John Ross Rule was born in his paternal grandparents’ farmhouse near Ottawa, Kansas, on December 12, 1930. He was the only child from Ernest William Rule’s marriage to Della Beulah Crockett. When John was four, his parents divorced, and for the next two years he lived with his paternal grandmother and uncles on the family farm. John was greatly influenced by the loving care he received from his grandmother, Pansy Virginia, during this time without a mother.

Ernest married K. S. “Ida” Denton when John was six, and he moved the family to the East Texas oil fields in search of work. Over the next several years, the family moved frequently, and John was in and out of numerous schools. After a brief stay on the Mississippi Gulf, Ernest moved the growing family to Harrison, Arkansas. It was in a rented home previously belonging to a schoolteacher that John discovered his love of books. He also discovered a love of fishing during his time exploring the banks of Indian Creek.

John graduated high school in Stuttgart, Arkansas, in 1949 and was awarded a scholarship to study journalism at the College of the Ozarks, now University of the Ozarks, in Clarksville, Arkansas. After a scandal shut the program down, John came to Fayetteville with $25 in his pocket to start school at the University of Arkansas in 1951. He struggled to make ends meet, and he decided to sign up for the army in 1953 to receive the GI Bill to pay for his education. After two years in the army during the Korean war, where he performed mostly administrative tasks at training post Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, John returned to the University of Arkansas in 1955.

John met the love of his life, Margaret Daniel, through classes they took together in the English department. Margaret was 16 years his senior, and she had four children. John soon became a fixture at family meals and outings. He admired Margaret’s ability to provide a home for her children on very little, and he enjoyed the sense of belonging he felt from being included in the family’s activities. After several years of friendship, John’s relationship with Margaret became romantic. They married on January 23, 1960.

While working on their master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the university, John and Margaret searched for land to purchase in nearby rural areas. They found 151 acres near the headwaters of Frog Bayou creek in northeast Crawford County, and they purchased the land in 1963. They named their homestead Frog Bayou.

In 1965, Margaret had the opportunity to conduct research for her dissertation at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. John accompanied her, teaching classes at Christian-Albrechts and at a local teacher’s college in Kiel. During their sixteen-month stay, John and Margaret were able to travel to thirteen countries. John kept a pebble in his pocket that he’d picked up from the creek at Frog Bayou to remind him of their home in the Ozarks.

After obtaining their degrees, John and Margaret taught at several small Southern colleges including Austin Peay, Arkansas Tech, Philander Smith, and Mississippi Valley State. John jokingly referred to themselves as “scholar gypsies”. They would return to their “homebase” at Frog Bayou during breaks from teaching, and in 1977 they retired and moved to the land full-time.

John and Margaret spent nearly three decades together in peaceful solitude on their land at Frog Bayou, interspersed with visits from friends and family. During this time, both worked on various writing projects while experimenting with homesteading. A big part of daily life for them was milking one of the several Jersey cows they had over the years, and processing milk into yogurt and cheese. Many delicious meals cooked on a wood burning stove were enjoyed at the big wooden table in their kitchen.

Margaret began to show signs of dementia in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s she experienced several health crises, the last of which led to a life-saving operation in 2004. She could not return to Frog Bayou after that, and John put her into a nursing home in Fayetteville. She passed away August 15, 2009. During those years of Margaret’s declining health, John dedicated as much time as possible with her. He stayed with his good friend Dick Bennett during the week and tried to make it to Frog Bayou on the weekends.

John’s increased time spent in town led to several big changes in his life. He began participating in events at the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology, and he read his poetry at local open mics. He began a friendship with Ruth Frances that led to a committed relationship that lasted for the rest of his life. In 2010, a small local press, Limber Twig Press, published a chapbook of his poetry titled Bird. Moon. Star. In 2012, his granddaughter, Sarah K. Moore, produced Witch Hazel Advent, The Story of an Ozark Poet, a documentary film about John’s life for her master’s thesis in journalism at the University of Arkansas. The documentary can be viewed here:  https://vimeo.com/273394203.

John spent the last decade of his life writing daily in the home he shared with Ruth, surrounded by their beloved pets. His biggest accomplishment during this time was completing Margaret’s historical novel set in Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma becoming a state. She had tasked him with completing it when her health declined, and he tackled this directive seriously and with much attention to detail. He also continued to compose poetry and work on his memoirs. In September of 2022, John suffered a major stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body, requiring full-time care. He spent the last year of his life at the Veterans Home in Fayetteville. John passed away on October 25, 2023, only five days after Ruth died on October 20, 2023.

John wished to be cremated, and for his remains to be spread over Margaret’s grave and around the land at Frog Bayou. A memorial to celebrate his life will be held at the OMNI center in Fayetteville on December 9, 2023 from 1 to 3 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in John’s name to the OMNI center at https://omnicenter.org/donate/.

“Nature does not reveal itself to you when you want it to. You have to be alert and always ready for something to happen- very small stuff, as I’ve pointed out in a poem or two.” Those of us who loved and adored John so much can best honor his memory by following his lead in honoring the sacred of the natural world around us. “And I really believe that if there’s an ultimate religion, it’s an ultimate loyalty to life and to the striving of life forms for full existence.”