Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  They stalked the lower river for several decades. At the end of the eighteenth century, the governor of the Louisiana Territory issued a desperate decree banning unlashed boats from the lower river; only convoys of ten or more lashed boats were permitted to proceed past the Crow’s Nest toward the delta. The governor had no other recourse. There was little in the way of formal law and order on the frontier then. A few garrisons of federal soldiers were stationed along the river, but they were tasked only with defending the settlers from attacks by small Indian raiding parties—not a large, heavily armed, and well-organized band of pirates. The river people were on their own.

  They did their best to stay in business. Their boats were heavily armed to fend off the pirates. One boat making regular runs on the river advertised that it offered “a large crew, skilful in the use of arms, a plentiful supply of muskets and ammunition, an equipment on each boat of six one-pound cannon, and a rifle-proof cabin for the use of the passengers.” But in the end the river men had no choice but to take direct action against the Crow’s Nest themselves.

  The story goes that one night in the late autumn of 1809, a large group of keelboats and barges had been stranded by contrary winds a few miles upriver from the Crow’s Nest. The crews lashed boats and created an impromptu floating city in the deserted waters. When they all crossed from boat to boat, hailing acquaintances and passing on gossip, the Crow’s Nest was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. Over the course of that evening, they decided that the time had come to do something about it: they were going to put an end to the Crow’s Nest gang once and for all.

  By midnight a plan had jelled; in the dead hours afterward it launched. More than a hundred of the toughest raftsmen and voyageurs had agreed to take part. They descended the river silently, in skiffs and canoes, until they saw the shadow of the islet ahead. The pirates had posted no lookouts; after all, there was never any traffic worth looting after sundown. Then the leader of the boatmen stood up in the shallows and waded ashore. In some versions of the story, he yelled out to the others the traditional fighting cry of the voyageurs: “Hell’s afire and the river rising! Up, boys, and cut their hearts out!”

  The boatmen stormed the islet. They took the pirates completely by surprise. Quickly they fanned out through the interior and seized control of the caves and of the boats they found docked in the hidden cove. They didn’t turn up much loot—or at least they didn’t admit to finding much. But they did discover a printing press for counterfeit money, which they ceremoniously wrecked. They also captured a couple of dozen men, two women, and a teenage boy. They let the women and the boy go. At dawn they hanged the men.

  The news of their astonishing victory rapidly spread up and down the valley. It was famous in the river folklore for decades afterward: any man who looked old enough and who could claim to have been on the river for long enough would modestly admit, after a few drinks, that he had taken part in the storming of the Crow’s Nest. But in the real world, the triumph proved to be short-lived. The Crow’s Nest wasn’t put out of business. Maybe the surprise of the attack hadn’t been perfect; the worst of the pirates might have had some advance warning and escaped. Or maybe it had gone perfectly, but the gang had simply sprouted up again with new leaders. Or maybe the raid had never happened at all, and was just a story the river people told to buck themselves up. In any case, by 1811, the Crow’s Nest was as feared on the river as it had ever been.

  The year 1811 was a hard one on the river anyway. The spring flood was disastrously high; towns were swamped all along the Ohio and Mississippi. By summer there was a bad outbreak of yellow fever, the worst that anybody had seen in years. In the fall there was another deadly fever, never identified, that swept the length of the valley. (It was described by the doctor Daniel Drake as a “bilious remitting and intermitting fever … clearly referable to the vegetable putrefaction which was the consequence of that flood.”) And then in the autumn there was the comet.

  The comet appeared in the first week of September. Initially it was just an unusually large new star that burned brightly each evening in the afterglow of sunset. As the weeks passed, it didn’t wink out or dwindle away, the way strange sights in the sky usually did; every night it was more brilliant, and within a month it was growing a tail. This tail was an alarming, two-pronged fork like a devil’s tail. By December the comet was a dazzling point of light surrounded by a vague milky halo almost as large as the moon, and the forked tail had stretched out into two enormous ghostly plumes that covered half the sky.

  Everyone knew what it meant: some strange disaster was imminent. Then there was another sign—or so it was said long afterward. “As the splendid comet of that year continued to shed its twilight over the forests,” the British travel writer Charles Joseph Latrobe wrote decades later, “a countless multitude of squirrels, obeying some great and universal impulse, which none can know but the Spirit that gave them being, left their reckless and gamboling life, and their ancient places of retreat in the north, and were seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South.”

  Soon after the squirrels left, the comet disappeared. And then the earthquakes began.

  The first quake was on December 16. Its epicenter was on the Missouri side of the river south of the junction with the Ohio. According to one eyewitness account, the quake was felt first in the boat city off New Madrid. When the crews were awakened in the middle of the night by the commotion, they had no idea what was happening. They all thought they must be under attack, by the river pirates or by the Indians. But the river was deserted. There had only been the sound—a deep, hollow, rolling thunder—and the brief violent chop of the river. Everyone went back to sleep; they had the vague idea that some large nearby stretch of the riverbank must have collapsed into the current.

  A bigger jolt came at dawn. First there was a new sound, a hissing roar that was, according to one witness, “like the escape of steam from a boiler.” Then the surface of the river shivered, stirred, and erupted into violent swells. The boats were heaved about in wild convulsions as the men clung on desperately; all around them the banks and sandbars were collapsing and the cottonwood trees along the shore were hurled into the surf—“tossing their arms to and fro,” one witness remembered, “as if sensible of their danger.” The crews in the boat city maneuvered frantically to keep their boats in the middle of the channel, as far away from the sandbars and the falling debris as possible. The river was becoming bloodred with the clay churned up from its bottom. Its surface was alive with whirlpools and was sheeting over with drifts and swirls of foam. The air was particularly strange; it seemed to be “filled with a thick vapor or gas, to which the light imparted a purple tinge, altogether different in appearance from the autumnal haze of Indian summer, or that of smoke.”

  Then the river calmed. The aftershocks, according to one account, were “becoming lighter and lighter until they died away in slight vibrations, like the jarring of steam in an immense boiler.” The water was a soup of foul effluvia that had been stirred up from the river bottom. Few were willing to risk drinking it—not for days and weeks afterward, no matter how thirsty they were. They would hang on until they had gotten as far away from New Madrid as they possibly could. Some of them waited for two hundred miles.

  Nobody believed the crisis was over yet. The aftershocks never quite stopped. There were hundreds of them over the next month. One traveler on the river a few weeks later recorded twenty-seven in the space of twelve hours; a doctor keeping track in Louisville that winter counted almost two thousand. A pendulum hanging in a store window in Cincinnati didn’t stop swaying until the spring. River travelers making their way through that country in December and into January reported all kinds of odd sights. It was said that just before the first earthquake hit, two pillars of lightning were seen towering up from the hills to the clouds. (This is a phenomenon known as earthquake light, which has a long history of eyewitnesses but still no documentary evidence or sci
entific theory to back it up.) Afterward there were lights and glows and flashes every night here and there in the hills along the river. There was also a pervasive horrible smell, like burning sulfur, that drifted all through the quake zone but had no detectable source. People added all this up and came to the only possible conclusion: it was the comet. Maybe it had disappeared from the sky because it had crashed to the earth somewhere around New Madrid. Or somehow the earth had become tangled up in its tail, which was lashing the river like a whip. The Scottish botanist John Bradbury, who was traveling on a keelboat when the first quake hit, recorded the discussions of the crew. One man offered the view that the earth was now stuck between the two tails of the comet and the earthquakes were its attempts to roll out again. “Finding him confident in his hypothesis,” Bradbury added, “and myself unable to refute it, I did not dispute the point.”

  The next great quake came on January 23. With this quake the stretch of the river south of New Madrid gave up all its snags: hundreds of thousands of planters, sawyers, sleepers, and preachers shook loose of the mud and came bobbing to the surface. Centuries’ worth of rotted logs accumulated in vast plateaus; they covered the river for miles downstream from the quake zone. Scattered in among them were coffins: the cemeteries along the riverbanks, caught in the general collapse, had disgorged their inhabitants into the water.

  Two weeks later, on February 6, was the third great quake. It came to be known as “the big shock.” It was so strong that it cracked pavements in Baltimore and rang church bells in Montreal. (It’s still the most powerful quake ever recorded in the continental United States.) At the epicenter, near New Madrid, the land was in a frenzy. The earth undulated like a stormy sea; forested hillsides came sliding down into the river in roaring collapses; geysers shot up from ruptured crevasses; waterspouts hissed and rushed and snaked down into the furious depths of the channels. The shock was so large that a titanic backwash of water went flashing northward upriver against the current, swamping boats, flooding levees, and drowning houses on the riverbanks: an impossible apparition terrifying everybody caught up in its furious rush. That strange backwash became the talk of the river for decades afterward. There was no agreement at all about how far it had gone or how long it had lasted—some of the standard histories of the region claimed that the river ran backward for days. (This was in fact a physical impossibility; what’s more likely is that the shock waves sent water washing upriver over the surface for several hours while the main strength of the current continued to flow normally underneath.) One prominent geologist, reviewing the whole story later in the century, was so skeptical about the backwash that he concluded not just that it hadn’t happened, but that the earthquakes themselves were mythical. But it remained the defining event for anyone who lived in the river valley in those years: they all knew where they had been and what had happened to them the day the Mississippi ran backward.

  The big shock was the last of the great New Madrid quakes. Together the quakes left the town of New Madrid flattened and had brought down every building in the countryside for miles around. But because the land in that part of the country had been so thinly settled, there were few reports of serious casualties—it was said that only two deaths among the locals could be directly attributed to the quakes. The river was another matter. The first quake had come when the river traffic was traditionally at its highest, right as the boats were bringing the northern harvest down to the markets of New Orleans. There was never an official count, but the death toll was probably in the hundreds. For weeks afterward bodies were found floating downstream, and there were wrecked and abandoned boats stuck on sandbars or drifting in the current all the way down to the delta.

  But the traffic resumed. Cautiously, over the next several weeks after the big shock, the first boats came making their way south. They found the wilderness country around New Madrid in ruins. On either side of the river for miles the hills were split and shattered by slips and subsidences and sinkholes and fissures. There were areas where whole forests had sunk into the ground and been covered over by floodwaters; they were now strange, menacing lakes, bristling with the spikes of drowned trees beneath the waterline. A greater surprise awaited them on the river itself. As they approached New Madrid, the view of the waters ahead was lost in mist and spray, and there was an unfamiliar sound: a deep, continuous, full-throated roar. (Ordinarily the river in the channels was preternaturally silent.) With incredulity, and then with mounting panic, the boatmen frantically maneuvered their craft out of the current and into the shallows. Then they got out onto the riverbank and warily approached the source of the noise on foot. There they found what they had suspected but could not bring themselves to believe: the land below the riverbed had split and tilted, and the course of the lower Mississippi was now broken by immense, river-spanning waterfalls.

  The river itself was quick to recover. The great waterfalls—there were two of them, one above New Madrid, and one below, about twenty miles apart—proved to be ephemeral. The relentless drag of the current rapidly wore them down; within several weeks they had eroded to the point where that stretch of the river became navigable again, and by spring no trace of them remained.

  Then the river rose: the spring flood that year was a big one, even worse than the flood of 1811, and it cleared away the snags and the wreckage and the bodies. The strange stench and pollution of the river were washed away as well. The great muddy flow resumed its old steady course, and the water was as drinkable as it had ever been.

  The landscape around New Madrid came back more slowly. The big open scars and fissures in the hills were gradually smoothed over by the wilderness. The new lakes and rivulets eventually aged into place, until they seemed as venerably weathered as any other feature of the countryside. But the terrain remained broken and jumbled. People were very leery of returning to it. In the years and decades that followed the time of the Great Shakes, wave after wave of new settlers came into the river valley; the population doubled, and doubled, and doubled again—but the area around New Madrid remained deserted. It didn’t regain its sparse pre-quake population until the middle of the century. Those that did return, and the few new settlers willing to chance life there, reported that the land never did settle down; there were accounts of weird rumbles and tremors and quiverings until at least the 1840s.

  The legal and economic aftershocks went on for just as long. The federal government made its first major foray into disaster relief after New Madrid; it passed an act granting compensation to property owners for their losses. The result was a fury of speculation and an instant, rapidly expanding, and inextricable tangle of lawsuits. Many of these suits dragged on for decades. The Supreme Court was hearing appeals on New Madrid cases in the 1840s; the last one wasn’t settled until the middle of the Civil War. By then a “New Madrid claim” had become a byword throughout the river valley for legal chicanery and fraud.

  But the most immediately significant event of the aftermath went unnoticed by everybody except the river people. When the boats came gliding again downriver into the lower valley, the voyageurs all braced themselves for their inevitable encounter with the Crow’s Nest pirates. But nothing happened. They saw no pirates. As they approached the Crow’s Nest itself, still expecting the worst, they discovered why: there was no Crow’s Nest any longer. There was only a dissolving sandbar where the island had been.

  Almost a century later, a monograph about the quakes published by the United States Geological Survey offered a description of the fate of the Crow’s Nest, as summarized from the eyewitness testimony of one Captain Sarpy. This Sarpy claimed that his boat had been lured to the Crow’s Nest on the evening of December 15, just before the first quake. He quickly realized that it was a trap, and before the pirates spotted him, he dropped back into the river out of sight and set in to wait until morning. The earthquake came, and when the haze cleared in the dawn light, he found that the island was gone. The pirates, their hideout, their hidden stashes of loot—the river h
ad taken them all.

  4

  Like Bubbles on a Sea

  TIMOTHY FLINT CAME TO THE RIVER as a missionary. That was in 1815, during the first big wave of migration to the Mississippi valley. The towns of the Mississippi were believed to be sorely in need of ministers: they already had a reputation for wild licentiousness, for gambling, for prostitution, for casual violence, and for prodigious, near-suicidal drinking. The churches and missionary societies of the East Coast were commissioning every warm body they could find. But Flint was in fact a reasonably good prospect. He had trained as a minister straight out of the highest and most conservative Puritan tradition—he was born in Massachusetts in 1780, was graduated from Harvard in 1800, and had already spent more than a decade serving at local churches in New England. His religious training had put the stress on sobriety, purity, and unquestioning obedience to church doctrine. He added to that his own personality—stiff-necked, querulous, and perpetually aggrieved. A college friend observed of him that there were two striking aspects to his character: he was useless at social intercourse and he was entirely ignorant of human nature. This all made him (it was surely felt by the Missionary Society of Connecticut) perfect for his job.

  When Flint set up at his first church in St. Charles, Missouri, it didn’t take long for him to make a pest of himself. With a wide and clear field of sinfulness before him, he decided that there was one particular vice he needed to target: Sabbath breaking. He was driven to a denunciatory rage when he observed the people of St. Charles working, dancing, partygoing, or laughing out loud in public on a Sunday. This didn’t endear him to his flock. He further alienated them by involving himself in a highly unpopular land deal: he bought and fenced in a large patch of forest where people had been accustomed to collecting their firewood in the winter, and he tried to have anyone who went on foraging there prosecuted for trespassing. Even his fellow ministers in town took sides against him for that. It got even worse for him when he tried to resell the land and found no takers. His letters back to the missionary society were filled with laments about how the deal had cleaned him out and how little support he was getting from the town.