Bay Creek

Dyer Bluff, George Dyer Bluff and Big Rock Hole

Bluffs and pool · both banks · about miles 25.0 to 25.7 · Plate A9

The big bluff on the right, rimmed by the river where it turns north toward Bay Creek, is called Dyer Bluff. It rises about 310 feet2 above the water. What looks from below like a cave in it is said to be only a shelter, a disappointment to anyone who climbs the steep slope1 to it.

George Dyer Bluff stands on the left between Bay Creek and the old George Dyer Place, above Big Rock Hole, and rises about 280 feet4. A rock on the bank, by one account, once stood six feet above the water there, and children dove off it into the hole. By 1980 the rock could no longer be seen3.

Bay Creek

Creek, landing and campground · left bank · about mile 25.9 · Plate A9

Bay Creek comes in on the left at the end of the reach. It drains about fifteen square miles of upland, but on the state’s stream maps only about a mile of its nine flows all year1, and in August 2006 it was adding half a cubic foot2 of water a second to the river. By one account it always runs water, though a floater hardly notices it, and its springs lie mostly in Watered Hollow, the fork of the creek that holds water; the Burk Heiney Spring, a big one, is said to rise below the mouth of Watered Hollow. Dry Hollow, which by the same account holds no visible water at all, comes down beside the creek at its mouth, and the road from Highway 106 came down it to the Joab Dyer Place3. The river used to swing to the right through what was called the Clay Bank Hole. By 1980 it ran straight past the mouth of the creek, and in normal water none flowed through the old channel4 (Chapter 15).

The Park Service keeps a landing and a backcountry campground at Bay Creek, at the end of a gravel road from Highway 1065 (Chapter 11). Archaeologists checking the ground for park development around 1980 recorded prehistoric chipped stone, including large dart points, at Bay Creek, along with late-nineteenth-century ceramics and bottle glass6 (Chapter 3). In April 2007 a party of cavers camped on a high gravel bar about a hundred yards from the last of the Bay Creek campsites, across from a high, steep bluff “pockmarked with holes.” Around midnight one of them heard a large animal moving through the brush across the narrow river, perhaps forty feet away, and got a good enough look to be confident it was a small black bear. A black bear had been reported in the vicinity, and it frequently broke into coolers at the Bay Creek campground7. Black bears, rare in Missouri by the 1850s (Chapter 13), had nearly disappeared by the early 1900s, and by the 1930s and 1940s few if any were left. Between 1958 and 1968 Arkansas released 254 bears caught in Minnesota and Manitoba, bears began crossing north into Missouri, and by 2024 the state estimated about a thousand, increasing by about 8 percent a year8.

The Joab Dyer Place stood on the hill between Bay Creek and Dry Hollow, and above the old home place, near the edge of the trees, thirty to forty graves make up the Dyer Cemetery, where Dyers, Donaldsons, Hardwicks, Ipocks, Stuarts, Coops and Cookys9 are buried. About twenty families are said to have lived on Bay Creek, and the big flood of 1928 ruined most of their small farms (Chapter 14). By one account there were two sawmills on the creek. In that flood the mule barn at Kooler’s mill, about a mile and a half up, washed away, and drowned mules were found the next day scattered clear to the mouth of the creek. Cleve Hoberry and a man named Babcock had the other mill about three miles up, and Hoberry, Joab Dyer’s father-in-law, is said to have come from California. Another mill stood at Black Pond10.

A sawyer born in 1914 who grew up near Bay Creek, and lived near it for forty-six years, remembered that people there held back from burning the woods to save the acorns for their hogs11 (Chapter 5). He also remembered “a lot of bays along the river, that the water come up but there wasn’t no current through it,” which disappeared when the drifts went out of the river. Where the creek’s name came from has not been recorded; another Bay Creek, on the Current, takes its name from Goose Bay12. In November 1863 ten Union militiamen came down Bay Creek to the Jacks Fork on the same patrol13 that came down Leatherwood (Chapter 6).

Dyer Ford, the castle bluff and Boneyard Hollow

Ford, bluff and hollow · left bank · about miles 25.9 to 26.3 · Plate A9

Dyer Ford1 crossed the river at the mouth of Bay Creek, below the old Joab Dyer Place (Reach F). Below it a small bluff borders the river on the left between Dry Hollow, which comes down beside Bay Creek3 and holds no visible water, and Boneyard Hollow. In winter, by one account, three upright rocks jut out of the cliff like the fortifications of a castle. Boneyard Hollow is said to be named for a nearby farm that used it to dispose of dead farm animals2. A slough called the Spring Bay began at its mouth. By 1980 the river had cut into the Spring Bay and it was gone, and thirty to forty feet had been cut off the left bank of the field below Bay Creek4.