PIKE COUNTY, Mo. — Following is a story by award-winning print and broadcast journalist, historian and public relations professional Brent Engel of Louisiana.

Missouri celebrates its 200th anniversary on Aug. 10, 2021.

‘The State of Pike’

Pike County officially existed more than two years before Missouri, and once was so big that it covered almost a quarter of what became the 24th state in 1821.

The Aug. 10 bicentennial provides a chance to look more closely at a locale destined to produce a host of leaders in business, agriculture, religion, politics, education, the sciences, the arts and sports.

Even Mark Twain couldn’t pass up the chance to be a Piker – a nickname that would become known worldwide. Twain used what he termed “the ordinary Pike County dialect” and “four variations” in his classic 1885 book “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” For Twain, and many others, Pikers had a very distinct dialect.

“I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike, and not succeeding,” Twain wrote in the introduction.

Chicago journalist Julian Street felt compelled to take in Bowling Green, Louisiana and Clarksville after he got an intriguing letter.

“Pike means more to Missouri than Missouri does to Pike,” the invitation’s anonymous author wrote to Street, who penned a 1914 book about his visit entitled “Abroad at Home.”

“Pike County, Missouri, is the most celebrated county of any similar geographical division in America,” wrote Harry Norman in the May 27, 1900, edition of the St. Louis Republic. “It is old and venerable. It existed before Missouri as a state was known; for in the early days, all of the region thereabouts — in fact, nearly all the Middle West — was called “Pike County” or “The State of Pike.”

 

Big start

An act of the territorial legislature established Pike County on Dec. 14, 1818.

It was named for explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who camped briefly on its banks and nearby islands during his 1805 journey to and from the source of the Mississippi River.

Pike noted the “handsome rocky cliffs.” French voyageurs called the area “Land of the Golden Hills.”

Early maps differ, but in its infancy Pike County generally extended from the Mississippi to a point near Columbia on the west, the Iowa border on the north and St. Charles County on the south.

“A brief study of these old boundaries will convince the reader of the propriety of calling the county ‘The State of Pike,’” according to the 1883 publication “The History of Pike County, Missouri.”

The same 1818 legislative act put Andrew Edwards, John Jordon, James Bryson, James Johnson and Peyton Watson in charge of establishing a courthouse and jail. They chose Obadiah Dickerson’s hotel and tavern in Louisiana.

Settlers came mostly from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, with the history book describing them “intellectually and morally the equals of any class of men that have ever planted human habitation within the domain of state or territory upon this western continent. There were among them no single one who was fleeing from the terrors of the law or who had been driven out by social ostracism.”

The first families “left the older states, not because they could no longer live there, but because they felt they could do better here,” the book indicates.

It wasn’t all a “gathering of grave men, or convivial old bachelors from the ranches” because “there came also the women and the girls,” the book relates, although “the lines were closely drawn as to woman’s rights or woman’s sphere” and “their duties even then…differed from those of the sterner sex.”

Pike County’s early fortunes were tied to the river, with agricultural commodities and natural goods among the major products shipped from docks along its banks. Stark Brothers Nurseries was founded in 1816, and would become recognized worldwide, but it took another moniker to really put the county on the map.

 

A nickname sticks

The term “Piker” was applied broadly to those who forged their way westward during the California Gold Rush of 1849.

“The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri, but as the phrase ‘A Pike County man’ was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into “A Piker,’” explained poet Bayard Taylor.

The songs “Joe Bowers” and “Sweet Betsy From Pike” helped make Pike County part of the American cultural experience. Poems such as “Come Ye Missourians” by Harry Miller spread the word:

 

“The finest of music will be there to greet you

‘Coon in the Henhouse’ and ‘Gal on a Log’

And Pike county maidens will be there to meet you

And pour out the coffee and slice up the hog.”

 

The definition of “Piker” as an industrious, trustworthy go-getter eventually was sourly reformulated to indicate someone with seedier traits.

“Their beards were longer, their clothes dirtier and their behavior earthier,” author Brian Roberts said of Pike County men in his book “American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture.”

Nevertheless, attention continued into the 20th century. Pike was the only county in the country that had an exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Sweet Betsy’s Log Cabin sat near the present site of the Jewel Box. References to Pike were made in movies, books and television.

Isaac Walter Basye, grandson of Bowling Green’s founder, asked whether anyone had not heard of Pike County.

“It is God’s country,” Basye declared. “And who dare say it is not the veritable Lost Paradise, the Garden of Eden, retouched in its pristine glory, rehabilitated by the latest and best edition of the genus homo, the Piker?”

Robertus Love, who grew up in Pike County and was a contemporary of Twain, used a different bit of colloquial jargon in his 1904 book “Poems All the Way From Pike:”

 

“Why, of course I’m from Pike

You big knock-kneed galoot!

So’s my brother Ike

Who’s likewise on the shoot

And whenever you meets one of us, you had better salute”

 

Louisiana Times newspaper editor E.E. Campbell found “Pikers galore” on a vacation to nine Western states.

“The Piker is to be found everywhere on earth – with perhaps enough exceptions to prove the rule,” Campbell wrote upon his return. “And he is mostly prominent.”

“For more than 100 years, the sons of Pike County have spread its fame throughout the nation,” Floyd C. Shoemaker of the State Historical Society of Missouri said in July 1958.

 

Piker pillars

Acknowledging every praiseworthy Piker is impossible.

Someone will always be left off the list. However, a few of the laudable ladies and meritorious gentlemen include:

*John Brooks Henderson, a Louisiana attorney and U.S. Senator who drafted the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

*Champ Clark, a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Bowling Green and a 1912 presidential candidate.

*Missouri Supreme Court Justice Thomas James Clark Fagg of Louisiana.

*Missouri Governors Elliot Major of Bowling Green and Lloyd Stark of Louisiana.

*Professor Robert Rowley, a Louisiana educator whose collection of fossils is considered one of the largest in the world.

*May Birkhead, a Louisiana seamstress who provided newspaper readers with fascinating firsthand accounts of Titanic survivors.

*James B. Fields, a Baptist minister and national orator from Eolia who was born a slave.

*Ashley native Cleland Boyd McAfee, a national theologian and hymn writer.

*Eddie South, a jazz musician from Louisiana who incorporated the violin into his repertoire.

*Lucy Foster Madison, a Louisiana author whose books for young people have been read by millions.

*Louisiana movie stars Claude Gillingwater and Cam and Gloria Hardin, and Bowling Green actress Virginia Kirtley.

*Major League Baseball player Paul Meloan of Paynesville.

*National Basketball Association coach Lowell “Cotton” Fitzsimmons of Bowling Green.

*Professional wrestler Kane, whose Bowling Green friends knew him as Glenn Thomas Jacobs.

 

While celebrating the past, it’s the spirit of the Piker that many say will carry forward.

The county “continues to demonstrate a resilience to change and grow, while still maintaining a strong pride in its heritage and past,” the 1981 Pike County Historical Society book “People, Places and Pikers” offered.

Presiding Commissioner Chris Gamm’s family has been a part of Pike since the beginning.

“Being a ‘Piker’ one can only say with a degree of pride,” Gamm said. “More than 200 years have passed, and the foundations laid by the first commissioners are still with us today. The uniqueness of the people rooted in Pike County cannot be claimed by one reason. There are many.”

Residents understandably don’t agree with each other on all matters, but former federal judge David Patterson Dyer of Louisiana knew there was an unspoken rule that all followed.

“We men of Pike County fight among ourselves and at election time we pull each other’s hair, but let a stranger attempt to take advantage of the opening and he will find arrayed against him a solid phalanx of Pikers that no power on earth can asunder.”

Two centuries of rich history give Gamm and others hope that Pike will still be going strongly when Missouri celebrates its quadricentennial in 2221.

“As based on the writing about Pike through the years, is the legend of Pike County a story or one of genuine truth based on our values of family, faith and work ethics that the rest of the world sees and imprints the name of Pike?” he asks. “Maybe after the next 200 years, with God’s blessing, the ‘State of Pike’ will still be recognized.”

 

One more thing

Gamm has tales from travels around the country which prove that as long as there’s a Piker to draw a breath, the county’s indelible legacy will be just fine.

There was the man at the Jacksonville, Fla., airport whose grandmother lived three houses from Gamm’s grandmother. The two realized they had played baseball together as kids. There’s the Army MP at Fort Belvoir near Washington, D.C., whose grandfather lived at Frankford. The man returns to Pike each year to deer hunt.

One of Gamm’s favorites also happened just outside the nation’s capital. He and his wife, Kathy, were visiting their daughter a few years ago. While mingling with others at the Pentagon, Gamm noticed a man following him from conversation to conversation.

Curious, the commissioner finally turned and introduced himself to the stranger, who happened to be from Monroe City. It was a moment that would make Twain – and every other Piker – proud.

“I said ‘Hi, I’m Chris Gamm.’ He said ‘You’re from Pike County, aren’t you?’ I said ‘Yes, Bowling Green. How did you know?’ He said ‘I could tell by the way you talk.’”