by Ken Midkiff
While backpacking recently in the Mark Twain National Forest on the Ozark Plateau, I was impressed once again by the immensity of this region of publicly-owned wooded hills. While this is not a “pristine” area, as evidenced by old sawed-off stumps and long-abandoned logging roads on some of the ridges, civilization has exercised benign neglect.
The first day out, however, I had noted a cemetery, miles from any road, marked on the topographical map. Ducking under overhanging branches of a massive oak tree, I found the rusty gateway leading into the graveyard.
The cemetery had received some attention in the recent past - brush had been cut and the openings between the markers had been cleared. Consequently, the rough stones were exposed to view.
The engravings and inscriptions were blurred, but a bit of peering and guessing revealed that most of the 50 or so graves dated back to the late 1860s to early 1900s. The most recent stone was of a granite commercial nature and was clearly decipherable: “Thomas Bockman. Father. Born 1849. Died 1933.”
I didn’t linger in the cemetery. While my rational nature told me that all that was present were bones of long-dead persons, childhood superstitions and genetic memories are strong. As I ducked under the oak branches to leave the graveyard, I glanced over my shoulder to ensure that I was still alone.
A few days later and miles away, my wanderings took me to a remote stream flowing out of a cave opening. At some time in the distant past, someone had constructed a wall in the cave mouth, and once a door had hung in an opening in this wall. A partially-hidden wooden sign declared that this was Bockman Spring.
A bit of exploring turned up remnants of a fence and some large worked stones that may have been the foundation of a building. There were timbers (a barn?) slowly returning to the soil from whence they came. The clearings in the valleys, which hard hours had prepared for the plow, were now being reclaimed by cedars, black locusts, shrubs and other pioneer species. Thomas Bockman or one of his kin had lived and labored here.
Most of what is now the Mark Twain National Forest was then in private ownership. The devastation wrought by the timber industry in the late 1800s had rendered the land unfit for human habitation. The wild animals that local residents had depended upon for food had vanished along with their habitat. Soil and gravel from eroding hillsides had filled fishing holes in the creeks. Not even the pigs could find acorns. The oaks were gone.
In the space of a few short years, the timber beasts had stripped the hills and valleys and had moved on. The population of the Ozark Plateau plummeted. Lands were abandoned, and the government acquired through tax forfeitures much of what is now the Mark Twain National Forest.
The residents of the area didn’t leave much of a written record. There is very little note of these hardy folk in any history texts. Some local historians have acquired old photographs of inhabitants of nearby small towns. But the lives of the inhabitants of the vast woodlands of the Ozarks are obscure and passed unnoticed.
Their time here is only evidenced by a few surviving remnants: a lonely graveyard, a walled-in spring, a barn returning to the earth, fields that once were turned by the plow now sheltering cedars and songbirds.
The demise was conducted in the name of “progress”. The timber of the Ozarks, the lifeblood of its residents, was taken to supply a growing nation. Towering oaks and massive pines became railroad ties and housing timbers. A century later and the scars of this progress are still there.
But the scars are healing. The stumps and old logging roads will be obliterated by time.
Soon the barns, the fields, and all vestiges of those who lived in and presumably loved these hills and valleys will be gone. But have we learned anything?
Or are we doomed to destroy that which supports and sustains us?