The Irish Wilderness is a dense forest of oaks and hickory. A trail through it loops to the Eleven Point River and a cave and several springs. Photo © Mark Blaine.

By Mark Blaine
Forest Magazine, Winter 2003

In 1859, Father John Hogan led a group of forty Irish families from the railroad camps of Saint Louis to the wilderness of southern Missouri near the Arkansas border. The land, though marginal, would be a refuge, a place where Hogan’s flock hoped to gain a foothold after escaping the potato famine in their homeland and the immigrant squalor and persecution they found in this country. At 12.5 cents an acre, the wilderness, in Hogan’s words, offered solitude “where people could so profoundly worship in the depth of that leafy forest.” Close to the land, close to God, away from everything else.

Emptiness, however, has a way of attracting visitors. Within a few years of settlement, Hogan’s Irish and their wilderness were surrounded by Union and Confederate troops. The land held no value to the combatants, and its rolling hills, limestone bluffs, sinkholes and abundant creeks and springs made travel difficult. So for the duration of the war, troops clashed at its fringes, sometimes using the rugged land as cover and keeping the Irish settlement sealed off from the outside. The war also attracted outlaws—bushwhackers who profited on the tumult of war but held no allegiance to the Union or Confederacy. These outlaws also found refuge in the wilderness.

Accounts of the time describe bloody and relentless conflict, according to Ronald Wihebrink, a U.S. Forest Service historian who wrote a booklet about the Irish Wilderness in 1970. Troops were mobile and skirmished frequently, but rarely lined up for big battles. Horses were stolen and stolen back. Locals were mixed in their allegiance and soldiers burned houses of suspected enemies. Meanwhile, bushwhackers burned homes and murdered settlers for their own ends. By the end of the war, all that remained of the Irish settlement were old fence lines and abandoned or burned houses and barns. No one knows what happened to the Irish.

The name remains from those early settlers, and more than 16,000 acres of the Irish Wilderness were officially protected by Congress in 1984 under the Wilderness Act. Wilderness protection, however, is just another chapter in the story of a wild country settled, abandoned, logged, reclaimed and threatened again.

The story of the wilderness after the Civil War is one of scattered settlement and legends of outlaws like Devil Dick Boze, whose family owned a mill in the area. The difficult country offered good cover for moonshining as well, but it was logging that brought a taste of prosperity to the area around the turn of the century.

A two-decade timber boom was over by 1914 and the sawmills had packed up and gone, leaving mostly stumps and ground that wouldn’t support even cattle or sheep grazing. The town of Wilderness, which had swelled to more than 400 people during the timber boom, began a precipitous decline. By the 1930s, the former forest was nearly worthless and many owners were loathe to pay their small, but accumulating, tax bills. At this point, the federal government bought much of the land, eventually turning it into the Mark Twain National Forest.

Proposals to build an atomic power plant in the wilderness and to dam area rivers were floated and rejected in the 1950s. The area slowly regrew into a dense thicket of small oaks, which, Wihebrink wrote, made the wilderness even more foreboding and impenetrable than when the Irish first arrived. In 1968, President Johnson designated the Eleven Point River a national scenic river, and Mark Twain National Forest officials began considering the Irish Wilderness for more substantive preservation.

A proposal to mine lead in the area caused some controversy in the late 1990s, and the issue is still alive, though dormant. In 1997, Doe Run Mining Company drilled experimental cores near the wilderness with an eye toward expanding its lead mining operations from southeastern Missouri. The Mark Twain National Forest is revising its forest plan, and lead mining will be at the top of many agendas during the forest’s review of its management practices. At issue is the ecological impact of mining in the porous limestone near the Eleven Point, Current and Jacks Fork rivers and the potential for polluting those watersheds.

The trail to Whites Creek through the Irish Wilderness follows the overgrown contours of an old road. The land is deceptively rugged, though its highest and lowest points are separated by only a few hundred feet in elevation. Low limestone cliffs line the Eleven Point River in places, and the climb out of the river valley is steep. Caves, springs and hollows offer clues to the geology of the place. Water flows underground through limestone fissures and caves, a regionwide network that connects the many spring-fed rivers in a subterranean watershed. As evidence, Greer Spring boils out of the ground a few miles upriver from the Irish Wilderness; at 220 million gallons per day, the spring is the largest on national forest land.

Here and there shortleaf pines—the only pine native to Missouri—loom over a tangle of oaks. Most of the shortleaf pines were logged during the brief timber boom, and oak and hickory have regrown in their place. In the winter they stand out, green against the leafless limbs of the surrounding forest.

Evidence of past life on the land is subtle—Whites Creek Trail follows the grade of an old road to a crossroads and then dips away, and it’s possible to walk miles across the rolling landscape without seeing anyone until the Eleven Point River, where canoeists and anglers regularly cruise past the wilderness boundary.

As for the Irish, Wihebrink speculated about a few grim possibilities. They may have been burned out and murdered, or some of them may have been burned out and murdered while the rest fled. Or maybe they just packed up and left when hostilities roosted in their place of solitude. Hogan became bishop of Kansas City some years later, having abandoned his vision of a Catholic settlement in the wilds of southern Missouri, but he never spoke of the Irish again. It’s a mystery that’s given ghostly fodder to more than one campfire story told by canoeists and hikers along the banks of the Eleven Point River.

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