Chapter 3
More Moves and a Feud
The crops did not
amount to much that year on Doc Hunt’s place as the big drought of the thirties
was getting underway and Hard Times were in full swing. My father put his seed corn and his hopes
into that worked-out red Ozark soil, but neither came to much. He gave up renting and went back to tenant
farming in 1931 or thereabouts.
This time we moved
into a big yellow farmhouse about a mile south of Bona and a quarter of a mile
off the road to Dadeville. In all of our
moves in those days we kept getting a little closer to that little store was
there, is why I feel that Bona (such as it is) is my home town. [village would
be a better term]
That yellow house
was up a long rocky lane from the county road.
At that time the county road was just a rocky dirt country road. There were no bridges over Maze Creek,
halfway to Dadeville, or over the Little Sac River, south of Dadeville near
Tarrytown. In either wagon or car, it
was necessary to ford the streams where rocks and gravel had been filled in to
make a shallow riffle for the road to cross.
Richard and I were
old enough by then to ramble around the countryside exploring and we really
began to appreciate the beauty and peace of those Ozark hills. It is an area of gently rolling hills,
extensive green woodlands, creeks, and river. There are no mountains in southwest Missouri. The “Ozark Mountains” that you hear about—really
just overgrown steep hills with lots of woodlands and deep ravines—are mostly
in southeast Missouri and down into Arkansas.
I don’t like my father’s term “overgrown’
hills. As an adjective, it is the
opposite of what is happening to the Ozarks Mountains. What Uncle Dick told me, and I believe him,
is that the reason the Missouri Ozarks Mountains, particularly those in the area
our family is from, are the oldest mountains in the world. Some people believe that the Appalachians (where
our family passed through) are the oldest, but they are taller than the Ozarks.
Like old people, the Ozarks have become worn and stooped from the millenniums
of years since their birth, but their spirit is strong, but by 1931 the soil
was worn out. When I am there I can feel
the ancientness. Whatever those
mountains may seem to suffer when compared to our Cascades or the Himalayas they
make up for in spirit. Too, whoo whoo
for you? Go there.
Those Ozark hills,
however, were a veritable wonderland to us.
The deep woods—interspersed with cornfields, grain fields (wheat and
oats), and open pastures—were mostly deciduous trees that were thick-leaved and
shady in summer and bare in winter.
There was little underbrush in those woodlands so we could roam freely
through them.
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| Fox Squirrel |
The hills at that
time abounded with small game. Besides
the many cottontail rabbits, grey squirrels and fox squirrels, there were quail
and ducks in the fall. There were more
song birds than I can count: mocking birds, whippoorwills, cardinals, scarlet
blackbirds, and many many sparrows.
There were many crows and (as scavengers to keep the countryside clean
of carrion) turkey buzzards that wheeled silently in the blue sky.
We had plenty of
catfish in the rivers and creeks as well as perch, bluegills, and chubs so us
kids grew up with a fishing line and cork bobber in our back pockets. It seemed that we always had new territory to
explore and yet, in retrospect, I realize that our real world lay within a
circle around Bona of about four miles in diameter. Anything outside that was alien territory and
any person—other than relatives—from outside was a “stranger” upon whom we
looked with a bit of suspicion.
In the halcyon
days of roaming those hills and woodlands, squirrel rifle in hand and fishing
line in pocket, we came to know that home territory so intimately that we could
find our way unerringly home even on moonless nights with only the familiar star
constellations to guide us.
No matter where they roamed, the stars always
seemed to guide members of the family back to Dade County.
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