About this time of year, in
the early autumn of 1857, John Joseph Hogan left Chillicothe to survey the
cheaper, government land available for purchase in the Ozarks. Look at a road map today and you’ll realize
that there still is not an easy way to cover those 400-plus miles from his
chosen mission in Chillicothe to southeast Missouri. Still he was determined:
It
seemed to me to be my duty to do whatever might be in my power, to aid these
people to rise from their condition of servitude, to ownership and cultivation
of land, so as to secure for them, beyond doubt, a settled and permanent mode
of existence, that would accord better with their higher social aspirations and
religious principles. This, however, could not be done in North Missouri, where
land was held at too high a price.
Hogan wasn’t one to plunge
off without a plan. He had procured
plots and surveys of available government lands in the Ozarks and knew where he
was going. The
itinerary he lists in his memoir (On the Mission in Missouri: 1857-1868) of his
first trip southward is short, but it would have been an arduous journey by steamboat on the Missouri River to St. Louis, then train to Iron Mountain or Frederick Town, then by horseback into the hills and over rivers for several weeks.
SURVEYING
Traveling by way of Brunswick,
Jefferson City, St. Louis, Old Mines, Potosi, Iron Mountain and Frederick Town,
I halted at Greenville, in Wayne County, where I hired a surveyor familiar with
the country. I examined the lands on the head waters of Little Black River,
Cane Creek, Brushy Creek, in Ripley (now Carter) county, and entered four
hundred and eighty acres in a body on Ten Mile Creek, making arrangements at
once to put men thereon, opening and cultivating it.
With the surveyor I rode
westward, across the Current River, by Van Buren, up Pike Creek, thence
southward over the great divide east of Eleven Points River as far as the head
waters of Buffalo Creek, thence eastward along Buffalo Creek and its
tributaries to a ford on Current River. At this place there was a mill and
homestead owned and occupied by a man named Appollinaris Tucker; he and his
family were the only Catholics known to be residing at that time in that
district. At the time of my arrival, Mrs. Tucker was in the last stages of her
mortal illness, in which it seemed God's Holy Will that she should linger until
her longings could be gratified to receive the last Sacraments; and, as it
happened, from the hands, of the first priest known to have come into that
region of country. After Mrs. Tucker’s death, I returned homewards, by way of
Iron Mountain, St. Louis, and Hannibal, to Chillicothe.
Appollinaris and Ellen Tucker purchased government land in 1854 and 1856 in Ripley County. There is no record of the mill after the Civil War or of what became of Appollinaris Tucker.
Tucker Bay Spring, with 24 million gallons a day, is #18 on the list of Missouri's 20 largest springs. A Google search brings up little information and few pictures. It's located on Forest Service land in the Mark Twain National Forest in Ripley County and the site is difficult to get to. The spring does not have a dramatic gushing-forth-from-the-rocks beauty like Greer Springs or Big Springs, but rises along the lower one-third mile of an
intermittent stream, at the base of a hill, seeming to come from a
fault. Other than this account by John Joseph Hogan, there seems to be very little known about it or the people who might have lived by it. Tucker Bay Spring remains one of the mysteries in the region known as the Irish Wilderness.
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