catch, fried it at the boat launch over a campfire and propane burners, and served it with crinkle-cut fried potatoes and store-bought biscuits, fried and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar92.

Gigging and illegal dynamiting by residents probably added to the decline in fishing that a Carter County fishing club’s register recorded after 1900, along with what the sportsmen93 themselves took out (Chapter 9). The folklorist, after years among giggers, judged gigging “not a serious menace to the game fish in my section of the Ozarks.”

Under the state’s fishing statutes of 1929 and 1931, game fish could never be gigged, gar, grinnel (the bowfin95) and hickory shad could be gigged at any time of year, and other nongame fish, the suckers among them, at any time except February through May, a closed season that took in the spring spawning runs96. In February 1938 a man in Reynolds County, east of the Jacks Fork, was charged with gigging two hog suckers out of season, and the county’s prosecuting attorney asked the attorney general how the law read. The answer, given that March94, set out the rules as they stood. By one account the state’s new Conservation Commission, which took office in 1937 under the amendment of 193697 (Chapter 9), banned gigging outright that year to protect the game fish, and Ozark giggers formed clubs and associations to get the ban repealed, until gigging came back with a short fall and winter season98.

Fishing the holes

The float-fishing trade99 and its guides belong to Chapter 9, and the fish100 themselves to Chapter 16. For people who lived along the river, fishing was sport, one old-timer said, “but it was also part of your subsistence.”

A Shannon County man remembered nights, as a boy of eight or nine, with his grandfather at Powell Spring101, below Eminence. They walked down the creek to the mouth of Big Shawnee and then about a mile up the Jacks Fork to the spring, with a quilt, biscuits, jelly and butter (Reach J). They had no rods and reels. His grandfather cut sycamore poles and set them along the bank, and they slept beside them: “I’d be asleep at night and I could hear those old poles hit that water and he’d jump up and say, ‘We got one!’”

Some fished with their hands, feeling under the rocks of the bank for a fish, which was called grabbling102 (Chapter 9). Near Mountain View in the 1930s the opening day of bass season came before any other business; two carpenters who were due at the Chicago writer’s farm103 that day arrived the next, “disgusted at the ways of furriners who didn’t know that the first day of bass fishing supersedes all other activities.” A neighbor told her of a night of fishing by lantern down on Jack’s Forks, at a deep hole she called the Sally Hole104, “which they don’t know how deep it is.”

The fishing holes were the deep ones against the bluffs. A woman who knew the upper river as a child in the 1920s105 remembered “what they called Catfish Bluff and Loader Ford,” which “had deep holes. And that’s where people fished a lot.” At low water today the river under Catfish Bluff is shallow106. Someone who grew up in Mountain View and fished as a child in the 1960s remembered parking on a gravel road and walking in to Gar Hole to “fish for the day,” and could not find107 the place again (Chapter 18; Reach C).

Gatherings

At Alley the Fourth of July picnics drew crowds from the 1890s108 on (Chapter 9). Elsewhere the gathering might be a Sunday fish fry. One man109 remembered that in squirrel, gigging or rabbit season the whole family hunted or fished, and after church the word went round: “Meet at granddad’s because we’re having a big fish fry. Bring a dish.” A hundred or two hundred people came to the riverbank on his grandfather’s farm, “and the kids could swim in the river and play.” An Eminence high-school student said in the late 1990s that when her mother’s family came home for the Fourth of July110, they all went down to the river to swim.

Many upland farms caught their household water in cisterns fed by rain off the roofs and watered their stock at ponds111, and a long dry spell could empty both. In one drought summer of the late 1930s, when the ponds had dried and the cisterns113 run low, the Chicago writer’s household loaded tubs, washboards, a boiler and a mountain of laundry into a trailer and drove down to Jack’s Forks to wash. By the time their first boiler was bubbling over a fire between two stones, other families had arrived, in a homemade carryall, a mule-drawn wood wagon, a new car and a farm wagon with sideboards. “Wash day became a glorified picnic,” she wrote. As they scrubbed, the bluffs along the bend rang with the old hymn “Shall We Gather at the River,” which the Baptist minister Robert Lowry wrote in Brooklyn in the summer of 1864 on the river of the water of life in the last chapter of Revelation112. Then they pinned their dresses up and waded knee-deep into the river to rinse, watching for snakes and turtles, making way for free-range stock that came down to drink, and splashing to the rescue when the youngest of one family fell in. A thunderstorm broke up the gathering that afternoon, and the rain filled the cisterns that night.

What the park changed

Much of the river’s bank passed into public hands after 1964, and the park brought rules114 that touch nearly every one of these customs: where people may jump, where they may swim in the springs, how they may camp, when motors may run (Chapters 10 and 11; Part Six). Above the park the banks are private115 (Chapter 11), and at the Highway 17 bridge the new bridge of 2005116 changed the way down to the water (Chapter 8; Reach D).

The holes at Steel Bridge and Blue Spring, and Bluff Hole118 above Alley, have filled or narrowed117 in the memory of the people who swam them (Chapter 15).