Joplin Globe Outdoor Page Favorite Hits File

Andy Ostmeyer, The Joplin Globe, Mo.
·4 min read

Oct. 27—Editor's Note: From our favorite hits file, we reprint this outdoors story online in time for Halloween.

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How the devil got his hands on so much Missouri and Arkansas real estate is a mystery.

But he did.

You can't throw a rock in the region without it landing on some place named for Old Scratch.

There are at least two dozen devil's backbones (ridges).

There are more than a dozen devil's dens and devil's iceboxes (caves).

There are numerous devil's tea tables (erosion-carved rock formations and columns with large rock caps on top).

And there are enough sundry features named for the devil that he could outfit his own house. There's a Devil's Courtyard (fractured limestone) feature in Buchanan County and a Devil's Dining Table (rock pinnacle) in Miller County; several devil's ice boxes, a Devil's Kettle (sinkhole) in Bollinger County; and a Devil's Kitchen rock formation in Roaring River State Park near Cassville. Other features around the state are known as the Devil's Punchbowl (sinkhole) in Phelps County and the Devil's Sugar Bowl (bluff formation) in Pulaski County.

"In Missouri, we've got, for some reason or another, a whole mess of things named for the devil," the late Jerry Vineyard, of Ozark, once told me.

Vineyard was a state geologist who revised many years ago an earlier book by Thomas Beveridge, "Geologic Wonders and Curiosities of Missouri," that identified these and many other natural features in Missouri — about 80 in all — named for the devil.

Arkansas, too, has dozens of ridges, caves and other places named for the devil. None of this is unique to the Ozarks. Most famous, of course, is Devil's Tower in northeast Wyoming, which became America's first national monument in 1906.

Vineyard believes using the devil to describe a formation or feature has a lot to do with the religious heritage of the pioneers who first explored and settled the country, and he notes that there seem to be differences when you get farther West, where part of the country was first settled by Spaniards rather than Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Bright Angel, for example, is the name of a rocky, steep and famous trail into and out of the Grand Canyon, part of which follows a creek of the same name.

"In Missouri," said Vineyard, "we'd call that the 'Devil's Walk.'"

Naming areas after the devil also may have something to do with the cantankerous, uncooperative nature of the land in the region, a rocky, thin-soiled country that was next to impossible to farm or from which to make any kind of living. Vineyard told me that Devil's Elbow, for example, is a sharp bend in the Big Piney River that proved a source of frustration to lumbermen who used the river to float rafts of railroad ties to market.

And some of it, said Vineyard, stems from the fact that the devil's home was often thought to be underground, and the region is home to thousands of caves that provide entrance to the underworld. But if that first generation of settlers and explorers were confounded by the land enough to associate it with the devil, later generations saw in some of those places something worth preserving, a reminder of what the Ozarks looked like, an Ozarks that was disappearing with each generation.

Here are few area sites worth visiting:

—Devil's Den State Park, south of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is today one of the region's most popular and most visited parks.

—Rock Bridge Memorial State Park near Columbia preserves the Devil's Icebox, which includes miles of mapped cave passages, although the cave is now closed because of a fungus spreading among bats.

—Roaring River State Park near Cassville contains the 1.5-mile Devil's Kitchen Trail, which includes a stop at a rock formation formed by shifting limestone blocks that created a room with a natural draft that, according to some anecdotes, was used by Civil War guerrillas.

—The Devil's Backbone Wilderness, a designated wilderness area of nearly 6,700 acres south of Willow Springs, is "an ideal area for day hiking or overnight backpacking," according to the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the site. "Elevations range from 380 feet to 1,020 feet along the North Fork of the White River, a high quality, spring-fed Ozark stream. Blue Spring, Amber Spring and McGarr Spring provide water to the river year-round.

"The forest is dominated by a variety of oaks, hickory and shortleaf pine. Dogwood, redbud and wild azaleas give the wilderness a wild burst of color in the spring. ... Fall isn't to be outdone when the oaks, sweet gum and sugar maple put on a show of yellows, oranges and reds."

Sounds more like heaven than hell.

Andy Ostmeyer is the editor at the Globe. His email address is aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com.