USA > Missouri > Centennial history of Missouri (the center state) one hundred years in the Union, 1820-1921, Volume I > Part 59
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well reach. They are simply rude ovens, calculated to hold drying but not baking heat.
The threshing machine, which goes from farm to farm in the grain country, has its counterpart in the evaporator on wheels which travels from orchard to orchard and saves the crop on shares or for a stipulated price per pound.
Corporations That Eliminate Water.
At the more important fruit centers of the Ozarks, evaporators which do the work on a large scale have been built by companies. Farmers' wagons stand before the door at all hours of the day, discharging the surplus of the small orchards which are yielding more than the owners can care for. Fifteen cents a bushel for apples and five cents a bushel for peaches bring to the evaporator about as much as can be handled. These are the small seedling peaches and the fall and defective winter apples which sell at such figures. When good fruit is brought in the evaporator management packs and ships it.
Machinery does the work in the evaporator. It can't pick up the apples, but that is all it asks of human agency. As soon as the apple is impaled on the fork the machine carries it round and round at varying angles under the knife until in a few seconds it is beautifully pared. The last twist of the machine leaves a round hole where the core was. Wheels and belts apply the power. All that the attendant does is to pick the apple from the basket and stick it on the fork. Two girls sit in front of the box into which the pared and cored apples fall from each machine. They pick up the apples and trim away any speck or bit of skin which may have escaped the machine knife. As fast as the girls fill a tray it is pushed into an almost air-tight chamber. Sulphur is burning below, and the fumes rise through the slats in the bottom of the tray and reach almost the entire surface of the apple. This is the bleaching process. From the bleaching box the apples come out a beautiful white. An inquisitive man, on his first visit to the evaporator, picked up a newly bleached apple and ate it. He said it had the queerest flavor of any apple he had ever tried. The taste in his mouth reminded him of the time his mother used to give him sulphur and molasses every other morning in springtime "for his blood." Bleached apples are not intended for immediate consumption. A few hours will dissipate the fumes. The smell of the brimstone is noticeable at first, but it soon passes away.
The automatic slicer is as ingenious as the paring and coring machine. After being bleached the apples go into a hopper. They drop, one by one, upon an endless chain, and are carried through a machine which deposits them in evenly cut slices. The slices are spread on a tray which is pushed on the slides of the drying room. There it remains in a heat of from 130 to 140 degrees. Five hours complete the process from the farmer's wagon to the finished fruit ready to be packed in 20-pound boxes. The evaporated fruit, after the method de- scribed, is a much handsomer product than that which comes off the bed cover and the back shed of the farm house. It commands considerably more per pound.
One of these paring and coring machines will do eighty bushels of apples a day. The slicer will chew up 600 bushels a day. While the pressure of the ripen- ing season is on they run night and day. That is to say, the drying room will be kept going continuously. The machinery has a capacity sufficient to turn out in
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ten hours enough pared, cored and sliced apples to supply the drying room in operation twenty-four hours.
The Rocks and the Orchards.
Throughout the Ozark country, valleys, or "bottoms," as they are called, are found along the streams. These bottoms, from a few rods to a mile or two wide, have deep and wonderfully fertile soil. They grow from fifty to seventy- five bushels of corn to the acre. No fruit man of experience wastes his time in setting out bottom orchards, for there is simply no comparison between results in the valleys and on the rocky hillsides and hilltops. The rougher the ground the better the orchard seems to be the rule. On a slope, where the little round stones cover the ground from three to six inches deep, fruit trees do gloriously. Unpromising as the surface looks, there is soil underneath the stones which makes an apple tree laugh.
Some astonishing theories are advanced to account for the fruit conditions of the Ozark country. Riding along a road, a local horticulturist pointed to a great heap of stones which an industrious farmer had picked off his land. "Within five years," the horticulturist said, "that man will be hauling those rocks back on his land."
The head of one of the commercial fruit companies of Howell, who came down from Illinois, had the stones picked off the slopes of his orchard and piled in a fine wall along the highway. He says he would not do it again. It is con- tended by some of the fruit growers that this coating of small stones is a great advantage to the land. One will hold that it keeps the moisture in the soil. An- other will argue that when the rain falls, these stones, many of which are porous, absorb water like so many sponges and then give off moisture when the weather turns dry. A third defender of the rocky soil will explain plausibly how the heating of the stones by day and the cooling of them by night greatly increases the condensation and precipitation. There may be something in this last claim; the dews of the Ozark country are equal to light rains. For one reason or an- other the fruit growers would not have the stones taken away if they could. An ingenious inventor patented one of the oddest-looking vehicles ever seen. It was designed to pick up stones automatically as it was driven over the field. The first impression of a stranger would be that the patent was a great thing for this country. But the pick-me-up was scarcely more than a curiosity. There was no demand for it among the fruit growers.
Fruit growing has received a tremendous impetus around West Plains, and the would-be horticulturist naturally goes there to see the. big orchards. It does not appear, however, from the statements of the unprejudiced, that Howell county enjoys marked advantages in natural fruit conditions over other parts of the Ozark country. There are ten or twelve counties in South Missouri where fruit enterprises will give the same magnificent results. The lower slopes prob- ably insure more regular peach crops. But wherever there is a slope or a plateau a thousand feet above the level of the sea, and most of the Ozark country shows that or a little more altitude, apples will grow to beat the world. The success of the Olden experiment naturally attracted attention to that immediate portion of the Ozark country. That explains largely why Howell county is so much in
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advance of counties east, west, south and north of her in orchard development. Fruit is the barter. Farmers bring in fruit for sugar, fruit for coffee and fruit for calico. Fruit is on exhibition in the store windows.
Stones and Strawberries.
A. M. Haswell told this story of personal experiences in the rocky Ozarks:
"I was near the thriving little city of Anderson, in McDonald county, the southwest corner of Missouri. Across the road from the farmhouse where I was entertained there was a typical Ozark hill-stony, steep and mostly wooded. But on the east this hill ran down into a long, stony point to the level of the adjoining valley, and on this tongue of hill was growing the thriftiest field of strawberry plants that I had ever seen, and I am an old strawberry raiser. The great, sturdy plants stood up a foot high and the rows had formed solid masses of vines from end to end. But it was not alone the thrifty plants that attracted my attention; fine strawberry plants are no rarity in the Ozarks ; but it was the fact that between the thrifty rows there was not one single grain of soil to be seen! Literally true-not an atom of soil, nothing but flint rocks !
"I climbed the fence and made a closer examination. Those magnificent strawberry plants were growing in as well macadamized a tract as I ever saw in a roadway in my life! Just then the owner of the field came along and, with a smile, said: 'I see you are looking at my strawberry patch. Fine, ain't they?'
"I assured him that I had never seen finer plants and added: 'I wish you would tell me how you ever planted them among these rocks and how, when planted, they managed to grow into such plants as these?'
"'Well,' he answered, 'when the ground is newly plowed we turn up a good deal of soil, but it washes in among the rocks again as soon as it rains.'
" 'But why don't you pick up the rocks?' I asked.
"'Pick 'em up! Why man, I'd feel like taking a shotgun to the man that would try it!'
"And then he explained, that that covering of flint rock was the best possible mulch for his plants. That six inches or less from the surface all rock ceased, and that once set, the plant roots reached down into a permanent reservoir of moisture, which no drouth could affect. Moreover, the stony covering held the frost in the ground in the spring, and kept the plants from starting to bloom before danger from frost was passed.
"How much do you suppose that stony point of hill brought its owner that year? There were just three-quarters of an acre of it, and it had yielded strawberries which sold on board the cars at the station for a fraction over $500!
"Speaking of stony land and what it will do recalls an experience I had a few years ago in Stone county, down near the Arkansas line. I had stayed over night with a farmer, and as I was about to drive away in the morning he said to me: 'Come out in the orchard and get some peaches to eat on the road.'
"That orchard occupied the summit of one of the 'Bald Knobs,' such as are immor- talized by the name 'Bald Knobbers.' It was a steep hill, probably 300 feet above the valley at its foot, and it was by nature as bald as Bill Bryan has got to be in these latter years. Also it was a thoroughly fitted out stone quarry. The whole rounded surface of the hill was a solid gray of rock. Look across it and you could not believe it any better than a solid city pavement. But the rocks were loose, and scattered among them were some hundred or so of the largest, thriftiest peach trees that I ever saw, and every tree was loaded to the limit !
"In answer to my surprised questioning, the farmer told me that he had set those trees out in 1870! That is, they were over 35 years old, when I saw them. Remember, that in most locations fifteen years is about the length of life of a peach tree. Old as they were, they were not showing any signs of dying, and they were full. That farmer told me of digging the holes to set those trees with pick ax and crowbar, but he also told me, as did the man at Anderson, that six or eight inches deep you would run into a fine Vol. 1-35
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reddish clay, without so much as a gravel stone in it. That was what gave those trees their chance, and, if their owner is to be believed, they had not failed of a crop in twenty-five years."
The Lesson Taught by the Wild Products.
From the wild products of the Ozark country John H. Curran drew the im- pressive lesson of possibilities :
"Ask the Ozark farmer boy about nuts and wild fruits. In the spring he will bring you the tart sheep sorrel, the creamy May apple and the wild straw- berry hiding in the grass. As summer advances he will show you blueberries, blackberries and dewberries along the lanes, and mulberries hanging low, with sweet roots and Indian tobacco after the meal.
"As the first frost falls he will shake the persimmon trees and catch for you mealy dainties or lead you to the paw paw patch where hangs nature's charlotte russe. Black and red haws with flavors all their own hang from bending branches.
"This Ozark lad will show you his store of walnuts, hickory nuts, hazelnuts and pecans and perhaps some chestnuts and butternuts, all speaking eloquently of the soil, the rain, the sunshine and the pure air of his country. home."
In the soil of the Ozark country Mr. Curran discovers the secret of the successful horticulture :
"From the limestone of Bonne Terre and the weathering porphyrys of the eastern part to the great galena formation of the Southwest extends a field of intensely interest- ing geological study. The soil content shows mineral saturation in many districts. Much of it contains iron which is said to be responsible for the rich color of the fruit and for flavors unexcelled by any fruit in the world.
"Phosphate is richly present on many chert-covered ridges and hillsides, a prime necessity in any successful orchard region. The weathering of this stone gives a con- stant supply of this important plant food.
"Ninety per cent of the uncultivated lands of the region are in timber-white, black, red, burr and post-oak, hickory, gum, walnut, bullpine, maple, elm and an unlimited variety of hardwoods, cover the hillsides, valleys and ridges, an ever-present reminder that the Ozarks lie in natural tree country. Where the forests are, there also are the forest fruits, and where wild fruits grow naturally, cultivated varieties thrive. The tree food is there and will do its work if given a chance."
The Age of the Ozarks.
"I believe," said a Connecticut man who settled in the Ozarks, "the geologists hold that these mountains are among the earliest created. They were formed long before some ranges which are a great deal higher and more imposing. They came into existence at such an early period that the strata do not include the Devonian age. That is to say, fishes had not come into being, and therefore we do not find fish fossils in our rocks. Speaking about the age of this Ozark country, do any of you know who was the first Arkansas traveler?"
Of course everybody gave way to the New Haven man's superior knowledge.
"Noah, of course," was the answer, "I read in the Bible only the other day that 'Noah opened the door of the ark and saw land!'"
With variation Governor Brough told this foregoing story of his state's antiquity to the Democratic convention at San Francisco in July, 1920, and it was received with hilarious enthusiasm.
Mayor John M. Wimer
Mayor John F. Darby
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Mayor Peter G. Camden
Mayor Bernard Pratte
Mayor Luther M. Kennett
A GROUP OF ST. LOUIS MAYORS OF THE YEARS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
CHAPTER XVI
LANDMARKS AND LEGENDS
Elephas Americanus in the Osarks-A Whole Pine Tree Top for a Meal-The Discovery at Carl Junction-Dr. Hambach's Conclusions-Zinc in Solution-Miners and Mineral- ogists Disagree-The Missourium Teristocolodon-Dr. Koch, Scientist-A Trade with The British Museum-The Market for Zuglodons-Star Curiosity of Wyman's Museum in 1842-Mastodon Beds at Kimmswick-An Amazed Professor-Tom Sauk Falls- Allen Hinchey's Indian Legend-The Footprints Which Laclede Found-Lilliput on the Meramec-A Scientific Investigation-Gerard Fowke on "The Clayton Ax"-Beck- with's Discoveries in Southeast Missouri-Eugene Field's Folk Lore Study-Alex- ander, King of the Missouri Voodoos-Mary Alicia Owen-The Initiation-Some Philosophic Conclusions-The Mamelles-A Variety of Topographical Eccentricities- Freak Work by the Water Courses-Murder Rocks-The Granite Potato Patch-Shut In and Stone Battery-The Pinnacles-Knob Noster-Cedar Pyramid-Tower Rock and Tower Hill-The Pictured Rocks-Treasure Traditions-The Springfield Chart- A Dying Sailor's Secret-The Michigan Man's Unsatisfactory Experience-Three Turkey Tracks and Three Arrows-Mystery of Garrison Cavc-A Tradition of the Delaware Indians-Woody Cave in Taney.
I have just paid my first visit to the mastodon beds of Kimmswick and they are the most wonderful I have ever seen. Missouri may well boast of them as a page out of the history of the world that has no duplicate. It is a treasure most rare. Every piece of this great collection ought to be carefully preserved until science may reach the point where it can put this page in the right place in the history of the earth and leave the story complete .- Professor W. H. Holmes, Curator, Smithsonian Institution.
Elephas Americanus roamed in all parts of the Ozarks. Skeletons have been unearthed near Kimmswick on the bank of the Mississippi and at Carl Junction within three miles of the Kansas border and at several places between those extreme limits. The bones taken out of a zinc mine at Carl Junction in 1892 were shipped to Washington University. Dr. Hambach, the paleontologist, said they indicated an animal from thirteen to eighteen feet in height. Elephas Americanus was from twenty-five to thirty feet long-could not walk the streets of St. Louis without burning off its back all of the long hair by contact with the trolley wires. One of the tusks was nine feet long and nine inches in diameter. This animal had teeth with a grinding surface nine inches long and four inches wide. Elephas Americanus of the great tooth and greater tusks walked on four legs, and ponderous underpinning it was. The ball on which the hind leg moved in the hip socket is as large as the body of a man. The length of that thigh bone can only be proven by proportions. The ball and part of the thigh bone have been found, but where the bone tapers midway between thigh and knee there is a break. Better preserved is the upper bone of the fore leg. The first of the joints of the backbone, that on which the head rolled, has been
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found and so has the last of the vertebra, that from which the tail extended. This animal had a foot which was a mass of bones, like the hog's foot. Coarse hair, as long as the goat's, covered it from proboscis to tail, and it wandered among glaciers and was glad.
A while ago the miners near Carl Junction found half-digested pine cones and needles far underground, and later they got the animal that fed upon such coarse provender. In this day and generation there are no pine trees within forty or fifty miles of Carl Junction. The mammoth took whole pine tree tops for a living. He chewed up chunks of pine wood as large as sections of tele- graph poles. And for that purpose he had four of these great teeth on each side of his mouth, two upper and two lower.
About the time of the Civil war a storekeeper in southwestern Missouri turned over all of his visible assets to three St. Louis wholesale houses for his obligations. These assets included a tract of land. In the division of the wreck the land fell to Fiske, Knight & Co., and in the division of the profits of that firm Mr. Knight came into possession of the land. The acres are arable. They would class as pretty fair farming land. But at that time land within three miles of the Kansas border was not in demand, and Mr. Knight accepted the tract at a valuation of $2 or $3 an acre-all it was worth as things were then. There was no junction, for the first of the two roads hadn't been built. Lead miners didn't know zinc ore when they saw it. They were throwing it out on their dumps by the thousands of tons. They called it "black jack" and usually prefixed a little profanity to indicate its utter worthlessness in their opinion.
Mr. Knight allowed his land to remain idle. Carl Junction came into ex- istence. The two railroads were built. Soon the tract was the only unoccupied land in the vicinity. Men went to the owner and asked the terms on which he would lease and let them inclose for farming purposes. Mr. Knight refused to name any figures. He said the people of Carl Junction wouldn't have any place to pasture their cows free if his land was fenced, and so he left it open. The line of the zinc mining came closer and closer until the shafts were sunk close up to the Knight line. Mr. Knight found himself called upon to refuse an offer of $100,000 for the land, which represented to him a bad debt of perhaps $2,000 and the taxes paid through a long series of years. Then, for the first time, he consented to the development work which might show what lay under this long-preserved virgin prairie. Holes were drilled at intervals from one end to another of the long strip. The drill struck ore everywhere, and in three places it developed four and five-foot veins of coal.
Down in the valley of Center creek is a depression. The earth sinks as if the top of a small cave somewhere underneath has fallen. In such places zinc miners look for "a chimney," as they call it, and for ore. In this depression S. A. Stuckey, the manager for Mr. Knight, proceeded to sink a shaft. He went through five feet of rich black soil. Then came clay, a stratum eight feet thick. The next thing was gravel-water-worn gravel with the edges rounded and smoothed as if the mass had been stirred in a great mortar for years. Below the gravel the diggers encountered a black, sticky, muck-like mass, and in that they found the burying ground of the Elephas Americanus.
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A Curious Theory about Zinc.
It has been ages since the Elephas Americanus roamed the slopes of the Ozarks and crunched huge branches of the pine trees to fill his enormous paunch. "Ages" is indefinite enough to be safe. It is long enough to furnish the basis for a mineralogical revelation. Practical zinc men have developed a curious theory about that curious ore. Most of the scientists rather scoff at the theory. Manager Stuckey and some others of the more intelligent and thoughtful class of practical zinc miners contended that zinc is a shifting ore. They believe it shifts from place to place ; that water is the chief agency in carrying and deposit- ing the ore. This ore is not a carbonate; it is a sulphide. Sulphuric acid is a principle in the formation of it. The sulphuric acid breaks down the crystals and water carries the zinc in solution from place to place, depositing it and leaving it to form ore. This is the argument of the practical zinc men. Min- eralogists do not accept any such idea as to the shifting about and growth of the ore. But mundic is the beginning of zinc formation. It is "the shine" which indicates the probable presence of ore. Some of the mammoth bones uncovered in Center creek valley have become honeycombed by decay, and in the openings thus left mundic has made its appearance. Since the owner of the bones went down to burial in some cataclysm the underground currents of water have been carrying the elements of zinc in solution and have left zinc crystals in the rotting bones. In this zinc belt is frequently found what the miners call "mineral wool." It is ore honeycombed. The miners explain the appearance by saying that the acid has broken down the zinc crystals and water has carried off the ore in solution to be deposited in some new place.
The Missourium Teristocolodon.
One day a wandering scientist from St. Louis was journeying through the interior of the state. He came to a farmer digging a well in Osage county. True to his geological instincts, he began overhauling the heap of dirt beside the well. He examined the different strata with professional interest. But when he suddenly came upon some half-decayed bones his whole paleontological nature was aroused. Veiling his curiosity with the calmness which is part of the scientist's outfit, the stranger climbed down into the well and saw a sight that fired his soul. Bones were sticking out in a dozen places. The scientist and the farmer talked over the discovery, and the former drove a bargain with the latter. It was agreed that the scientist should finish the well and in return for the labor should have any bones he might find. The bargain was carried out. The professor dug the well to water and carried away the bones of a mastodon. This was in 1840. The scientist was Dr. Koch. At his leisure, in St. Louis, he put together the fragments until there stood before him the frame of a mastodon. He took his prize to pieces, packed the bones in boxes and sailed for London. The Britishers were charmed, but they were not bidding high for prehistoric skeletons. The tusks of all well-regulated mastodons curve upward. That is the decision of paleontology. Dr. Koch turned the tusks of his mastodon so that they curved outward. He insisted that his mastodon was of an entirely new species. He gave it the name of Missourium Teristocolodon, or the sickle- toothed mastodon. Perhaps the sickle-tooth caught the foreigners. At any rate,
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after much dickering they entered into a contract by which they agreed to give the professor $2,000 for the skeleton and an annuity of $1,000. They had previously looked the doctor over and concluded that the death risk was a good one to take. Dr. Koch, however, was tough. He lived until 1866 and drew his annuity for twenty-six years. The British Museum paid $28,000 for the Missourium Teristocolodon. After studying the skeleton awhile the paleon- tologists came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the sickle- tooth. They twisted the tusks around until they pointed in the same way that other mammoth tusks point, and they crossed off the books the new species which Dr. Koch claimed to have discovered.
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