New Madrid, MO Earthquakes 1811-1812

On the 15th day of December, 1811, the first great shock of an earthquake occurred, that shook the whole majestic valley of the Mississippi to the center, and made the Allegheny mountains tremble beneath its gigantic throes. Its convulsions agitated even the waves of the Atlantic ocean. The subterranean forces which produced such results must have been of inconceivable magnitude.

The region on the west bank of the Mississippi and in the southern part of the state of Missouri seems to have been the center of the most violent shocks. They were repeated at intervals of two or three months. These shocks, in their terrible upheavings of the earth, equal any phenomena of the kind of which history gives any record. The country was very thinly settled, and there were but few educated men in the whole region who could philosophically note the phenomena which were witnessed. Fortunately. most of the houses were very frail, being built of logs. Such structures would sway to and fro with the surgings of the earth, but they were not easily thrown down. Vast tracts of land were precipitated into the turbid, foaming current of the Mississippi. The graveyard at New Madrid was at one swoop torn away, and with all its mouldering dead, swept down the stream.

Most of the houses in New Madrid were destroyed. Large regions of forest, miles in extent, suddenly sank out of sight, while the waters rushed in forming, upon the spot, almost fathomless lakes. Other lakes were drained, leaving only vast basins of mud, where, apparently for centuries, in the solitudes of the forest, the waves had rolled.

The Whole wilderness of territory extending from the mouth of the Ohio, three hundred miles, to the St. Francis, was so convulsed as to create lakes and islands, ravines and marshes, whose numbers never can be fully known. Some of the effects produced were very difficult to account for. Large- trees were split through the heart of the tough wood. The trees were inclined in every direction, and were lodged in every angle towards the earth or the horizon. The undulations of the earth resembled the surges of a tempest-tossed ocean, the billows ever increasing in magnitude. At the greatest elevation these earth billows would burst open, and water, sand and coal would be ejected as high as the loftiest trees. Some of the chasms thus created were very deep.

Wide districts were covered by a shower of small white sand, like the ground after a snow storm. This spread of desolation rendered the region around quite uninhabitable for a long time. Other immense tracts were flooded with water from a few inches to a few feet deep. As the water subsided a coating of barren sand was left behind.

Indeed, it must have been a scene of horror in these deep forests, and in the gloom of the darkest night, and by wading in the water to the middle to fly from those concussions, which were occurring every few hours, with a noise equally terrible to beasts and birds and to man. The birds themselves lost all power and disposition to fly, and retreated to the bosoms of men - their fellow sufferers - in this general convulsion. A few persons sank in these chasms, and were providentially extricated. A number perished who sank with their boats in the Mississippi. A bursting of the earth just below the village of New Madrid arrested the mighty Mississippi in its course, and caused a reflux of its waters, by which, in a little time, a great number of boats were swept by the ascending current into the mouth of the bayou, carried out and left upon the dry earth when the accumulating waters of the river had again cleared the current.

The following is from "The Great West." There were a number of severe shocks, but the two series of concussions were particularly terrible, far more so than the rest. The shocks were clearly distinguished into two classes—those in which the motion was horizontal, and those in which it was perpendicular. The latter were attended with explosions: and the terrible mixture of noises that preceded and accompanied the earthquakes in a louder degree, but were by no means so desolating and destructive as the other. The houses crumbled, the trees weaved together, the ground sunk, while ever and anon vivid flashes of lightning, gleaming through the troubled clouds of night, rendered the darkness doubly horrible. After the severest shocks, a dense, black cloud of vapor overshadowed the land, through which no struggling sunbeam found its way to cheer the heart of man. The sulphurated gases that were discharged during the shocks tainted the air with their noxious effluvia, and so impregnated the water of the river for one hundred and fifty miles as to render it unfit for use.

In the intervals of the earthquake there was one evening, and that a brilliant and cloudless one, in which the western sky was a continued glare of repeated peals of subterranean thunder, seeming to proceed, as the flashes did, from below the horizon. The night, which was so conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the same period in which the fatal earthquakes at Caracas, in South America, occurred, and it is supposed that these flashes and those events were part of the same scene.

One result from these terrible phenomena was very obvious. The people in this region had been noted for their profligacy and impiety. In the midst of these scenes of terror, all, Catholics and Protestants, the prayerful and the profane, became one religion, and partook of one feeling. Two hundred people, speaking English, French and Spanish, crowded together, their faces pale, the mothers embracing their children. As soon as the omen which preceded the earthquake became visible, as soon as the air became a little obscured, as soon as a certain mist arose from the east, all in their different languages and forms, but all deeply in earnest, betook themselves to the voice of prayer. The cattle, much terrified, crowded about the people, seeking to demand protection or community of danger.

The general impulse, when the shocks commenced, was to run. And yet, when they were at the severest points -of their motion, the people were thrown upon the ground at almost every step. A French gentleman told me that in escaping from his house, the largest in the village, he found that he had left an infant behind, and he attempted to mount up the raised piazza to recover the child, and was thrown down a dozen times in succession. The venerable lady in whose dwelling we lodged, was extricated from the ruins of her house, having lost everything that appertained to her establishment which could be broken or destroyed. The people at the Little Prairie who suffered most, had their settlement, which consisted of a hundred families, and which was located in a rich and fertile bottom, broken up. When I passed it and stopped to contemplate the traces of the catastrophe, which remained after several years, the crevices, where the earth had burst, were sufficiently manifest, and the whole region was covered with sand to the depth of two or three feet. The surface was red with oxydized [sic] pyrites of iron, and the sand blows, as they were called, were abundantly, mixed with this kind of earth and with pieces of pit coal. But two families remained of the whole settlement. The object seems to have been in the first paroxysms of alarm, to escape to the hills. The depth of water that soon covered the surface precluded escape.

The people, without exception, were unlettered backwoodsmen, of the class least addicted to reasoning. And yet it is remarkable how ingeniously and conclusively they reasoned, from apprehension sharpened by fear. They observed that the chasms in the earth were in the direction from southwest to northeast, and they were of an extent to swallow up not only men, but houses, clown deep into the pit. And these chasms occurred frequently, within intervals of half a mile. They felled the tallest trees at right angles to the chasm, and .stationed themselves upon the felled trees. Meantime their cattle and harvests, both there and at New Madrid, principally perished.

The people no longer dared to dwell in houses. They passed that winter and the succeeding one in bark booths and camps, like those of the Indians, of so light a texture as not to expose the inhabitants to danger in case of their being thrown down. Such numbers of laden boats were wrecked above the Mississippi and the lading driven into the eddy at the mouth of the bayou at the village, which makes the harbor, that the people were amply provided with provisions of every kind. Flour, beef, park, bacon, butter, cheese, apples, in short everything that is carried down the river, was in such abundance as scarcely to be matters of sale. Many of the boats that came safely into the bayou were disposed of by the affrighted owners for a trifle, for the shocks continued daily, and the owners deeming the country below sunk, were glad to return to the upper country as fast as possible. In effect, a great many islands were sunk, new ones raised. and the bed of the river very much changed in every respect.

After the earthquake had moderated in violence, the country exhibited a melancholy aspect of chasms, of sand covering the earth, of trees thrown down or lying at an angle of forty-five degrees, a split in the middle. The Little Prairie settlement was broken up. The Great Prairie settlement, one of the most flourishing before, on the west bank of the Mississippi, was much diminished. New Madrid dwindled into insignificance and decay, the people trembling in their miserable hovels at the distant and melancholy rumbling of the approaching shocks.

The general government passed an act allowing the inhabitants of the country to locate the same quantity of land that they possessed here in any part of the territory where the lands were not yet covered by any claim. These claims passed into the hands of speculators, and were never of any substantial value to the possessor. When I resided there, this district, formerly so level, rich and beautiful, had the most melancholy of all aspects of decay. The tokens of former cultivation and habitancy [sic] were now mementos of desolation and desertion. Large and beautiful orchards were left uninclosed [sic], homes were deserted, and deep chasms in the earth were obvious at frequent intervals. Such was the face of the county, although the people had for years become so accustomed to frequent and small shocks, which did no essential injury that the lands were gradually rising again in value, and New Madrid was slowly rebuilding with frail buildings adapted to the apprehensions of the people."

History of Seneca County : from the close of the Revolutionary War to July, 1880 : embracing many personal sketches of pioneers, anecdotes, and faithful descriptions of events pertaining to the organization of the county and its progress; Springfield, Ohio: Transcript Print. Co., 1880, Pages 640-643
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