New Madrid earthquakes

Earthquakes

Date: December 16, 1811-March 15, 1812

Place: Missouri; also Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee

Magnitude: Estimated 8.6 (December 16, 1811), 8.4 (January 23, 1812), 8.8 (February 7, 1812), with other quakes estimated up to 7.0

Result: 1,000 estimated dead, 5 settlements and 2 islands destroyed

In 1811, the New Madrid region encompassed the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the territories of Missouri, Mississippi, Indiana, and Illinois. Within this sparsely populated region, the town of New Madrid, Missouri, with a population of about 1,000, dominated boat traffic on the Mississippi River from the mouth of the Ohio to Natchez, Mississippi. Founded in 1789 by Colonel George Morgan, New Madrid was the third-largest city between St. Louis and New Orleans. It was situated at a point where high banks seemingly would protect it against even the highest flood and at a point where the current brought river traffic close to the western bank on which the town stood. Farmers, hunters, and fur trappers came to the town for supplies; riverboats stopped to buy and sell provisions.

New Madrid County stretched from the Mississippi River to within 30 miles of what would become the Missouri state western border. It included land 60 miles deep into what became Arkansas. Settlers in the entire county numbered only 3,200, but census figures did not include unknown numbers of slaves and Native Americans. These figures also would not have included isolated hunters and fur trappers.

The Earthquakes. In 1811, scientific knowledge could not have provided information about the New Madrid seismic zone, which includes northeastern Arkansas, southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois, western Tennessee, and western Kentucky. The towns of Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Carbondale, Illinois; Paducah, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; and Little Rock, Arkansas, mark the boundaries of the zone; only Cape Girardeau existed in 1811. The unique events of 1811 and 1812 brought this zone, later, to national attention. The number of earthquakes and tremors, the length of time they continued, and the geographic area affected made the New Madrid earthquakes unique in U.S. history. The sparse population and the absence of multistory buildings were credited for the low death rate, about 1,000, during the quakes. In addition, many settlement residents had moved from log homes into tents after the initial quake. The death rate, however, may have been far higher than contemporary or later estimates. Deaths among Native Americans, slaves, and travelers on the Mississippi are not known.

The first tremors were felt about 2 a.m. on December 16, 1811. According to an anonymous New Madrid resident writing to a friend, the earth moved, houses shook, and chimneys fell, to the accompaniment of loud roaring noises and the screams and shouts of frightened people. At 7:15 a.m., a more serious shock occurred.

The shocks would continue. The Richter scale for measuring earthquake intensity had not been invented, but, in Louisville, Kentucky, engineer and surveyor Jared Brooks devised an instrument to measure severity, using pendulums and springs to detect horizontal and vertical motion. Working in Louisville, hundreds of miles from the probable epicenters, he recorded 1,874 separate shocks between December 16, 1811, and March 15, 1812. In New Madrid, according to eyewitness reports, quakes were an almost daily occurrence until 1814. The most violent shocks were felt on December 16, 1811; January 23, 1812; and February 7, 1812. Epicenters for the first two quakes were probably in northeastern Arkansas, about 60 miles south of New Madrid; the last was most likely in southern Missouri.

Eyewitnesses reported experiencing nausea and dizziness, sometimes severe, from the constant motion, saying that they could not maintain their balance during the worst of the quakes. Fissures, some as long as 600 to 700 feet, appeared in the earth. Various accounts told of eerie lights, dense smog, sulfurous smells, and darkness at the time of the quakes. Many pointed to unusual animal behavior before the quakes. Naturalist John Jacob Audubon, riding in Kentucky, was one of several people who found that horses refused to move for moments before the quakes. Bears, wolves, panthers, and foxes appeared in some of the settlements. After the quakes, panicked animals presented problems.

General Geographic Effects. Settlements along the Mississippi River were obliterated by quakes and subsequent flooding or landslides. Other settlements were abandoned. Little Prairie, Missouri, was destroyed on December 16, 1811. As water rose, almost the entire population of the town fled, wading through waist-deep water, carrying children and belongings. They were surrounded by wild animals and snakes also struggling for their lives. Among humans and animals alike, the sick and injured had to be abandoned. The Little Prairie refugees finally reached New Madrid on Christmas Eve, only to find that town in ruins. New Prairie eventually was entirely flooded by the Mississippi River. Big Prairie, Arkansas, near the later town of Helena, was destroyed the same day, also by flood. Point Pleasant, Missouri, was destroyed by bank slides into the Mississippi on January 23, 1812, and in January and February, Fort Jefferson, Kentucky, was lost to landslides. New Madrid itself suffered serious damage from December through February and was finally obliterated by floods in April and May, 1812.

Decades later, New Madrid was reestablished north of the original site. Other settlements, such as Spanish Mill, Missouri, were abandoned when their economic base was destroyed. As the configurations of river channels changed, Spanish Mill was left without enough water to run its mill and without direct access to river traffic.

The land was also changed by the formation of many new lakes, some of them large, during the course of the quakes. These included Big Lake, on the Arkansas-Missouri border, 10 miles long and 4 miles wide, and Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, 65 square miles when first formed. Native Americans reported that their villages were destroyed and that many persons drowned in the formation of the lakes. Elsewhere, large tracts of ground sank. Near Piney River, Tennessee, 18 or 20 acres sank until treetops were level with surrounding ground; the same thing happened to a smaller tract on the Illinois side of the River near Paducah, Kentucky.

Ultimately, the earthquakes were felt over an area of about 1 million square miles, including two-thirds of what were then the United States and its territories. Residents of St. Louis, approximately 200 miles from the epicenter, felt the first shocks around 2:15 a.m. on December 16, 1811. Windows and doors rattled, some chimneys were destroyed, and some stone buildings fell. At Natchez, Mississippi, 300 miles south, four shocks were felt on December 16. Tremors were felt from Washington, D.C., to Boston, Massachusetts; and from Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, north to upper Canada and south to Mexico and Cuba. To the east, considerable damage was reported in Louisville, Kentucky. In Cincinnati, Ohio, the first quake tore down chimneys; the quake of February 7, 1812, destroyed brick walls. Almost 800 miles away, in Washington, D.C., residents woke on December 16, 1811, to the slamming of doors and the rattling of furniture and dishes. Dolley Madison, wife of U.S. president James Madison, was awakened by the shock, which also caused scaffolding around the U.S. Capitol to collapse. The quakes triggered landslides in North Carolina, where, at the statehouse in Raleigh, legislators adjourned, alarmed by the building’s motion. In Charleston, South Carolina, clocks stopped, furniture moved, and church bells rang. During the severe quake of February 7, bells rang in Boston, more than 1,000 miles from New Madrid.

The River and River Traffic. While damage to the Mississippi River and to river traffic was probably more severe than to the land itself, the extent is unknown. The number of boats, workers, and passengers and the amount of cargo on the river is impossible to gauge. Traffic probably was heavy, however, since the Mississippi was the only efficient means of transportation between the midwestern United States and the Gulf of Mexico.

Contemporary accounts point to dramatic effects of the earthquakes. One anonymous traveler saw violent movement of boats at the moment of the first quake. As the traveler watched, massive trees snapped in two. Another, hearing the crash of trees and the screaming of waterfowl, watched as riverbanks began their fall into the water. Eyewitnesses reported that the water changed from clear to rusty brown and became thick with debris tossed up from the bottom. Dead trees shot up from the riverbed into the air. Fissures, opening at the river’s bottom, created whirlpools; water spouted. The quakes also created great waves, which overwhelmed many boats. The largest of the quakes caused the river to heave and boil.

The Mississippi was too dangerous to navigate after dark. River maps were unreliable; stumps and sandbars could shift. Thus, boats moored for the night. Those moored to river islands remained relatively safe, but many boats moored to the western shore were crushed by falling banks.

The most terrifying experience occurred on February 7, 1812, when the most violent of the quakes caused a huge series of waves in the river, in a phenomenon called a fluvial tsunami. This began about 3:15 a.m., when boats were still moored. Flooding New Madrid, the tsunami caused the Mississippi to run backward for a period that seemed, to observers, to last several hours. Lakes were created as the river poured into newly formed depressions, and thousands of acres of forest were dumped into the turbulent water.

The quake created temporary waterfalls, one about half a mile north of New Madrid and the other 8 miles downstream. A boatman, Captain Mathias Speed, had experienced the tsunami. Forced to cut his boat loose from the sinking bar to which it was moored, he found himself moving backward up the river. Safe on shore, he watched the disastrous effects of the waterfalls. River pilots had no way to anticipate the new hazards. Speed and his men counted 30 boats going over the falls. Twenty-eight capsized in the three days before the falls vanished as the river bottom settled. Those on shore could do nothing except listen to the screams for help. There were few survivors.

The first of the quakes, however, helped prove the value of steamboats. The New Orleans, commanded by Nicholas Roosevelt, was making its initial Mississippi River voyage in December of 1811. Provided with 116 feet of length, a 20-foot beam, and a 34-cylinder engine, as well as intelligent navigation, the boat arrived safely at New Orleans, despite the pilot’s despair because all the normal navigation markers of the river had vanished. Since no one along the river had previously seen steam-driven craft, some blamed the subsequent disasters on the steamboat.

By the end of the quakes, the configuration of the river was altered. Many small islands vanished without a trace. Of the larger islands, some several miles in length, two were lost. Island No. 94, known as Stack or Crows Nest Island, inhabited by river pirates, disappeared on December 16, while island No. 32, off the Tennessee shore, disappeared on the night of December 21 while the New Orleans was moored there. Elsewhere, dry land became swamp, and wetlands were uplifted and dried. Smaller rivers that had flowed into the Mississippi were diverted, the shape of New Madrid Bend was changed, and three inlets to the Mississippi were destroyed.

Bibliography

Bagnell, Norma Hayes. On Shaky Ground: The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Fuller, Myron L. The New Madrid Earthquake: A Scientific Factual Field Account. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912.

Logsdon, David, ed. I Was There! In the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812 (Eyewitness Accounts by Survivors of the Worst Earthquake in American History). Nashville: Kettle Mills Press, 1990.

Page, Jake, and Charles Officer. The Big One: The EarthquakeThat Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Penick, James, Jr. The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812. Rev. ed. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.

Stewart, David, and Ray Knox. The Earthquake America Forgot: 2,000 Temblors in Five Months. Marble Hill, Mo.: Guttenberg-Richter, 1995.