This is a fairly true story. My grandpa told it to me when he was an old man. That was fifty years ago. People in those days told nothing but the truth (especially grandpas), so the basis of this story has got to be true. If any lies have worked themselves into my account, it’s only because I had to tone down the story a ways to make it more believable.
Just a quarter mile downstream from my family’s farm is a place where two rivers meet. The slow flowing Little Sac River intercepts the mad North Branch of the Dry Sac River in its pell-mell rush down the hills of the Ozarks. I’ll just call the latter river the Dry Sac, though there is a South Branch of the Dry Sac that also meets with Little Sac. If you guessed that all of these rivers are quite small, you’d be mostly correct – though the Little Sac can sometimes be a huge torrent of flood waters and the Dry Sac has never been known to be anything but wet all the way across. The Little Sac drains the land north of Springfield – it starts over near Strafford and slowly meanders its way across northern Greene County, swinging way off to the west before turning north and continuing to its meeting with the Big Sac. The Dry Sac drains a smaller area of southern Polk County and extreme northern Greene County. But oh, the place where these rivers meet is a sight to behold.
Early settlers into southern Missouri apparently ran out of names for rivers and streams, and so started borrowing the names of indigenous peoples (like the Sauk tribe). That’s not so hard to understand. These folks had walked all the way from the Atlantic Ocean, naming rivers as they traveled west. From Virginia through Tennessee, it took them several generations to reach southern Missouri, as they marched pretty much due west. Crossing the Mississippi River may have been a challenge as there were hundreds of miles of rivers and swamps. A little water never deterred these strong willed folk. But dry did. They got all the way across Missouri and discovered that Oklahoma was flat and arid. So in southern Missouri many stayed. Good thing, too, since all the good river names had been used up and Indian tribes were becoming scarce. Seemingly, the put the word Sac in every river they found. That suited the Sauk Indians just fine, though none of them had been in the Ozarks except maybe when just passing through.
The nature of these two branches of the greater Sac River is not revealed by the coincidence of their watersheds being so close together. The rivers are nothing alike. The Little Sac is a slow river with a deep and wide valley. It flows through some fertile prairie and carries some mighty fine dirt into the poor soil of the Ozarks Plateau. On the other hand, the Dry Sac is a fast moving, clear stream that runs almost exclusively through regions of poor soil. It picks up little dirt, but carries a goodly amount of gravel. So when the rivers meet, something monumental has got to happen.
Steep gradient rivers have rapid rises and falls of flood waters. Low gradient rivers rise slowly, but stay high longer. The Dry Sac picks up rain water and quickly thunders its floods downstream. When it runs into the Little Sac, it expends the water’s fury by scouring great holes in the river-bed of the Little Sac. Meanwhile, flood waters from the Little Sac tend to back up and wait for the Dry Sac flood to disperse. By waiting in one place, the waters drop a lot of their dirt and nutrients onto the farm lands upstream.
One of the results of big holes and nutrient rich waters is that you get an abundance of life in the river. In the case of the Little and Dry Sacs, the abundant life worked itself out into precisely one catfish of prodigious size. Normally, you’d expect billions of fish. But due to a combination of bizarre factors, great schools of fish are (even to this day) rarely found at this confluence. As I was explaining, the Dry Sac carries a lot of gravel. Most catfish are creatures of slow, warm, mud-banked rivers; they are not used to gravel swimming in flood water like it was so many shiner minnows. The unsuspecting fish tend to go for the rocks which look like easy pickins for a meal. Rocks are hard to digest and tend to stay in the fish’s gut, weighting them down and overall making them sluggish. So fish are often lost when they attempt to swim over the shallow parts of the river and get hung up on the shoals. For some unknown reason, one fish every few hundred years excels in eating gravel. The catfish of this story never learned his lesson about rocks, and ate so much that his ballast prevented him from escaping the confluence hole; so there he stayed, eating from the nutrients that flow to his wide open maw, and gaining an inordinate amount of weight from the limestone in his diet.
The lone catfish totally owned the area where the rivers come together. Story has it that he lived in the hole for a hundred fifty years, gaining on average fifty pounds of fish flesh per year in his early life and even more later on. And that doesn’t count the weight from the tons of rocks he swallowed. You do the math. The guy was huge. The rocks in his belly led him to think that he was forever extremely hungry. That is, hungry enough to eat anything that got into his hole. Why, one time this guy from St Louis was vacationing down in the Ozarks, and wanted to try noodling for one of our prize catfish. Noodling is a term for hand-fishing – a guy sticks his hand underwater into a hole in the river bank in an attempt to grab any fish (or snake) lurking there. The old timers say that if you tickle a catfish in just the right places, you can put it to sleep and pull it out of the water before it even knows it has been caught. Even better, if you can stick your hand down the fish’s throat, you don’t get poisoned by the horns of the catfish. Anyway, this St Louis guy didn’t know anything about the lone catfish. He did manage to get a hand on it, then the fish got his lips on the guy. The last thing that anyone heard was the sound of the huge catfish sucking the poor guy down into the water.
Since then, they put up signs warning tourists of the dangers. One of the signs says to listen for the sounds of gravel. When that fish moved, folks all up and down the river bank could hear gravel shifting around in his bowels. If you are out canoeing on a clear Ozark’s stream, listen for the sound kind of like pulling a canoe onto a gravel bar. If you hear it, stay in the boat!
One day, a flock of the neighbor’s sheep walked down to the river for a drink. The catfish swallowed the whole herd in one mighty gulp. Now, a sheep is not ideal catfish food. If you go buy a sack of Purina Catfish Chow, you won’t see sheep on the list of ingredients. Wool is totally indigestible for catfish, and tends to gum up the fish’s guts. But in this particular case, things worked out better for the fish than for the sheep. The thick wool on the sheep was slowly scraped off their hides by the gravel in the digestive system of the fish. It was further processed into high-lanolin yarn as it passed through the small intestines of the fish. Those sheep were responsible for thousands of miles of the yarn of the finest quality. The ladies of the community pulled the wool from the water over the course of several years. For another fifty years, they would all get together on Saturday nights to knit blankets. To this day, nobody in that part of Polk County needs to be cold at night, for there are still thousands of blankets waiting to be given out to people in need. I used to have a fine woolen sweater made from the same source – the most incredible thing about it was that the watery habitat of the fish had imparted a total water-proofing to the wool, and it would repel any but the hardest rains.
It’s hard to point to any objective proof of the huge catfish. But there were several small indications.
- One time the skeleton of a half-ton steer came flying out of the water and landed right-side-up amongst the herd that had come to drink from the river.
- During the drought of 1954, many crops in the field were drying up and blowing away. One of the neighbors had the idea to put some pepper into the water. I’m telling you, that old fish sneezed so hard that his body came completely out of the river. When he landed back in the water, it was like a kid doing his best cannonball dive. The fish gave his tail a mighty flap, and the water was scattered up and down the river valley for miles. Several different farmers were able to survive the draught due to the irrigation provided by that one fish. Unfortunately, the ensuing waves drowned several families of beavers when their dam was destroyed.
- The Butterfield stage used to run from Tipton, Missouri to Sacramento, California. At one time it passed right by the confluence. Many were the teams of horses lost to this voracious appetite of this killer catfish. Eventually, the Butterfield Stage went out of business, due in no small part to the insticts of the catfish.
- During the Civil War, the Confederacy and the Union never met in battle in southern Polk County. Union General Zanoni had brought his troops near the confluence once. Something, probably in the water, bothered him so much that he never went back.
There did come a day when the people of the river valley were hungry. Crops had failed and cattle had mysteriously vanished. The people remembered the huge catfish and how he would make some really good eatings. So they disassembled a plow and bent back the shares until it looked like a huge treble hook. They attached a half rotted horse-hide to the hook and threw it all into the scour hole. The old catfish took about a second and a half to see the lure sitting in the water, and another second and a half to swallow the hide. As the tackle was dragged out of the water, folks noticed that the catfish was using the plow shares to clean his teeth (it’s a little known fact that really big catfish develop broad, flat molars that are constantly being congested by the algae of their habitat.)
One of the heroes of the early United States was Captain Noam Bradley, the skipper of a tall sailing ship – the good ship Nose About. It was a really super ship for its day, fast yet stable, and with a really shallow draft that allowed the captain to traverse many inland rivers. And the most amazing thing about the ship was the huge size of its anchor. Special foundries in France had been built to cast an anchor of that size. Iron and coal were imported to create a steel so hard that it was said nothing could bend it. That anchor got the Nose About through some of the most ferocious hurricanes of the late eighteenth century.
Early in the war of 1812, Captain Noam tied the Nose About to the wharves in New Orleans. When the English invaded Louisiana, Bradley sailed as far north up the Mississippi River as the draft of his ship would allow, hoping to be able to swoop back south and catch the British unaware. He anchored about where the Ohio River runs into the Mississippi (which is another fine catfish hole, though because of greater water flows, it has somewhat less success in producing monster catfish than the confluence of this story!) There was no way to know that the great New Madrid Earthquake was poised for release just a few miles downstream. As soon as that super temblor let loose, it built a wall of water over five hundred feet high. The surge began running upstream, leveling everything in its path. Folks say the river ran upstream for days. This tsunami caught the Nose About at the top of its crest and hurled it north; the mighty ship that day looked like a Hawaii surfer hanging on for dear life as a Kahuna wave bears down on shore. The enormous sea anchor served as a tiller to keep the ship straight in the water. Through Missouri toward St Louis the craft sped, with Captain Bradley doing his best to steer away from the St Francis Mountains and stay in the river channel. By this time, flood waters had turned St Louis into an island in a sea of what used to be good farm land. For some reason Bradley steered the ship into the Missouri River, perhaps he had seen his chance to sell merchandise in Kansas City (a port heretofore closed to ocean-going craft.) The tidal wave was much smaller by then, so Bradley pulled up his anchor. Unfortunately, the flooded condition of all the rivers made navigation problematic, and Bradley ended up surfing his way up the Missouri to the Osage River to the Big Sac, and thence clean up to the Little Sac. Bradley proclaimed that he had all along intended to sell goods to the people of the Sac River, so he dismantled the ship and used the wood to build a store. He salvaged almost everything that he could from the Nose About, and though no one saw the sense of a sea anchor on the Sac, Bradley lugged it to the store.
This brings us back to the catfish story. Having failed to catch the fish on a converted plow, the hungry guys started looking for bigger tackle. Remembering Captain Bradley’s sea anchor, the men sent for it. As luck would have it, one of those twenty mule team rigs was on its way back from making a borax run to the Mississippi. The drivers asked for nothing more in way of payment than some good catfish steaks, and so veered off to go get the sea anchor. Another neighbor found a stout logging chain that legend says Paul Bunyan had at one time used to tie up Babe (his blue ox) at night. Mr. Miller donated several buffalo carcasses from his rendering plant. With great difficulty, the men hefted that mighty sea anchor and three of the buffalo carcasses into the swirling eddies of the river confluence, and hitched the mule team to the logging chain and the sea anchor. Sure enough, that catfish took the bait and set the corners of the sea anchor firmly into his own jaw. He was fighting so hard that water was jetting a thousand feet high into the air. The mule team was plenty spooked, so instead of pulling strong and steady, they gave a single enormous tug on the logging chain. Well that fish roared in pain and shook so hard that a new tsunami started downstream. With the catfish’s pull equal to the twenty mule team, the barbs of that sea anchor were pulled out straight. Giving a mighty shake of its head, the catfish dislodged the sea anchor and launched it and the mule team into a low earth orbit (some say it returned to earth almost a century later, where it dredged Lake Tanguska in Siberia.)
Meanwhile, the tsunami caused by the fish was picking up steam as it flowed down stream. It gathered up most of the detritus deposited by the earthquake’s original tsunami. It even grabbed the remnants of the Nose About along with Bradley’s store. That’s why you can find no evidence of the epic story of Bradley and his ship. Except, that is, you used to be able to see a gouge caused by the great sea anchor as it tore into the roots of the earth next to the Sac River; but then the Corp of Engineers built a huge dam and flooded the whole valley. So now it’s all gone, save for the stories told by a few brave narrators.
Never again was that huge fish seen; it turned shy and now forever contents its hunger pangs with the small things that drift downstream. But we don’t allow people to canoe that stretch of the river out of fear for what might happen if that fish forgets his aversion to metal. My worry is that the floods this spring raised the water level so high that the fish was able to leave the confluence. He could be anywhere by now, just silently waiting for an unsuspecting person to go for a swim. That great white shark known as Jaws would be like a rubber ducky beside the terror of the catfish from the confluence. If I were you, I wouldn’t go swimming anywhere that I couldn’t see the bottom. And if you hear the sound of gravel where the river banks are all mud – head as quick as you can for dry ground.
