What We Call Things

Where Highway 17 crosses the Jacks Fork north of Mountain View, the Park Service sign reads Buck Hollow. Asked in 2026 what they call the place, twelve people2 who know the river gave seven different answers. Most who grew up in Mountain View said Steel Bridge. Someone who grew up in Eminence said 17 Bridge Hole. A Birch Tree resident and an Eminence resident who has done park and conservation work said Buck Hollow. Others said Highway 17, or gave two names at once: “Buck hollow or steel bridge,” “17 Bridge/Buck hollow,” or “Buck hollow or it used to be referred to as the Steel Bridge.”

Every place on the river carries two kinds of names. One kind is printed, on topographic maps, in the federal names file, on Park Service sign1s and in float guides. The other is spoken and passes from parents, grandparents, neighbors and friends. When the same people were asked who taught them the names of places on the river, they named grandparents, parents, an uncle, a husband, fathers-in-law, neighbors, friends and “new acquaintances.” One of the ten who answered mentioned maps. Most of the holes, bars and shoals of the river have only the spoken kind4. (Who Jack was3, and how the river got its own name, is in Chapter 4.)

Two sets of names

The official names of American places are settled by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a federal board set up in 1890 so that every government map and document would call a place by the same name. The names it approves are kept in the Geographic Names Information System, which the U.S. Geological Survey maintains, and the names on federal maps are drawn from it. A state board recommends5 changes for its own state, and the federal board decides. Officially the Jacks Fork watershed has 40 named streams and 92 named valleys. A few pools have official names, Baptizing Hole and Muck Forty Hole6 among them, and most of the places where people swim and fish have none.

The oldest written dictionary of the region’s names has the same gap. Missouri was the first state to take up a systematic study of its place names, begun at the University of Missouri in 1928, and by 1939 eleven graduate theses had worked through 82 of its counties. The twelfth7 was finished that year by Anna O’Brien, a graduate student who took on five south-central Missouri counties, Shannon and Texas among them. She copied every name she could find in county histories, postal guides, atlases and highway maps onto its own slip of paper, then went into the counties and asked people8 where each name came from. Shannon County was hard country for that work. It had only a branch railroad across its southern edge, and Eminence, she noted, could not be reached by any common carrier, though a ride might be arranged with the bread-truck driver or the rural mail carrier9. She took over the family car, and her professor spent what she called “a sort of busman’s holiday”10 gathering names in Shannon County himself. In Shannon and Dent counties the lumber and mining camps, some lasting only a few months before they moved on with the receding forest, had left names that she thought had doubtless been missed11. In 1945 Cora Ann Pottenger did the same for Howell County, which takes in Mountain View and the head of the South Prong country. Between them they recorded the origins of many of the creeks, hollows, schools and post offices12 around the Jacks Fork. Apart from Chimney Rock, Jam-Up Hollow, Hospital Cave and the names around Alley13, the river’s holes, bars, fords and shoals are absent.

Where the stories came from matters too. In Shannon County the people who explained the names were a merchant, the postmaster, a state senator, county judges, schoolteachers, an abstractor and a ninety-year-old prosecuting attorney, nearly all of them in Eminence. Of the eight who explained the Texas County names, four lived in Houston and Summersville and one in Arroll14. The stories that got written down are largely the county seats’ versions.

How the old names were made

The origin stories are what people said in the 1930s and 1940s, and the doubtful ones were marked as doubtful when they were written down. In the 1939 dictionary one asterisk flags a story open to reasonable doubt, and two15 flag a name nobody could explain.

Families. The commonest source of a name was whoever lived there. Mahans Creek, spelled Mahon in 1939, was “named for a family who lived at the head of the creek.” By another account it was named for William Mahan, a son of James and Jane Mahan, who settled by the spring below Bohannon or Pummill Hollow16. Gill Branch, in the Barn Hollow country, carries the name of Samuel K. Gill, a Union private who came about 187217. Moore’s Hollow, in northern Howell County, was named for Hugh and Thomas Moore, who lived there by 186718. Peters Creek, the largest creek on the North Prong, carries the name of a ranch manager of the 1880s, and the Harmon branches19 the name of an early family on the prong (Reach A). The fords20 took the names of the farms they crossed to (Chapter 8).

A spring in Barn Hollow changed names with its owners. Before 1852 it was Hellum21 Spring, probably for a settler named Helm, said the way people said “ellum” for elm (Chapter 5). About 1872 it became Rushing Spring, for Joel P. Rushing, and about 1888 McCollouck Spring, for William McCollouck. By 1937, with yet another owner on the land, the spring “seems to have lost its names.” Spout Spring, on the South Prong side, went partly by the name of the owner who piped its water up the hill22 to his house (Reach B).

Events. Some names remember something that happened. Horse Hollow, near Alley, is where John Alley was said to have kept his horses, and Hospital Cave23’s name rests on a wartime story (Chapters 6 and 13). The pool near Blue Spring where church groups gathered for services is Baptizing Hole24 (Chapter 19).

The event most often retold is a fishing accident. As a Park Service folder told it to floaters in 1977, Ozarkers say that John “Muck” Reece, or Reese, of a family that lived near Blue Spring for many years26, and some friends were out one night gigging for yellow suckers by the light of pine knots, burning on a bed of clay mud in the middle of their johnboat. As Muck struck for a fish he lost his footing and fell overboard. When he finally came up, sputtering, he claimed he had sunk forty “foot,” and his friends teased him25 about it for years. The hole a little more than a mile below Blue Spring carries the joke: Muck 40 Hole on the folder, Muck Forty Hole27 on the federal maps (Reach D). Of four people asked28 about Muck 40 in 2026, three did not know it and one had heard of it without being able to say where it was.

Jokes. Naming could be teasing. Possum Trot, a stock Ozark name for a back-of-beyond place, went on a hollow, a school and part of early Mountain View29 (Chapter 5), and the federal map has two Possum Trot Hollows in Shannon County, one entering the Jacks Fork from the left between Alley and Eminence and the other in Winona Township30. A Texas County post office of 1891 to 1902 was called Nirvana, probably as a joking name for a sleepy place31. Montier, south of the river, was first called Nip, after either a section foreman or a dog32, depending on who told it.

The land itself. Most other names describe the place or what lived there. Across the five counties of the 1939 dictionary, plants gave more names to towns, churches and schools than any other feature of the country, and nearly four in five of the plant names were trees: oak in eighteen names, pine in thirteen and cedar in nine35. Chimney Rock33, the pillar on the bluff a little below the junction of the prongs, was “so named because of its chimney-like shape.” The dictionaries of the 1930s had no record of “chimney” used for a rock, and the use went down as one of 109 Americanisms34 gathered from the five counties, words or senses of words that grew up on this side of the Atlantic. The cave below the pinnacle took its name from the rock, and the spring36 that flows from the cave took its name from the cave. Open Hollow37 was “so called because of its width.” Hay Hollow38, near Eminence, was a valley “from which grass is cut for hay.” Pine Creek, on the South Prong, took its name from pines, along its banks39 in the Texas County account and along the ridge40 in the Howell County one, and Pin Oak Hollow41 from its trees. Sugar Tree Hollow on Leatherwood Creek42 and Sugartree Bottom on the middle river use the old country name for the sugar maple. The bottom was once the home of several large ones43, and a Shannon County school of the 1930s, Sugar Tree Grove44, was “named for the maple trees which grow in the district.” Bee Bluff on the middle river has its own honey story45 (Reach F). A Bee Bluff School, District 83, near Eminence46, was recorded in the 1930s as named for its place “near a bluff on which grew bee trees,” the hollow trees where wild bees stored their honey48. Lying near Eminence, the school probably took its name from another bluff47. Panther Hollow49, which joins the river above Highway 17, was the “Habitat of panthers in early days.” On Wolf Creek, a South Prong branch, people still said in the 1930s that “wolf hunting in the vicinity is good sport.” The name of Blue Spring Park50, recorded in the late 1930s as a tourist development at a spring near the Howell County line, “was chosen to describe the water.”

Some of these come with two explanations. Jam Up got its name, by the 1939 account of the Shannon County hollow, from “the peculiar geological formation found there.” By another, written down in Howell County in 1945, it came from floods: a ridge with a natural tunnel worn through it crosses the canyon, and in heavy rain the water backs up behind it, “making a jamming of the water; hence the name”51 (Chapter 12). Barn Hollow was named either for a farm with several log barns or, in the explanation preferred in 1945, from a mishearing of “barren,” because the valleys were said to have been nearly bare of timber52 in the early days (Chapter 5).

Some explanations were made to fit the name. In 1939 an Eminence merchant explained Button Rock School, District 85, by saying that the creek near the school “butts on” a huge rock and turns off at a sharp angle. The story is probably what students of names call a popular etymology, an explanation thought up for a name after the fact, built from the sound of the word54, and it was filed as one in 193953. The school stood on the east side of the Current55, and a map of 1980 letters a second Buttin Rock on the Current56 above Two Rivers. The school’s rock may be one of the Current’s, and not the river’s Button Rock, the jumping rock across from Circle B above Eminence (Reach J).

The federal maps of the watershed also carry names that nobody explained in the 1930s and 1940s: a Spargo Branch and a Sanders Branch on the North Prong, both lettered on the 194857 topographic map, a Fly Blow Hollow, a Pistol Barrel Hollow, a Pipestem Hollow, a Rail Tree Hollow, a Lick Log Hollow, a Dry Camp Hollow, a Hog Cave Hollow and a Coppermine Hollow58. The 1938 state highway map lettered a Spurgeon Hollow, a narrow valley on the Jacks Fork a little north of Eminence, and in 1939 its name, too, went down as unsolved59. Two hollows below Eminence carry the Coppermine name, and by one account each runs toward old mine workings60 (Reach J).

The bridge with three names

Buck Hollow is the oldest name the Highway 17 crossing has. Buck Hollow Ford carried the road between Mountain View and Summersville before the Civil War61, and the first bridge there, finished in 191462, was the Buck Hollow bridge (Chapter 8). When Ward Dorrance floated past, probably in 193463 (Chapter 9), he heard it as “Buck’s Holler.” The hollow’s own creek64 enters the river at the bridge, so the name belongs to a real valley as well as to the access.

Steel Bridge is the Mountain View name. Five of the people from Mountain View and Arroll gave it, one spelling it “Steele.” Two more gave it as an alternative to Buck Hollow, one of them a newcomer of 1979 who wrote that the crossing “used to be referred to as the Steel Bridge.” No one from Eminence, Birch Tree or Springfield called it Steel Bridge. The people living in Eminence and Birch Tree said Buck Hollow or 17 Bridge Hole, and one from Springfield said Highway 1765. When the name came into use, and whether it described one of the earlier bridges, is not recorded. The bridge there now dates from 200566.

Other names have come and gone. A Howell County historian67 who swam there as a teenager in the late 1960s knew the place as “the Seventeen Bridge” or “Cardinal Acres68,” after the resort beside it (Chapter 9). He also remembered a friend calling it something he heard as “Rat Cliff,” which brought “mental visions of little rodents scurrying around the bluff.” The name belonged to the Radcliff family’s ford upstream, which, he later wrote, was “pronounced locally ‘Rat-liff,’ and by me ‘Rat Cliff.’” He was “kind of offended” when the Park Service’s signs and float maps called the place Buck Hollow, “but that’s the oldest name for it.” (For the place itself, see Reach D.)

River Hill. The descent of Highway 17 to the bridge has a name that no map prints. Four69 of the people asked called it River Hill. Others called it Buck Hollow, “South 17,” “Just 17” or, from Eminence, “17 Bridge Hole.” The road down was rebuilt along with the bridge (Chapter 8).

Low Water, the Forks and the Prongs

At the head of the river the names tangle. The state float guide calls the put-in South Prong Access70. The road maps call it the Highway Y crossing. Most people who grew up there call it Low Water, a name that, as one of them tells it, began with the old, low Highway Y bridge71 (Chapter 8).

From the bridge the name spread. People now use it for the Highway Y bridge, for the access beside it, for the county road’s low-water crossing at the junction72 itself, where each prong runs under the road through its own culvert pipes73 (Chapter 8), and, in one answer, for the junction of the prongs itself. The newcomer of 1979 placed Low Water at “the low water bridge on Jacks Fork road,” and a map of 198074 letters the bridge at the Forks “Low Water Bridge.” Asked what they called the county-road crossing, people said “Low water bridge,” “Low water crossing”75 and “The Forks bridge.” Someone who grew up in Mountain View gave the shortest geography of all: the two prongs were “above low water.” One man defined the common noun as “A low water crossing76 where you drive on a concrete bridge through a creek” or across a river at low level.

The two streams above the junction have two sets of names as well. The federal maps call them the North Prong and the South Prong, and three77 of the people asked used those words. A tourist map of Texas County in 1936 called them the North Fork and the South Fork, and so did the place-name dictionary78 three years later, and two people asked in 2026 still say79 North Fork and South Fork. By one account the North Prong was often called Steiner’s Fork80, probably for a Steiner who at one time owned the land along its upper part (Reach A). The junction is “The Forks” to four people asked and “the Prongs” to three81. One Mountain View resident, who uses Forks, described the change: “most people start at The Forks82 (Now it’s called the Prongs).” The same person also called the prongs Slick Rock83, a name that appears in no record for the upper river, though the federal maps have a Slick Rock Hollow far downstream, in the Little Shawnee Creek drainage below Eminence84. Another person thought the junction had been called “Jammed Up,” and was unsure.

At the other end of the river, most people asked call the mouth Two Rivers. One Mountain View native, now living in Winona, calls it the Junction85.

It depends where you’re from

The Jacks Fork has several hometowns. Summersville sits on the upland north of the upper river and Arroll on the upland about a mile and a half north of the North Prong86; Mountain View and Willow Springs lie to the south, Birch Tree and Winona farther down, and Eminence on the lower river. A Mountain View resident who gave some of the fullest answers agreed that “People from different towns87 call the same places by different names,” and also strongly agreed that the old names should be kept, “even on official maps.”

The answers of thirteen people in 2026 are a small sample, but they lean the same way (Table 18.1).

Steel Bridge, River Hill, Low Water and the Forks came mostly from people who grew up around Mountain View and Arroll. They were not theirs alone: one person whose hometown is not recorded used both River Hill and the Forks88, and the Mountain View resident, asked whether people from other towns say River Hill, answered “Neighbors and yes.” The people from Eminence, Birch Tree and Springfield more often gave the sign names, Buck Hollow and Highway 17, or 17 Bridge Hole. The one who grew up in Eminence and said 17 Bridge Hole also listed three river names outsiders might not know: “Cullpepper Shoot, Steel Bridge Hole, Powell Springs (River split).” Culpepper Chute and Powell Spring are on the river near Eminence, one above the town and one below it89, and this Steel Bridge Hole is probably Eminence’s own, the pool above the town’s bridge, named for the steel bridge of 191790 (Reach J).

Around Alley, the swimming hole above the bridge is Bluff Hole91. The one who grew up in Eminence described “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.” Lynne Norris of Winona, who swam there, found it “about gone last time I was there.” Asked about a place called Float Rock, two92 of four people had heard the name without being able to say where it was, and two did not know it.

Even the generic words change at the watershed line. In Howell County, on the Eleven Point side of the divide near Willow Springs, valleys could be draws; Cane Creek’s older name was King’s Mountain Draw93. On the Jacks Fork side they are hollows. Hollow seems to be a word of the high Ozarks. In 1939 it turned up thirty-eight times in the names of the five counties, most of them in Shannon County, and was rare elsewhere in Missouri94. None of the 9695 named creeks in the Jacks Fork watershed is a draw.

Names that live without a place

Some names survive in speech after the place itself has been lost. Asked what words they used that outsiders might not know, two people put Gar Hole first96, one of them writing “Gar Hole near Y highway.” Six people were asked where it is. One marked it on the map about a mile and a half below the Highway 17 bridge, near the mouth of Belew Hollow97. Four, among them the woman who had written “near Y highway,” said they had heard of it but were not sure where it was, and one did not know it98. A Mountain View native who now lives in Winona remembered, “When I was a kid99 we would park on a gravel road and walk in there and fish for the day. I couldn’t find it now.”

Gar Hole is tangled with another name. The same Winona man said the upper river’s Blue Hole was “Same as gar hole.” 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 (The Open Ledger). On the Black River, probably in 1934, the same floater who heard “Buck’s Holler” found the water blue in its deep places and was told that “to strike blue water”100 meant to come upon a fishing pool, and he put at the head of his book a native’s advice to walk the boat over the shoals until “bye ’n bye ye’ll strike blue water.” Elsewhere in Howell County, off the Jacks Fork’s watershed, a Blue Hole Hollow101 recorded in 1945 took its name from “the very deep portion of the stream, Blue Hole, always filled with plenty of water of a bluish color. A good fishing place.” “Blue hole” may have named a kind of place, a deep pool good for fishing, that more than one pool could carry.

Names can also live in print without a place. Jerktail Landing102 is on the Current River, between Round Spring and Two Rivers. In the story a Park Service folder told floaters in 1977, mule-skinners hauling copper and iron ore across the river there “cried ‘jerk tails’” at the critical moment, and the mules strained extra hard. Five people were asked whether Jerktail had ever named a spot on the upper Jacks Fork. Four did not know it as an upper-river name, one of them, from Eminence, adding “On the Current,” and one had heard103 of it without knowing where.

Names that moved

The name Alley104 probably came from a man, John Alley, and traveled by way of a post office and from there to the mill and the spring itself (Chapters 4 and 5; Reach H). In 1939 a Jam-Up Hollow reached only by horseback was one of the attractions of Rhymer’s Ranch105 near today’s Rymers (Chapter 9), and the description fits the canyon and tunnel at Jam Up Cave. The federal maps put their Jam Up Hollow far downstream, in the Mahans Creek106 drainage near Eminence. Whether these are two valleys that share a name, or one name that slid down the river on its way onto the maps, has not been settled.

The 2011 corrections

One move happened on purpose, and it took names off the federal maps and put them where local people said they belonged.

Below Rymers, a run of hollows and branches comes into the river from both sides. For decades the federal maps labeled them one way. In 2011 Tom Akers of Eminence told the Missouri Board on Geographic Names, the state body that recommends names to the federal board, that the labels were wrong and that nobody who lived there used them. He brought four proposals, which together shifted a string of names downstream (Table 18.2; Map 08).

Akers was born in St. Louis in 1951 and grew up in Eminence, finishing its high school in 1969. He took two degrees in applied mathematics at the University of Missouri at Rolla, and from 1972 through 1976 he spent his summers as a seasonal ranger at Alley Spring, in the park’s first decade. He was principal of the Eminence high school for four years before joining the Air Force in 1979. The Air Force trained him as a flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base, and in 1987 NASA chose him as an astronaut.

He flew four space shuttle missions. In October 1990 he helped launch the Ulysses probe, bound for an orbit over the poles of the sun. In May 1992, on the first flight of the shuttle Endeavour, he was one of three astronauts who went outside together, the first three-person spacewalk, and caught a stranded Intelsat communications satellite by hand so that a new rocket motor could be fitted to it. In December 1993 he made two of the five spacewalks that repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, and in 1996 he flew to the Russian space station Mir. By the end he had spent more than 800 hours in space and about 29 hours outside the spacecraft.

Akers retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1999 and taught mathematics at Rolla until 2010. Then he came home to a small farm near Eminence. He rode for more than twenty years as a trail boss of the Cross-Country Trail Ride (Chapter 11), and land surveying is among his pastimes. In May 2026 he was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Akers told the board the unnamed valley had been known as Bee Hollow for fifty years. Bee Bluff stands about seven-tenths of a mile upriver from its mouth. He said the old Stillhouse Hollow had no local name. Allen Branch was the oddest case. It had been on federal maps since at least 1917 and on the state highway map of 1938, and it went into the 1939 place-name dictionary from that highway map alone, among the names nobody there could explain. By 2011, he said, no one living in the area had heard of it.

The board first heard the proposals in May 2011, when a motion to approve them drew opposition, and it put off a decision until November while three of its members looked into the case. By its meeting of November 8, 2011, the Shannon County commissioners had approved all four changes, and the Park Service, which manages the land, had agreed. Three board members reported that they could find no documents showing the new names were correct, though two of them, Island Branch for the old Allen Branch and Bee Hollow for the valley below Bee Bluff, were already in local writing by 1980 (Reaches F and G). One of them had asked people in the area, who told him that “Col. Akers would know best about the correct names.” The old Stillhouse placement had been checked on the ground by federal fieldwork in 1968, and the view put to the board was that the trouble was “a cartographical error rather than a field error,” that is, that the names had been gathered correctly on the ground and put on the wrong valleys when the map was drawn. A motion to keep the old names died for want of a second. The board approved all four changes with one abstention and provided for a note in the federal record giving the original names. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names adopted all four changes on January 12, 2012.

Stillhouse, for the place where whiskey was made, is a common name in Missouri. Fifteen Missouri valleys carry it, three of them in Shannon County. The watershed has a Stillhouse Branch on the South Prong and, besides the corrected one, another Stillhouse Hollow on the federal maps, entering the river from the left about four miles above it. A longtime angler and hunter of the middle river has other names for both, calling the shorter hollow “Little stillhouse” and the corrected Stillhouse Hollow, the valley the 2011 changes renamed, “Nickelloff.”

Other names repeat in the same way. There is a Bee Bluff on the middle Jacks Fork and another on the Current, a Blue Spring on each river, Pine Hollows on the South Prong and on Mahans Creek, and Spring Hollows on the middle river and on Storys Creek.

Spellings that drift

Most of the river’s names were spoken long before anyone wrote them down, and some changed in the writing (Table 18.3).

Some of the drift is the ear at work. An unfamiliar name gets bent toward a familiar word: Lodder becomes Loader, and Radcliff becomes Rat Cliff. Button Rock is still unsettled. Asked how they spell the jumping rock near Circle B, a Mountain View resident wrote “Button Rock,” the Eminence resident who has done park work wrote “Buttin Rock,” and Lynne Norris of Winona answered, “Ive heard Button and Buttin.” The federal maps print Buttin.

Some drift runs from the map back into speech. A Howell County newspaper columnist107 grew up saying Ratliff for the ford above Highway 17, then saw “Rat Cliff” on a federal topographic map and wondered whether his mother, “who occasionally had quirky pronunciations, had gotten it wrong and I learned it from her.” The family name was Radcliff108 (Chapter 8).

The creeks nobody named

Underneath the named places is a larger map of unnamed ones. It can be drawn from federal elevation data, a grid of ground heights in cells about 40 meters across. Water on each cell is taken to run to its lowest neighbor110, and following those steps downhill and counting how much ground drains through each cell picks out the channels. Keeping every channel that drains at least a square kilometer, about 250 acres, the Jacks Fork watershed has 285 creeks. Ninety-six carry a name on federal maps or in the federal names file. The other 189 have no recorded name (Map 18.1111).

Most of the nameless one109s are small: 108 drain less than two square kilometers, most of them steep side hollows. Eighteen drain five square kilometers, about two square miles, or more. The largest, a creek entering the South Prong, drains nearly thirteen square miles and runs about six miles, and no official record names it. Of the 90 creeks that run straight into the Jacks Fork or one of its prongs, 31 have no recorded name.

Sixty-one of the 96 named creeks are named as hollows, 21 as branches, 13 as creeks and one as a valley, and the water in a valley’s bottom generally carries the valley’s name.

Some of the unnamed creeks have names in speech. The angler and hunter of the middle river gave “Spring hole”112 for a side branch the maps leave blank, and called the creek the maps label Spring Hollow “Big bear.” The creek that runs through Mountain View between the football field and First Street is the head of Jam Up Creek, which reaches the river about nine miles away by its channel113 (Chapter 12). The Mountain View resident gave the town’s creek the name of the creek it becomes114, said it “Runs into Jacks Fork,” and agreed that “Most of the little creeks around here have names that only locals know.”

The words for water

Beneath the names is a vocabulary for the river’s parts. The basic unit is the hole, any pool deep enough to swim or fish in, named or not. In a drought summer, probably 1934, the upper river’s whole course was summed up for a passing floater as “shoals and pot-holes, jest shoals and pot-holes,” the pot-hole being a still pool under a bluff and the shoal the fast, shallow water between (Chapter 15). On the Black River a man told him to expect three “rimes” and three eddies, the rimes being rapids and the eddies the still stretches in between115. Hydrologists speak of the riffle, the pool and the bar116 (Chapter 15).

Asked in 2026 for words outsiders might not know, people mostly gave names of places: Gar Hole, Jam Up, Pebble Dam, Slick Rock, “honey hole,” Cottonmouth Bar, Cullpepper Shoot, Powell Springs “(River split).” A few gave words: riffles; “Riffle. Chute. Hole of water. Crossing”; “Swift Current117.” Someone from Mountain View offered two everyday names for the river itself, “Watering hole or The Creek.” Four of thirteen118 called it the river.

The fullest set of words came from the Mountain View resident, choosing among alternatives for each. For a riffle the choice was “rapid,” for a blue hole “a bluff hole,” and for water that runs only after rain a “wet weather spring” and a “wet-weather creek.” The boat was a jon boat, the fish goggle-eye and suckers, the crayfish a crawdad, a rise “the river’s up” and the park “the Riverways.” A float was “a float trip119” (Chapter 20), and heading out was “Going to the river.”

The land around the river has its own words. A hollow, written “holler”120 in the 1930s to catch the way it was said, and noted in Howell County in 1945 as “also pronounced ‘holler’ locally,” is a narrow valley running back into the hills. A branch is a small creek. A bluff is the cliff, usually on the outside of a bend, and a gravel bar121 the bank of stones on the inside (Chapter 2). A ford is where a road crosses through the water, and a low-water bridge122 a ford with a floor (Chapter 8).

Several of these words grew up on this side of the Atlantic. When the region’s name words were checked against the standard dictionaries in 1939 for a list of Americanisms, bluff, for a high bank with a steep front along a river, turned out to have been first used in North America, with a first record from 1737. Branch for a small stream is an American sense recorded from 1674, and fork, for a tributary or for the place where two streams meet, is chiefly American, from 1753. Prong, the word on the federal maps for the two streams at the head of the river, had been set down in 1860 as Southern usage for “a branch or arm of a creek.” Lick, for a spot where animals come to lick the salt or salt earth, is American from 1751, and sink, for a hole in limestone country where the water sinks and is lost, is an American use as well. Hollow is the old English word for a valley, in use since the 1550s, though American place names took it up in great numbers123. Some of the river’s everyday words are American as well. Johnboat, for the narrow, flat-bottomed, square-ended boat poled or paddled on inland waters, is in print from 1894. Crawdad, an alteration of crawfish used chiefly west of the Appalachians, is recorded from 1878, and goggle-eye was a name for the rock bass by 1840124.

Some words stayed local. A wassie, in the dialect, was a rain wash or a swamp. The Shannon County village of Low Wassie, first called Pomeroy, became Low Wossie in 1892, named for a sinkhole close by, and took the spelling Low Wassie in 1925125.