What you're seeing right now
Water coming up through the basement floor drain, or a toilet in the lowest bathroom gurgling and refusing to flush right, usually means something is wrong past your house, not inside it. If more than one fixture backs up at the same time, a tub drains slow while the toilet bubbles, that's not a coincidence. That's the main line talking to you.
A lot of Springfield homes sit on clay soil that swells and shrinks with moisture, and that movement puts stress on the pipe running from the house to the street. Combine that with trees planted decades ago, when a lot of this housing stock went in during the 1960s through 80s, and you get root systems that have had forty or fifty years to find every joint and crack in an aging clay or cast iron line.
Why the Ozarks make this worse
Springfield doesn't get the brutal freeze depths of the upper Midwest, but it gets enough freeze-thaw cycling each winter to open up small cracks in old pipe joints, and then enough heavy spring rain to wash soil into those openings. The karst terrain under a lot of this region, all that limestone and the sinkholes and shifting ground that come with it, means soil settlement isn't rare here. A pipe that was level when it was laid can end up with a low spot, a belly, where waste sits instead of moving along.
Add in a wet spring or a sudden downpour after a dry stretch, which this area gets often, and groundwater can rise enough to seep into a cracked line or overwhelm a city sewer that's already running full. When that happens, the water has nowhere to go but back up through the path of least resistance, which is usually your basement drain.
More on this from Reading List What A Backup In The Basement Is Telling You About The Main Line.
What you can check yourself
Start simple. Look at the basement floor drain and any laundry standpipe for standing water or a sewage smell even when nothing has backed up recently. Run water in an upstairs sink while someone watches the basement drain. If it bubbles or rises, that confirms a blockage somewhere downstream rather than an issue with one fixture.
Check your yard for a soft, soggy patch that stays wet even when the rest of the lawn is dry, especially along the route you'd expect the line to take toward the street. That can mean a leak below ground. If you have a sewer cleanout, a capped pipe sticking up near the foundation or property line, you can sometimes get a visual on backup by removing the cap carefully and seeing if water is standing in the pipe. Do this slowly and expect odor.
None of this tells you exactly where the problem is or how bad it is. It just tells you whether the issue is isolated to one fixture or sitting in the main line itself.
Where this stops being a DIY job
A single slow drain is often a local clog you can clear with a plunger or a hand auger. Multiple fixtures backing up together, water coming up through a floor drain, or sewage odor in the basement are different. That's main line territory, and pushing a drain snake down a single fixture won't reach far enough or fix a break, a belly, or root intrusion thirty feet out in the yard.
This is also where timing matters more than people expect. A backup that happens at 9pm on a Friday after a heavy rain isn't going to wait politely until Monday morning. Sewage backing up into a finished basement causes damage by the hour, not the day, and in Springfield's clay soil a crack that seems minor now can widen fast after the next freeze-thaw cycle or storm.
A professional with a sewer camera can see exactly where a line is bellied, cracked, or root-choked, and whether the fix is a cleanout and clearing or something that requires digging. Guessing at that yourself usually means calling someone anyway, after spending money on equipment or time you didn't need to spend.
What to do while you wait for help
Stop using water in the house, every sink, toilet, washer, and shower, until the line is cleared. Adding more water just pushes the backup further into the house. If sewage has already reached the basement floor, keep people and pets away from it and don't try to mop it up without protection, since backed-up sewage carries more than just water.
If this happens outside normal business hours, which in Springfield it often does given how storms roll through overnight, treat it as the kind of problem that needs attention before more water moves through the system, not something to leave until morning.