Haunted Ozarks

INTRODUCTION

It’s not that the mountains are so high, it’s just that the valleys are so deep.

—Old folklore saying

Called the Ozarks Uplift or Ozarks Dome by geologists, the area covers about fifty or sixty thousand square miles of southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, southeastern Kansas and southwestern Illinois. The region is comparable to the size of Florida and is bordered by the Mississippi River on the eastern side, the Missouri River to the north, the Arkansas River to the south and the Great Plains, with the Osage and Neosho Rivers, to the west. In Missouri, the Ozarks blend into the Mingo Swamps at the Bootheel in the southeast.

Taum Sauk Mountain, west of Ironton, Missouri, is the tallest peak in the St. Francois Mountains at 1,772 feet. Arkansas’ Boston Mountains have peaks as high as 2,000 feet.

The St. Francois Mountains are the core of the dissected uplift and bear the oldest rocks, formed by 440 million years of submergence beneath the ocean, uplift, erosions and deposits of limestone, granite, rhyolite and dolomite. The Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains together are known as the U.S. Interior Highlands.

Repeated stages of development for the Ozark region are the Cambrian Postosi Formation, the Eminence Formation, the Ordovician Gasconade Formation and the Roubidoux Formation. Each layer was separated by the moving of land plates, erosion and the addition of other materials—such as sandstone, shale and chert (flint)—that formed during stages of exposure. Sometime between seven million and fifty million years ago, the Tertiary uplift took place; this was the latest stage of erosion.

The sediments of sandstone, flint and shale are resistant to weathering, but dolomite and limestone dissolve in water. The years of lying beneath the seas and then being forced upward as the land moved have cause a pitted formation of land, much like a sponge with its many sinkholes, caves, streams and losing streams.

The topography is divided into four sections, mostly rolling hills and valleys. The sections are Springfield Plateau, Salem Plateau, St. Francois Mountains and the Boston Mountains. Divisions between the Springfield and Salem Plateaus are rugged, and the Boston Mountains have valleys ranging from 500 to 1,550 feet deep.

Unique Ozark geographical features are glades, grasses and forbs (herbaceous flowering plants) in shallow soil on exposed bedrock within otherwise heavily forested land, especially in Missouri. The land is rocky. Our yard in Springfield, Missouri, is rough for planting tomatoes, and digging out a garden can be frustrating at best.

Springfield is called a Tree City and showcases some of the glorious trees that make the Ozarks such a beautiful place to live.

Opinions differ on how the region got its name. Many think the word Ozarks is a derivation of the French term Aux Arcs, which translates to Of the Bows. While as a kid I played with the green, cauliflower-like fruit called hedge apples, the Osage Indians found a more practical use, constructing strong bows out of the wood of the Osage orange tree.

There are tales of the word Ozark coming from early people referring to rainbows, as in aux arcs en ciel towards the rainbows. Another possibility is the French word for the bends, or arcs, in the Arkansas River. More derivations include of the arches, in reference to the dozens of natural bridges formed by erosion and collapsed caves in the Ozark region. These include Clifty Hollow Natural Bridge (a series of arches) in Missouri and Alum Cove in the St. Francois National Forest.

Aux Arcs is also thought to be a shortened and corrupted French term meaning to the Ozark Mountains or, in the decades prior to the French and Indian War, to (toward) Arkansas Trading Post. Aux Arkansas originally referred to the trading post at Arkansas Post located in wooded Arkansas Delta lowland above the confluence of the White River with the Mississippi River.

Arkansas appeared to be the French version of what the Illinois tribe (farther up the Mississippi) called the Quapaw, a tribe living in eastern Arkansas in the area of the trading post. Eventually, the term came to refer to all Ozark Plateau drainage into the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers. In the twentieth century, Ozarks became a generic term for the region.

Plateau elevation ranges from 650 to 1640 feet above sea level. The rocks are Mississippian and Pennsylvanian carbonates, domed upwards, folded and faulted. Sixty-five million years ago, during the Tertiary period, water, lithology and erosion created the structural framework of the region, dissecting the land into rounded ridges cut through by narrow, steep-sided valleys. Rocks were dissolved by springs, sinkholes and caves, commonly called karst as a land feature.

The Ozark Plateau consists of about 70 percent forest, 20 percent pasture and 10 percent cropland. Soil consists of weathered carbonate rocks. Trees are mostly oak, pine and hickory.

Weather ranges from humid continental to humid subtropical, with precipitation between forty and fifty inches per year. The Ozark region, characterized by many underground streams and springs, is drained by the Osage, Gasconade, White and Black Rivers. Lake of the Ozarks, impounded by Bagnell Dam on the Osage River, provides power and recreation facilities. Taneycomo Lake, Bull Shoals Lake and Table Rock State Park are also recreation areas.

In Oklahoma, the Ozark Plateau covers a small portion of land, and the uplift in Kansas is even smaller. The Oklahoma Ozarks cover Cherokee, Adair (with portions of Ottawa), Delaware, Wagoner, Muskogee and Sequoyah Counties.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers inhabited the Ozark Plateau about fourteen thousand years ago. Archaeological digs have found remains in campsites and burial grounds. Pictographs give insight into the lives of these indigenous people. The Osage and Quapaw were not nomadic but lived in villages.

Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet first explored the Ozarks about 1673 but did not enter present-day Oklahoma. White settlers, mostly French fur traders, are documented in the area about 1705. In 1770, the Spanish took possession. American settlers trickled in by 1790.

The Cherokee nation lived on the Oklahoma section of the Ozarks Plateau after it was removed from the South. Eight tribes occupied northwestern Oklahoma by 1890: the Cherokee, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ottawa, Quapaw, Peoria, Modoc and Shawnee.

ST. FRANCOIS MOUNTAINS

If you kill a toad, your cows will give bloody milk.

—Ozark superstition

Missouri boasts its own volcanic history in the location of the St. Francois Mountains, an outcrop of Precambrian igneous rock formed of spewed magma, hot gases and acid debris 250 million years ago. This fell and cooled, forming a dense layer of fine-grained igneous rhyolite over a heart of coarse-grained granite.

Shallow seas formed inland layering dolomite and sandstone, sediment upon sediment, several feet thick. The St. Francois Mountains (often misspelled St. Francis Mountains, matching local pronunciation) are one of the oldest exposures of rock in North America, with the Ozarks Dome elevations and stratigraphic inclines radiating downward from Taum Sauk’s peak. This area is thought to be the only American Midwest region to have never been submerged, existing as an island archipelago in the Paleozoic seas. Even fossilized coral and the remains of reefs are found among the rock flanking the mountains.

The St. Francois Mountains are the center of the Missouri mining region, yielding iron, lead, barite, zinc, silver, manganese, cobalt, nickel ores and granite and limestone quarries. Potosi, Missouri, was considered the richest lead deposit in the world. Bell Mountain, near Potosi, is one of the tallest landforms in North America and part of the Missouri Wilderness. Part of the St. Francois Mountains, Bell has a twelve-mile trail ascending to its peak.

Historic Mine La Motte, near Fredericktown, saw lead mining activity by the French as early as 1720. An old granite quarry lies on the edge of Elephant Rocks State Park, a spectacular outcropping of huge, weathered, pinkish granite boulders set in a row like circus elephants on parade.

This range of mountains is said to contain some of the most unique natural features of the state of Missouri, with the most ancient landscapes and least-populated counties. Elephant Rocks, Johnson’s Shut-Ins, the Black River and Sliver Mines and Devil’s Tollgate are part of the attractions in the area.

Johnson’s Shut-Ins lie pocketed away in the St. Francois Mountains among chutes, rivers, gorges and waterfalls. Plains cut out by the constant flow of water now host drought-hardy plants (normally found in the Southwest deserts) among the exposed rocks that share their space with the eastern collared lizard (which rises up to run on its back legs) and scorpions. There is a saying in the area: Never put on your boots in the morning without shaking them out first.

Ancient peoples of America inhabited the Arcadia Valley at the end of the last ice age. They hunted big game, mastodon and the giant ground sloth. As the larger animals died off, the Indians adapted to hunting smaller game and to become forager-gatherers. Their arrowheads and spears became fluted for hunting; they made needles for sewing, nets for fishing and mortars for grinding seeds. Fish and vegetables became staples in their diet.

What is now Missouri once was home to the Hopewell Indians. They fired clay pots and tools, traded furs and built large ceremonial mounds. St. Louis once housed several of these mounds and was nicknamed the Mound City. The largest of these mounds stood at what is now the intersection of Mound and Broadway Streets.

During the Mississipian period, the Native Americans depended more on the rivers and grew crops in the fertile riverbeds. Hernando de Soto and his men encountered the Indians in 1541 after crossing the Mississippi into Calpista and Palisema, modern-day Arcadia Valley and the Black River Recreation Area (this area includes Pilot Knob and Ironton and extends west to the Current River).

The last classified era of Native American development is the Historic period. Starting in 1700, the European explorers discovered tribes of Osage, Delaware, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Piankashaw and others.

It is thought that the Osage were the only Missouri-native tribe. The white man drove other Indians westward as they took over their lands across North America. The Osage were warlike and covered Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Their numbers were greater than those of other tribes. Only the strongest males were allowed to marry and often gained the maiden of their choice, plus her sisters, implementing selective breeding that produced warriors over six feet tall.

A treaty with the Osage took from them most of their claim to the Ozark Plateau, but the Indians thought the treaty did not exclude them from hunting in the area. This often caused trouble with the white settlers, even though the Indians were mostly friendly and even traded and hunted alongside the white man. Various treaties relocated many tribes, and Native Americans became a rarity in the region after 1830. The Trail of Tears passes through the Ozarks, and the loss of many innocent lives haunts our soil. The first white settlers noted about twenty thousand Indians in Missouri.

One superior main street links two towns in the valley, Ironton and Arcadia. Small-town geniality and nineteenth-century buildings stand as a testimonial to the history of the Ozarks in this region. Ephraim Stout was the first white settler in the valley in 1805. On the banks of Stout’s Creek, the first ironworks west of the Mississippi River were erected.

ARCADIA ACADEMY

Arcadia Valley Academy (1846) boasts some of the most beautiful architecture and stained-glass windows in the state. It is haunted by the Ursuline nuns who purchased the former Methodist high school and turned the building into a girls’ school and convent. Some of the best citizens of southeast Missouri graduated from the school.

When the nuns first bought the property, only two of the original buildings existed. The sixteen-room school had only three rooms that were habitable. The unfinished four-story brick building built in 1870 also had three usable rooms.

For 150 years, the academy has towered over the valley. Built by Jerome C. Berryman, the building served as a Union hospital during the Civil War. After the nuns bought the academy, it operated as a school until 1970. When the nuns moved to St. Louis in 1985, the convent closed and is now under private ownership. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district, the academy has two hundred rooms and forty-seven toilets. The gymnasium has a truss system designed in Germany, and the auditorium seats 250 people. The campus occupies seventeen acres and features nine buildings; only one building remains of the original campus, and it houses a bed-and-breakfast.

When run by the nuns, the girls’ lives were strictly monitored; silence was to be maintained except during recreation.

Today, animals seem agitated at the site. Doors open in the night, and footsteps are heard in the halls, supposedly belonging to the nuns who ran the school. Children are often heard playing in the buildings. A Civil War soldier roams the location. A man buried in the cemetery on-site can be seen in the rooms or the hallway. Sounds of large objects being dragged over the floors are heard. Singing is reported. Doors locking and unlocking, odors, mists, the feeling of being touched and shadowy figures are all on the list of anomalies at the academy.

THE LEGEND OF MINA SAUK FALLS

Mina Sauk Falls in the Shut-Ins at Taum Sauk Mountain is the tallest waterfall in Missouri, and according to legend, the mountain’s face displays the grief of Mina Sauk. She was the daughter of Sauk-Ton-Qua, called Taum Sauk by the white man and chief of the Piankishaw.

The Piankishaw tribe was smaller than the Osage, the masters of the area, and the Cherokee, but spent peaceful summers in the Arcadia Valley, land of the flowers, hunting and raising corn. Limestone shelters along the bluffs of the Mississipi became their homes during the winter.

Mina’s tale tells of her beauty and how men desired her. She met a young Osage warrior in the woods, and he wooed her in secret. The couple was discovered, and Mina’s improper behavior cost the young man his life. He was executed on a porphyry outcropping of rock overlooking Taum Sauk Creek and facing Wildcat Mountain. Tossed off the mountain, he was speared by the warriors above when he landed on the succession of rock benches. At last, he lay dying in the valley below.

Mina, in her despair, fought her restraining tribesmen and broke