The young nation to the east was in an official state of confusion in the last days of 1811. Dolley Madison and her quiet and somewhat indecisive husband, the fourth president of the United States (and the hero of the Constitutional Convention), were at home in the new Washington, D.C., mansion built for the chief executive, as James Madison grappled with a full range of problems. The country’s foreign policy—if, in fact, there was one—was in deep trouble. The nation had yet to command much respect in the world community of established kingdoms and empires, and the British in particular had been treating their former colonies with utter contempt. British ships had for the past six years helped maintain their oaken wall of naval strength against Napoleonic France by impressing British subjects as sailors wherever they could find them, and that included grabbing American sailors on American ships. The humiliation of having U.S. shipping subjected to constant harassment by the British and the French had led Thomas Jefferson’s administration to declare a total embargo on foreign trade several years earlier, a disastrous policy which nearly drove the New England states to rebellion. Now Madison’s administration had begun permitting American trade with only France, falling into a trap set by the wily Napoleon (who would meet the limits of his power the following year on the fields of Waterloo). To make matters worse for Madison, a noisy group (known as the War Hawks) led by thirty-four-year-old Henry Clay of Kentucky, was clamoring for war with England, looking for an opportunity to seize Canada and England’s western possessions. It was a time of unrest, and with slow communications, a time of rampant rumors on the frontier.
Several hundred miles of twisting river to the south of New Madrid, the city of New Orleans was still adjusting to American control. The “capital city” of French America had been sold suddenly by Napoleon to a startled Thomas Jefferson eight years earlier for a mere fifteen million dollars. What shook Jefferson was the additional land that came with New Orleans: the entire Louisiana Territory, an expanse stretching from the western shores of the Mississippi all the way to what would later become Utah and Wyoming. Overnight the real estate holdings of the fledgling United States had doubled.
For New Madrid, however, the Louisiana Purchase was a disaster. The town had been laid out originally with a grandiose plan by promoter Colonel George Morgan, a Revolutionary War officer, to become the capital of Spanish America. It had served as a mandatory tax collection stop for river traffic through what had been first Spanish, and later French territory, but with the land on both sides of the river now part of the United States, there were no more taxes to be collected. Suddenly, New Madrid’s chief reason for existence had evaporated.
When John Bradbury and crew stopped at New Madrid on December 14, 1811, all that was left of the community was a collection of two small stores carrying a desultory arrangement of merchandise, perhaps a hundred cabins scattered in the immediate vicinity, one Catholic church without a priest, and (by some reports) one schoolhouse. It was hardly a garden spot of the Mississippi, and Bradbury was not sad to leave it.
Having traveled one hundred miles farther south on the river, by two o’clock on the frigid morning of December 16, Bradbury’s flatboat was tied to a grove of willows a few hundred yards above a dangerous area of the river called the Devil’s Race Ground, where the Mississippi flowed past a half-submerged island. Running such shallow narrows in darkness would have been suicidal, so the crew had decided to bed down for the night in the roughhewn cabins on the flatboat beneath a starry sky.
The sounds of the mighty Mississippi formed an audible backdrop of soothing white noise as the tired boatmen dropped off to sleep. The distant roar of the rapids just to the south balanced by a constant burbling and splashing of waves against the bank blended with the gentle rocking of the wooden craft. The heavy scent of wet vegetation intermingled with the musty smell of Mississippi mud and the aroma of kerosene in the drafty shipboard cabin. Wrapped in equally odorous buffalo robes against the freezing temperatures, Bradbury and the others were fast asleep in different cabins at the moment that massive tectonic pressures that had been building unseen and unknown beneath the region finally reached the breaking point.
Suddenly, with no warning, cubic miles of rock shifted, causing other blocks and faults to activate, the moving, reverberating mass lashing out with massive waves of seismic energy.
The P waves and the S waves from miles directly beneath the small settlement of Little Prairie, sixty-five miles north of Bradbury’s boat, arrived twenty-four seconds later, crashing into the riverbed beneath the boat. With an initial, monstrous heave accompanied by a deep-throated rumbling of soul-shaking proportions, the banks of the Mississippi began moving, the water churning in violent waves.
Bradbury was awake in an instant, the incredible noise all around him blending with the sudden motion of the heavy boat—a motion which made no sense. With the sound of trees beginning to crash nearby, he threw off the heavy buffalo robe and tensed his body to leap through the entrance to the tiny cabin, when it was filled instead with several of his crew, eyes wide, a look of uncomprehending terror on their faces.
“O, mon Dieu, Monsieur Bradbury, qu’est-c’qu’[il] y a?! [What is that?]”
Bradbury had to push past the men to get to the door, running over the bucking deck of the cabin, his senses rebelling at the magnitude of the shaking and the noise—the horrendous noise—all around them.
The river looked as if it were in the midst of a storm, agitated, confused waves chopping in different directions, but not wild enough to explain the lurching and shuddering of the boat. Something else had hold of it and seemed to be shaking it with a vengeful violence.
The sound of wildfowl screaming in various directions in the dark willows all around the bank pierced the low rumbling. The image of white foam on the river blended in a confused rush with the sight of the trees to which the boat was tied, whipping in incredible arcs toward the water and back up.
All he could think of was their mooring lines. They must hold, or the current would take them!
The men were behind him now, all of them out of the other cabin, where they had also been jolted awake. Joseph Morin, the patron, met Bradbury’s gaze with a wild look as the botanist turned back to the terrified faces and half screamed the answer:
“C’est un tremblement de terre! [It’s an earthquake!]”
As his words reached them, a large mass of riverbank crashed into the water somewhere nearby in the dark. Bradbury had been satisfied that their mooring was safe; now he wasn’t sure. If they snapped loose and got shoved into the Devil’s Race Ground at night in this upheaval, they would surely drown. John Bradbury didn’t need years of experience on the river to arrive at that conclusion. It was self-evident.
But at the moment he had a panicked crew and a seismic nightmare with which to contend. With the second crash of riverbank into the churning waters, the patron’s voice rose like a shriek over the awful rumbling: “O, mon Dieu, nous perons! [Oh, my God! We’re perishing!]”
The seismic waves reached the town of New Madrid approximately seven seconds after they began assaulting Little Prairie, slamming into the roughhewn houses simultaneously, jolting awake the residents, many of whom were thrown unceremoniously onto cold floorboards in pitch-dark rooms still heavy with the wood-smoke of last evening’s fire and early morning’s embers, the thunderous noises from below blending with the squealing of tortured wooden joints and crashing metal pans, shattering glass windows, and disintegrating stone chimneys and hearths.
A young woman named Elizabeth Bryan was one of those who awoke to a nightmare in total darkness when her bed rammed the wall of her small bedroom at flank speed. Fumbling, terrified, and unsure of where she was for a few seconds, she could hear the panicked screams of geese someplace outside along with the frightened yells of fellow humans.
Scrambling over the pitching floor to the doorway, fighting the sickening motions, Bryan lunged at the bolt and nearly fell outside when she yanked it back, the door pitching op
en into the darkness of an alien landscape.
The world she entered seemed to be ending. Most of the residents of New Madrid must have had similar thoughts as they fought to get outside, then fought to stay upright. Trees were still whipping back and forth in the little town with awful splintering noises and the bellowing of cattle melding with the “most awful roar” as people staggered seemingly in all directions at once.
There were a few smoky torchlights now as the townspeople gathered, confused, scared, and not even noticing the freezing temperatures as they stood in nightshirts and nightgowns, bare feet on frozen soil, listening to the winding down of the noises that Elizabeth Bryan would later describe as “very awful … resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating.”
The sky had been crystal clear as the people spilled into the freezing night. Within five minutes, however, a cloud of dust and “vapour” with a sulfurous smell filled the air and blocked out the stars.
Through the night there were eight more minor shocks, followed by a major jolt just after 6:30 A.M. and culminating with a monstrous shaking worse than all the others which hit a little after 7:00 A.M., this one strong enough to shock the famous bird watcher John Audubon as he rode his horse in the barrens of Kentucky several hundred miles to the east.
This time, in the subdued morning light, weird geysers of sand and what appeared to be a black substance mixed with water broke out in several locations nearby, some spouting up to fifteen feet in the air the heavy sulfurous odor again overtaking everyone, getting in their eyes and obscuring their vision. The seismic waves yanked the ground beneath New Madrid from side to side, further collapsing houses and chimneys in the midst of a hoarse, frightening roaring mixed with the screams and yells. The bewildered people were in mass confusion as their community and their houses crashed around them.
One hundred miles to the south John Bradbury and his boat had managed to stay tied to what was left of the bank, but as the shaking died down, he plunged into the water with a candle, following two of the crewmen, trying to see whether the lines were still secure.
What he found was a profound shock. Shielding a candle, he saw “a long chasm bridged with fallen trees [separating the bank they were moored to from the new bank of the river]; at its end the sheer bank had caved into the river. Their boat would have been buried had it been moored fifty feet above.”
Bradbury finally gave the order to abandon the craft, and all of them spent the remaining long hours of darkness on the shaking bank, huddled around a small campfire and counting the impacts of succeeding shocks. The earth seemed to never stop moving.
Six hundred miles to the east the waves passed beneath Thomas Jefferson’s home shortly after two in the morning. The grand mansion of Monticello had begun shaking, the sight of kerosene lamps swaying back and forth greeting the startled ex-president of the United States as he sat bolt upright in bed and wondered what had happened.
The seismic waves set bells ringing in New York and Boston moments later, “throwing down” houses as far east as Cincinnati (where residents ran outdoors), spreading over all of the fledgling nation, waking residents in farms and villages, towns and tents from the foothills of the Rockies to the Atlantic shores. In a thousand dark rooms puzzled humans looked around and wondered what had shaken them, unaware that what they were feeling was a catastrophic earthquake. It would be weeks before word spread throughout the country, explaining that what had startled them had begun on what were at the time the western fringes of their nation, an unfathomable distance away.
As daylight crept into the shattered remains of New Madrid, a muddy, turbulent Mississippi River could be seen laden with debris (including the cargo of several destroyed river barges, barrels of flour and pork, and personal possessions), and the aftershocks continued. In fact, the earth seemed to stay in a constant state of agitation throughout the day of December 16 and into the next, as hundreds of stunned settlers simply lost track of the number of jolts.
As a sad Christmas season came and departed, the band of traumatized survivors at New Madrid continued to live in temporary tents and shelters, without money, without much hope, and without help. Much of their townsite had slumped into the river, and numerous houses had been destroyed or damaged. Word began to filter in that a small lake had been tremendously enlarged by a massive slumping of the land to the east in Tennessee (it was named Reelfoot Lake), and stunned rivermen spread reports of islands which had disappeared while new ones had risen in strange places, the channels with which they had become so familiar now completely altered.
On January 7, 1812, it happened again. Another mammoth quake erupted amidst the constant smaller quakes, this one coming in the early darkness as well, causing widespread sandblows, strange lights in the sky, more slumping of the riverbank, and horrendous noises and traumatizing people almost as severely as the first major jolt of December 16.
More chimneys were destroyed on January 7, and from that day until February 1, the tremors continued on a daily basis.
Then, suddenly, about February 1, all was quiet again. The smaller quakes stopped, the periodic shocks ceased, and people began to dare hope that maybe the worst was over.
It wasn’t. At 4:00 A.M. on February 7 another series of breaks directly beneath New Madrid radiated massive waves of energy that smacked into the pitiful community with a force and vengeance greater than all that had come before. Elizabeth Bryan, still clinging to hope and living on an adjacent hillside, watched sand geysers erupt in all directions, saw the remaining buildings in New Madrid utterly destroyed, and listened to the raging water of the Mississippi as its bottom was thrust up in several places, creating a series of tremendous (but temporary) waterfalls on the great river.
The awful darkness of the atmosphere, which, as formerly, was saturated with sulfurous vapor, and the violence of the tempestuous thundering noise that accompanied it, together with all the phenomena mentioned as attending the former [earthquakes], formed a scene, the description of which would require the most sublimely fanciful imagination. At first the Mississippi seemed to recede from its banks, and its water gathered up like a mountain, leaving, for a moment, many boats which were here on their way to New Orleans, on the bare sand, in which time the poor sailors made their escape from them. It then [rose] fifteen or twenty feet perpendicularly, and expanding, as it were, at the moment, the bank overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent. The boats, which before had been left on the sand, were now torn from their moorings, and suddenly driven up a little creek.… The river falling immediately as rapidly as it had risen, receded within its banks again with such violence that it took with it whole groves of young cotton-wood trees which lodged its borders.… A great many fish were left on the bank, being unable to keep up with the water. The river was partially covered with the wrecks of boats, and it is said that one was wrecked in which there was a lady and six children, all of whom were lost.
In all the hard shocks mentioned the earth was horribly torn to pieces; the surface of hundreds of acres was … covered over to various depths by the sand which issued from the fissures which were made in great numbers all over the county, some of which closed up immediately after they had vomited forth their sand and water.4
The townspeople had had enough. Almost to a person they fled what was left of ravaged New Madrid for a nearby encampment on a small hillside, one family in such panic that their injured seventeen-year-old daughter was left behind on her bed where a falling timber had broken her leg.5
The town of New Madrid was gone, totally destroyed. What had not been shaken to the ground had fallen into the river with the calving riverbank.
The Mississippi waterfalls which were reported by Bryan and others gave rise to reports that the great river had actually run backward, but whether it was a temporary “retrograde current” or a genuine flow reversal (highly unlikely, considering the volume of water), the river had been forever changed.
On the adjacent land the remains
of sandblows dotted the destroyed countryside, forests lay cocked at strange angles, trees lay broken by the millions, an area of land four miles long had dropped twelve feet, a huge lake had been created, and many boats were missing. There were no officials in what was left of New Madrid to decide how many had died, but because of the small population, the number of people who did not live through the quakes was minimal. Not so, however, on the river. Although John Bradbury and his crew had made it safely to New Orleans by February 7, others simply disappeared with their cargoes. There was no way to know how many.
The February 7 “hard shock” was felt and noticed throughout the nation. Major topographic changes had ripped through an area of fifty thousand square miles, and an area of one million square miles had been badly shaken. St. Louis suffered substantially, with many houses damaged, some collapsed, chimneys down by the dozens, and the population thoroughly frightened. New Orleans, Boston, New York, Chicago, Colorado, Montana’s wilderness, and even southern Canada weighed in with excited newspaper accounts in the next few months. Repeated strong shocks rocked Louisville, Kentucky, two hundred miles away and St. Louis to the north. Cracks developed in buildings in Savannah, Georgia; a chimney was lost in Richmond, Virginia; pavement cracked in Washington, D.C.; and bells rang by themselves all over the country.
The New Madrid region was sparsely populated before, but the few people who had been there during December and January scattered to the four winds (except for a few hearty souls). Many decades would pass before anyone would make a systematic assessment of the surface damage, but even a hundred years later it would be staggering. Each of the three quakes would have registered near magnitude Mw 8.5—sufficient to classify them as “great quakes” in the West and well over that threshold in the east.6
On Shaky Ground Page 15