The first government surveyors arrived in the Middle Fork valley in 1812, and decades prior to the Homestead Act. Early settlers lived along the rivers and the forest edge; John Deere would not invent the moldboard plow to cut the prairie soil until the 1850's. Pioneers cleared forest soils to grow food and grazed cattle on the prairie. Their graveyards can still be found along the river near the Johnson Hill bridge, the Higgensville bridge and many places in between.