Pilgrim Jim's Treasure Field
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Matthew 6:21
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I have heard many interesting and compelling
stories about rivers, streams and creeks, many with colorful, attractive titles
such as, On The Banks Of Plum Creek or On The Banks Of Walnut Creek and also a
catchy title like, A River Runs Through It. I have also heard of
adventures along the banks of the Red River. I have never lived near Plum Creek,
Walnut Creek or the Red River, but I can tell you about some times when I lived
On The Banks Of #4 Ditch, five miles east of Bernie, Stoddard County,
Missouri during the late 1930's and early 1940's. Those times were hard times
but they made some good memories. The sometimes surging, sometimes still,
stream of water that made up #4 Ditch was a part of the Little River Drainage
Project that had been constructed between the years 1914 and 1928. The purpose
of the drainage project was to drain off the excess water that at one time had
almost completely covered the land in the Southeastern Lowlands area of
Missouri. The waters in #4 Ditch generally flowed South, making a few minor
twists and turns, then emptied into a floodway, that flowed into the Little
River, and miles later, joined the St. Francis River in Arkansas, and then into
the Mississippi River. That was the intended purpose and intended flow of the
ditch but sometimes, during flood times, #4 Ditch spread out wide and far and we
found what appeared to be the Mississippi River in our front yard.
I remember going swimming, skinny dipping, in
the waters of the ditch that flowed by our house. We kept a watch out for
snakes, which were plentiful, and when I was about seven or eight years old, I
often wondered if a turtle might bite me somewhere, like on a finger or a toe,
but it was fun. The road bridge that crossed the ditch was only about 60 yards
from our house so we had ready access to either side. I remember having small
artillery wars from one side of the ditch to the other by using old water pipe
as the artillery guns. We plugged up one end of the pipe, stuck it into the
ground, and used a forked stick to support the open end. We built a fire around
the pipe and poured water into the pipe, then stuck a good fitting corncob into
the open end. When the water in the pipe began to boil and steam built up in the
pipe, the corncob would suddenly pop out of the pipe and sail across the ditch.
It was probably a dangerous thing to do and I don't recommend it today,
but it was a lot of fun back in those days. We sometimes had more than one pipe
steaming on each side of the ditch.
I remember times when my cousins, Norman and
Charles Ott, came to visit us and we had corncob wars around the barns and corn
cribs. My brothers and cousins were all older than I was but I had a lot of fun
anyway. My brothers, Gene and Howard, and my cousins, Norman and "Todd", never
threw corn cobs at me because I was so much younger than they were but I
sometimes got into the line of fire anyway. I remember a time when a heavy
corncob landed beside my head, just forward of my ear, and I heard ringing
sounds and saw some pretty lights for a moment, but it was fun.
When flood seasons came to that part of
Stoddard County, #4 Ditch could become a wide, scary looking stream of water,
and it sometimes appeared to be going in the opposite direction from the way it
usually flowed. As the water kept getting higher and higher, it leaked at the
low spots and pretty soon our entire yard and many of the fields around us would
be covered with water. The house was built up on blocks and I don't remember
water getting into the house where we lived but it came close. I learned that a
pig trough does not make a very good boat because it tips over too easily. I
remember seeing fish swimming in our yard and the high waters usually brought
some really big ones into the main body of the ditch. I once saw a catfish that
weighed 74 pounds, but it wasn't in #4 Ditch. It was in the trunk of a man's car
and he had caught it in the floodway that #4 Ditch flowed into.
When the waters finally started to recede,
the flow of water in the ditch would seem to change directions and begin to flow
back South again toward the Floodway, the Little River, the St. Francis River,
and then the Mississippi, sometimes leaving behind some big fish of assorted
kinds. I used a plain wooden pole as a fishing pole but I can remember catching
some good sized fish, catfish, and several different kinds of perch. They tasted
good when fried and it was a lot of fun. The receding waters left more than fish
behind and it was always a lot of fun to go exploring, to see what interesting
articles had been deposited in the yard and fields around us. I remember finding
a lot of bottles, all kinds and shapes of bottles, some of which would probably
be valuable now. Some articles would bring questions to my mind as I wondered
who had lost them and how far away they had come from. It was like a history and
a geography lesson in my mind and it was fun. I didn't have very many toys or
store bought things to play with but I remember having fun anyway. Those were
hard times but like a line of a song says, "There's Hard Times, Sometimes,
Anyplace You Go".
When we lived on the banks of #4 ditch, I attended school at
Middle Smith School, a small country school house with two rooms. A long,
folding, divider wall could be opened up to make the interior of the building
into a one-room-school where all eight grades were in the same enclosure. That
environment must have been difficult for the Teacher, who spent some portions of
time with each class or grade. I remember a few of my teachers and the one I
remember more clearly is Miss Pauline Murphy who started teaching school shortly
after graduating from High School. I remember her as being a good person and I
liked her. Middle Smith School was two and one-half miles from where I lived and
I walked to school each day, usually bare-foot in good weather. There were times
when some of my shoes were hand-me-downs from my older brother.
I was still quite young when I moved away from
Southeast Missouri and since then, there has been a lot of water under the
bridge that crosses #4 ditch. Some of the names that I remember from those times
in the 1930's and early 1940's are these:
Bannister, Bates, Beaird,
Cunningham, Gobble, Hester, Kildow, Murphy, Ott,
Panel, Pointer, Potts, Proctor.
I remember Mason's Store on the road going
East at the Eastern edge of Bernie and I remember the cotton gin on the South
side of Main Street, just West of the railroad tracks and I recall seeing the
smoke rings that came from the smoke stack of it's diesel engine. The Movie
Theatre was a few buildings North of that intersection. I remember my Mom and
Dad doing some grocery shopping at Ward's Store on Main Street. I remember
seeing Soldiers (Airmen) from the Malden Army Air Base, during the early 1940's.
The base was a Fighter Pilot training field at first, and sometimes the planes
practiced strafing the farm fields. The Airfield then became a Glider Transport
base and I saw a lot of C-47 Aircraft pulling gliders through the air. There
were signs on the sides of buildings in town saying, "Shhhh, Loose Lips Sink
Ships". I was quite young and I wondered just what I might know, that I should
keep quiet about. When my Brother Gene entered the Army then I knew that I
should keep quiet about anything that he wrote about in his letters. I can
recall feeling very proud of him and I still feel that way.
Jim Clark