COLUMNISTS Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on

— The string of recent earthquakes in the region should remind us that northeast Arkansas was near the epicenter of the largest quake to hit the nation in recorded history. Early in the morning on Monday, December 16, 1811, the few settlers living in northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri were literally thrown from their beds as the first shocks hit. Over the next three months severe earthquakes shook the area from Cairo, Illinois, to around Memphis.

This was dubbed the New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) Earthquake because that was the only real settlement in the area. The Arkansas historian Margaret Ross estimated that no more than 200 non-Indians lived in the affected part of Arkansas at the time. The small population kept the death toll from the quake down to a few dozen.

Survivors of the quake told amazing stories.Even New Madrid, which was well north of the worst quake zone, suffered the loss of practically every house. River banks, especially along the Mississippi, collapsed in long expanses, swamping any boats that were tied to them. Indeed, it is believed that most fatalities were among boatmen on the river.

Masonry chimneys tumbled to the ground in huge numbers. AtSmithland, in western Kentucky, a chimney fell, exposing the body of a slave who had been murdered by his owners, nephews of President Thomas Jefferson.

It was the loud sounds made by the quakes that lingered longest in the minds of survivors. One observer reported, “The sound is like that of a cannon or distant thunder; and the earth and rocks appear to have been convulsed as though by the force of gun powder.”

There is some evidence that the Mississippi River experienced a reversal of its flow, at least for a few minutes. More certain is the truism that the quakes drained natural lakes and created new ones, and rivers were considerably altered. The 18-mile-long Reelfoot Lake in northwestern Tennessee was created when the quakes caused large tracks of land to sink.

In some places the quakes caused the ground to push upward and form giant domes. Two of the three largest, at modern Blytheville and onewest of the St. Francis River, were in Arkansas. Large tracks of land along the St. Francis sank into the earth. These were called the sunken lands. Big Lake in Mississippi County resulted from the quake.

Fissuring, the process whereby the ground was riven with great openings, horrified the settlers more than anything. One witness reported seeing “a little cluster of men, with pale-visaged women and children holding on to their skirts, gazing with spasmodic, open-mouthed wonder at a fearful chasm in the earth, out of whichissued a current of steam, with serpent-like hissings.”

The United States Congress was slow to react to the pleas for help from stricken settlers in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. A few months before the New Madrid quake, Congress had appropriated $50,000 for victims of a terrible earthquake in Venezuela. (That South American earthquake wassmaller than the New Madrid quake, yet it killed an estimated 10,000 people. This is testimony to the small population of northeast Arkansas in 1811-12.)

In 1815, Congress adopted legislation to indemnify those whose land had been destroyed by the earthquake by granting them an equal quantity of public lands elsewhere. This should have provided relief to many Arkansans who lost land along the St. Francis, but it appears that only 20 of the New Madrid Certificates were redeemed. The remainder were sold to land speculators, often at a pittance, including some which later figured into the long legal battle over ownership of the town site of Little Rock.

-

———◊-

———

Tom Dillard is head of special collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column was published January 19, 2003.

Editorial, Pages 80 on 07/25/2010

Upcoming Events