Saturday Snippet: The day the Mississippi ran backwards

 

As mentioned in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading about the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.  Among other sources, I found "When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes".

It's a long (sometimes over-long) but very interesting account of the earthquakes, based upon survivors' reports and post-earthquake investigations.  I'm still busy with it, and finding it very informative.

For today's Snippet, I thought I'd pick a chapter describing the Mississippi River itself during and immediately after the earthquake.  Remember that at this period in history, steamboats had not yet become commonplace, so many living near the river had never seen them or even heard of them - hence their reactions to this strange critter of the waters.

ABOUT 125 miles northeast of Rocky Hill, the steamboat New Orleans was resting quietly on the evening of December 15 [1811]. Apart from not having been able to recruit any investors for the Ohio Steamboat Navigation Company, the voyage of the New Orleans was going as well as Nicholas Roosevelt could have hoped. The boat had performed admirably at the Falls, and she was on a reasonably timely schedule. And now Roosevelt was the proud father of a son.

 Like everybody else within a three-hundred-mile radius of New Madrid, those aboard the steamboat were awakened by the 2:15 a.m. shock. With the shakes continuing throughout the night, they passed the rest of the anxious time without sleep. Yet they may have been the most fortunate of everyone in the area—because of the size and stability of their boat, the water was safer than land.

As soon as it was light enough to travel, the New Orleans was able to get under way. Moving downstream, the vibrations and noise of the engine kept the people on board from feeling the impact of the ongoing shocks, including the powerful aftershock that morning. But the Roosevelts’ Newfoundland dog, Tiger, felt the tremors and alternated between whining and growling as he prowled around the deck, and laying his head softly in Lydia Roosevelt’s lap, which indicated to the humans that “it was a sure sign of a commotion of more than usual violence.”

Insulated from the quake’s effect by this awesome new vehicle of a dawning age, those aboard the steamboat calmly ate their breakfast, but as the New Orleans continued downriver, signs of the quakes became more readily apparent. The passengers saw trees swaying as if in a high gale although, in fact, there was no wind blowing. They watched as an enormous section of riverbank suddenly tore away and dropped into the river. As the boat grew closer to the epicenter, it was lifted by quake-induced waves, and many on board the New Orleans were struck with seasickness.

The boat’s pilot, Andrew Jack, who was on intimate terms with the river, found the channel altered to the point where he was forced to concede he was lost. New hazards lay everywhere, and heretofore reliably deep water was now filled with uprooted trees. Without the familiar channel, Jack chose to stay in the middle of the river and hope for the best. It slowed him down, but it was a much safer way to proceed.

As the big boat passed the small settlements along the lower Ohio, the evidence mounted. Henderson, Highland Creek, Shawnee Town, and Cash Creek all showed earthquake damage. All along the route, banks were caved in and trees were down, and the shapes of familiar islands were changed.

The following night, the New Orleans put up about six miles above the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, and not more than twenty-five miles from the Rocky Hill plantation. Not long after the crew and passengers had retired, there were urgent cries for help from the forward cabin. Assuming an Indian attack, Roosevelt jumped out of bed. He quickly grabbed the ceremonial sword from the outfit he wore for official receptions, and flew out the door of the family’s sleeping quarters.

Reaching the forward cabin, Roosevelt found not Indians but flames. Roosevelt’s mind jumped to the worst conclusion—an engine explosion, the most dreaded hazard on steamboats. But as he glanced around the room, he saw the real cause. In anticipation of the following day’s needs, the crewman who had been assigned to tend the fire had stacked up a pile of green wood near the heating stove to dry it out. Exhausted by the stress of the past two days’ events, the man had fallen asleep, and the wood caught fire. The flames quickly jumped to the finely crafted wood of the cabin walls, and suddenly the whole boat was imperiled. Roosevelt regained his wits and took command, urgently barking out orders. With Roosevelt encouraging his men all the while, the blaze was soon extinguished, but not before the exquisite paneling of the forward cabin was all but destroyed.

The following day, when the New Orleans reached the confluence of the two rivers, the water level in the big river was unusually high and the current had slackened, an unmistakable indication of flooding. When the big boat arrived at New Madrid that afternoon they found the place in a shambles. The entire town had dropped fifteen feet, down to the level of the Mississippi. A huge chunk of the riverfront, including the city cemetery, was gone, carried away by the river. Many chimneys and fences were down; others fell before their eyes. Houses were damaged. What had been a large plain behind the town was now a lake. The earth’s surface was rent by hundred-foot-long chasms. People and animals wandered about in a state of somnambulance.

As the huge boat approached, many of the townspeople fled in terror. The braver among the inhabitants, however, hailed the boat and begged to be taken aboard. Their frantic pleas for help threw Roosevelt into a quandary. There were far more people wanting to board the New Orleans than the boat’s store of provisions could possibly accommodate. Moreover, these refugees had no place to go, and when they were put ashore at Natchez or New Orleans, they would have no means of support.

The Roosevelts looked at the heartrending scene, and despite their instinct to take the refugees aboard, they knew they had no choice. Sadly, “there was no choice but to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the terrified inhabitants of the doomed town.”

* * * * *

As bad as the damage was on land, conditions were worse on the river. The New Orleans had been protected by her weight and size. The rest of the boats on the Mississippi were tossed about like toys in a bathtub.

 Firmin La Roche, a sailor by trade, was the captain of a small fleet of three boats transporting furs from St. Louis to New Orleans in December 1811. (After the Battle of Tippecanoe, riverboats increasingly tended to travel in groups as protection against Indian attack.) There were eleven other men on the three boats; on La Roche’s vessel were a crewhand named Henry Lamel, a slave named Ben, and Fr. Joseph, a French priest who had been a missionary among the Osage and was now returning to France. The convoy left St. Louis on December 8 but twice in the first week was delayed en route for repairs.

On the evening of December 15, the convoy tied up about eight miles north of New Madrid, at a landing near the home of La Roche’s cousin, John Le Clerq. The boatmen ate supper and retired for the night.

At about 2:15 a.m., La Roche was jolted awake by a thunderous crash that turned the boat on its side. Lamel, sleeping in the next bed, was flung on top of La Roche, and the two men landed hard against the side of the boat.

La Roche, Lamel, Ben, and Fr. Joseph scrambled to the deck to see what had happened. The impenetrable darkness was filled only with sounds—an unidentifiable crashing and grinding, and booming explosions and ominous rumblings emanating from the depths of the earth. For almost an hour, they had no reference point until, at around 3:00 a.m., the haze cleared enough for La Roche to see thousands of trees crashing down and huge sections of shoreline tumbling into the river.

With the boat pitching and rolling, Lamel managed to cut the rope that was tied to a log near the bank. The boat had just begun to float away from shore when it was lifted by a monstrous rush of water from downstream. “So great a wave came up the river,” wrote La Roche, “that I never have seen one like it at sea.”

The four men grabbed on to whatever part of the boat they could and held on for dear life. Trying to row or steer was futile—not capsizing or being thrown overboard was the best they could hope for as they were swept along by the gigantic wave. The river rose to as high as thirty feet above its normal level, and the boat was carried upriver, toward St. Louis, for more than a mile. The mighty Mississippi was running backwards!

The angry river was surging and roiling. John Weisman, a flatboat pilot who was transporting Kentucky whiskey, reported that “if my flatboat boat load of whiskey had sprung a leak and made the ‘Father of Waters’ drunk it could not have committed more somersaults. It seemed that old Vesuvius himself was drunk.” Vessels were tossed about so violently that experienced boatmen had trouble staying on their feet.

Sandbars and the points of islands dissolved into the furious waters, taking countless numbers of trees down with them, thereby creating new hazards for already beleaguered riverboat pilots. Great quantities of long-submerged trees were also dislodged from the river bottom, freed from the depths “to become merciless enemies of navigation,” as one later report so aptly phrased it.

One man whose boat was wrecked on a planter climbed onto its trunk as his vessel went down. Grateful at least for his life having been spared, he soon realized to his dismay that the snag was slipping down into the raging river. Over the course of the next few hours, he desperately clung to the trunk, calling for help as several boats passed by. Finally, a skiff managed to row a short distance upstream of the man and float down alongside the planter. As it passed under him, the exhausted fellow let go of the trunk and tumbled into the boat.

Neither of Firmin La Roche’s other two boats was in sight; one vessel and its crew would never be seen again. “Everywhere there was noise like thunder,” wrote La Roche, “and the ground was shaking the trees down, and the air was thick with something like smoke. There was much lightning … I do not know how long this went on, for we were all in great terror, expecting death.” La Roche, Lamel, and Ben knelt and received absolution from Fr. Joseph.

Finally, the great wave began to subside, and the river gradually resumed its normal direction. Near New Madrid, several boats that had been carried up a small stream just above the town were left high and dry, several miles from the river.

As La Roche’s boat was carried back downstream, the sky began to lighten. On the Kentucky side of the river the boatmen saw two houses burning. When they reached New Madrid, there were several more buildings in flames, and a crowd of about twenty terror-stricken people crowded together on the high bank, crying out and cringing in fear. The crewmen tied up to the shore, but before anyone could disembark, a nearby hickory tree suddenly cracked and came crashing down on the boat. A branch whipped into La Roche’s left arm, splintering the humerus like a toothpick. Ben was pinned beneath the tree trunk. The others rushed to his aid, but when they managed, with some difficulty, to pull his body out, it was limp. Ben was dead.

The tree had also damaged the boat, which began taking on water. Thinking they would be drowned, the men frantically climbed onto the shore, dragging Ben’s lifeless body with them. When the people on land saw a priest among the group, they all knelt, and Fr. Joseph gave them absolution as well.

La Roche’s boat did not sink, however, and the townspeople loudly urged the boatmen to return to their craft, believing they would be safer on the water. Having already experienced several terrifying hours on the river, however, the crew were of the exact opposite opinion, and they chose to stay on land. They hurriedly dug a shallow grave and buried Ben.

All the while, the shocks continued, accompanied by constant sounds issuing from the earth. As soon as it was light enough, the crew set about repairing the boat. When it was mended to the extent that they could continue, the people onshore began crowding on board and dumping the cargo of furs into the river in order to lighten the load. (La Roche later estimated his losses at $600.) Finally, when no more souls could safely fit aboard, they pushed off. Unfortunately, the boat leaked badly, and the overloaded vessel was in danger of sinking. Lamel bailed furiously, but finally La Roche insisted that the passengers be deposited back onshore.

As they made their way toward New Orleans, the boatmen saw evidence of earthquake damage for 250 miles south of New Madrid. Concerning the loss of life, Fr. Joseph wrote, “We made no effort to find out how many people had been killed, although it was told us that many were. We saw the dead bodies of several and afterwards drowned persons we saw floating in the river.”

* * * * *

Earthquakes in themselves do not usually kill people. People are killed by the secondary phenomena associated with earthquakes, which include tsunamis, landslides, fires, falling structures, soil liquefaction, and land fissures.

Fires are one of the greatest hazards in an earthquake. In modern quakes they can be caused by exposed electrical wires or broken gas lines. For example, in the 1906 San Francisco quake, for which death toll estimates range from seven hundred to three thousand people, the greatest number of casualties was caused by the resulting fire that swept through the city. In the New Madrid quakes, the burning buildings witnessed by La Roche were a result of candles or overturned woodstoves that still held embers of the previous evening’s fire.

The wave that carried La Roche and his crew upriver and created the impression that the river had reversed its flow was another deadly secondary effect. It was similar in cause and result to a tsunami. Two factors most likely were responsible. First, a large piece of land somewhere near Little Prairie was thrust up and temporarily dammed the river—quite possibly the “great loaf of bread” recorded by Michael Braunm, who observed that after the “loaf” burst, the river was running retrograde. When the water upstream, pushed along by the current, hit the wall of land, it had no place to go but back in the direction from which it had come, causing a huge wave, just as deformation of the ocean floor during an earthquake at sea displaces vast quantities of water that can result in a tsunami. In addition, enormous sections of riverbank were caving in all around—a Captain John Davis recorded seeing “30 or 40 acres” fall—and when they did, they displaced huge volumes of water, adding to the size of the wave. When the land that had dammed up the river began to erode away, which happened relatively quickly because of its soft character, the current once again flowed naturally.

* * * * *

John Bradbury, a Scottish naturalist engaged in an extensive collection of North American plant specimens, was on a boat about a hundred miles south of New Madrid when the first quake hit. He had been entrusted by a friend with delivering a cargo of a ton and a half of lead from St. Louis to New Orleans; on board with him were a passenger named John Bridge and a crew of five French Creoles, including M. Morin, the boatmaster or patron. On the night of December 15, the boat was tied up to a sloping bank on a small island near the second Chickasaw Bluff, near present-day Memphis, about five hundred yards above a shallow stretch of river so treacherous that it was known as the Devil’s Channel or the Devil’s Race Ground. Through this channel, the river rushed so ferociously that the roar of the water could be heard for miles. With the sun already having set, Bradbury determined that the channel was too dangerous to attempt and decided to wait until morning.

When the quake hit, Bradbury and the others were awakened by the noise and “so violent an agitation of the boat that it appeared in danger of upsetting.” They rushed onto the deck. The caving banks had caused such a swell in the river that the boat nearly capsized and sank.

Morin, the patron, was beside himself with fear. “O mon Dieu!” he cried, continuing in French, “We are going to die!” Bradbury tried to calm him, but Morin ran off the boat crying, “Get onto land! Get onto land!” The deckhands followed him onto the island.

Bradbury decided to go ashore as well. As he was preparing to leave the boat, another shock was unleashed. When Bradbury reached the island, he found a frighteningly large fissure. With his candle, he walked the length of the fissure and concluded that it was at least eighty yards long; at either end, the perpendicular banks had crumbled into the Mississippi. With a shudder he realized that had his boat been moored to a perpendicular bank rather than a sloping one, he and his companions would have been goners.

As the sky lightened, the horrors began to emerge. “The river was covered with foam and drift timber, and had risen considerably.” As Bradbury and his party waited for enough light to embark, a pair of empty canoes came drifting downstream on the faster-than-normal current. These canoes were of the type towed by boats and used for getting ashore and boarding other vessels, and Bradbury took it as “a melancholy proof” that some of the boats they had passed the previous day had perished along with their crews.

The shocks continued; while on the island, Bradbury counted twenty-seven more by dawn. At daybreak, he gave the order to embark, and everyone returned to the boat. Two of the deckhands were loosening the ropes when yet another powerful shock hit. In terror, the two men ran up onto dry land, but before they could get across the fissure that had opened in the night, a tree came smashing down to block their way. The bank of the island was rapidly disappearing into the river. Bradbury called out to loosen the ropes, and the two hands ran back to the boat.

Now they were once again on the river, but as the boat approached the Devil’s Race Ground, Bradbury saw that the channel was chocked with trees and driftwood that had floated down during the night. The passage appeared blocked. Equally distressing, Morin and his crew appeared to be in such a state of panic that Bradbury concluded they were incapable of getting the boat safely through the channel.

Bradbury thought it prudent to stop once more to give the men time to get their emotions under control. Spying an island with a gently sloping bank, the boat moored again, and the crew began preparing breakfast. Bradbury and Morin went ashore to get a close look at the channel and determine where the safest passage might be. As they stood and talked, the 7:15 aftershock arrived, nearly knocking them off their feet. Another tremor hit while they ate breakfast, and as they prepared to reboard the boat, there was still another, which nearly pitched John Bridge into the river, as the sand suddenly gave way beneath him.

Before giving the order to push off, Bradbury noticed that the deckhands were still in a state of fearful paralysis, so he proposed to Morin that the patron give each of them a glass of whiskey to bolster their courage. After they had drunk up, Bradbury gave them a spirited pep talk, reminding them that their safety and the safety of the boat depended on their efforts.

Finally, the boat untied and was once again on the water. Their confidence buoyed by the whiskey and Bradbury’s exhortations, Morin and the hands successfully threaded the boat through the perilous channel, making several instantaneous changes in their course in order to avoid disaster. When they had passed the danger, the men threw down their oars and crossed themselves, then gave a loud cheer and congratulated one another on having come through the Devil’s Race Ground in one piece.

Bradbury’s summing up of the total effect of the December 16 quakes was that they “produced an idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution.”

* * * * *

The crews of countless boats either drowned or abandoned their crafts to take their chances on land. The misfortunes of these men proved a source of salvation for the residents of New Madrid. In the days following December 16, the river deposited manna at their shores, as boat after unmanned boat floated down into the New Madrid harbor, bringing a bounty of meat, flour, cheese, butter, and apples. The town was still a disaster zone, but at least the people had enough to eat.

The shaking went on—as Jared Brooks wrote on December 16, “it is doubtful if the earth is at rest from these troubles 10 minutes during the day and succeeding night”—persisting throughout the course of the following days. Three days later, Stephen F. Austin—later known as “The Father of Texas”—landed at New Madrid and recorded his impressions. “The Philanthropic emotions of the soul are never more powerfully exercised,” he wrote, “than when called on [to] witness some great and general calamity … throwing a hitherto fertile country into dessolation and plunging such of the unfortunate wretches who survive the ruin, into Misery and dispair.”

“These emotions I experianced when on landing at N. Madrid the effects by the Earthquake were so prominently visible as well in the sunken and shattered situation of the Houses, as in the countenance of the few who remained to mourn over the ruins of their prosperity and past happiness.”

Several days afterwards, the camp of Little Prairie refugees received word that New Madrid had survived and that food was available there. Led by George Ruddell, the two hundred Little Prairie survivors immediately set out on a three-day march and reached New Madrid on Christmas Eve.

* * * * *

As the New Orleans chugged its way down the hazard-choked river, keeping to the middle as much as possible, those on board continued to witness the aftermath of the earthquake’s wrath. Earlier in the voyage, the steamboat had always made fast to the shore at night, but with so many sections of riverbank caving in without warning, that was no longer possible. Instead, pilot Andrew Jack now anchored to any of the larger islands that dotted the river.

One night soon after passing New Madrid, with the shakes continuing, the steamboat put up on the downstream side of one such island, identified by Zadok Cramer in The Navigator as Island 32 (the islands were numbered consecutively, beginning at the mouth of the Ohio), about fifty miles below Little Prairie. In the night, the passengers were awakened by the sounds of scraping and banging against the sides of the boat. Several times, the vessel was shaken by severe blows. Conferring with Jack, Roosevelt concluded that the sounds and jolts, which would continue all through the night, were caused by driftwood that was being swept downriver. They passed the word to the other passengers and then returned to bed.

When the people of the New Orleans got out on deck the next morning, they were stunned. They were no longer anchored to the island—it appeared that the steamboat had slipped anchor and floated downriver all night.

But Pilot Jack, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the river, looked around and pointed out to the others the landmarks that showed they were in the same spot at which they had dropped anchor the previous day. The boat had not moved at all—instead, the island had broken up in the night and been carried away by the current! The sounds and jolts they had heard and felt throughout the night were caused by pieces of the disintegrating island floating up against the boat.

Island 32 was not the only one to disintegrate. Island 94, known as Stack Island or Crow’s Nest Island, about 450 miles below New Madrid and 175 miles above Natchez, also disappeared.

A tale published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1902 purported to tell the story of “The Last Night of Island Ninety-Four.” According to this account, on the evening of December 15, a Captain Sarpy was en route from St. Louis to New Orleans in his keelboat, the Belle Heloise, with his wife and daughter and a large sum of money. At nightfall, the keelboat tied up at Island 94. This island had been a long-standing lair for river denizens of every stripe, including Samuel Mason, the notorious river pirate who had been apprehended in Little Prairie a decade earlier, only to escape while being transported on the river. Two years before Sarpy’s trip, however, a force of 150 keelboatmen had invaded the island and cleaned out the den of thieves, after which the island became a safe haven, and now, Sarpy thought to use the island’s abandoned blockhouse to lodge his family and crew for the night.

As Sarpy and two of his men explored the island, however, they overheard talking in the blockhouse and, peering in the windows, listened as a group of fifteen river pirates discussed plans to fall upon the Belle Heloise the following morning. Sarpy and his crewmen hurried back to the boat and quietly pushed off, tying up at a hidden place in the willows on the west bank about a mile below Island 94.

The following morning, after weathering a night of earthquakes, Sarpy looked upstream to see that Island 94 had disintegrated—the entire landmass was gone, and presumably, its criminal inhabitants along with it.

Whether or not the story is true, Island 94 did indeed disappear.

That must have been an amazing and very frightening experience for all concerned, particularly because the science of that day was not sufficiently far advanced for the ordinary person to understand what was happening.  It must have felt to many like Divine vengeance was being visited upon them for their sins.

If an identical earthquake were to happen in that area again today, with its vastly greater population and much more developed infrastructure, I shudder to think how many would be killed.  It would probably be the single biggest natural disaster to strike the USA since the Declaration of Independence.

Peter