ABOUT THIS BOOK
From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent’s mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten.
In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons—environmental, scientific, social, and economic—why something as consequential as major earthquakes can be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial.
Engagingly written and ambitiously researched—both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time—The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be an important resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, as well as history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
: Earthquake Cracks - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0001
[Davy Crockett, New Madrid earthquakes, earthquake cracks, earthquake magnitude, intraplate earthquakes, history of earth science, history of seismology, history of causation, Native American history, history of evidence]
In the 1830s, Davy Crockett wrote about stumbling into “earthquake cracks” during a bear hunt. His matter-of-fact reporting of earthquake evidence contrasts with how the New Madrid earthquakes soon became regarded: like Davy Crockett himself, as dubious frontier tall-tale, not as sober history or scientific evidence. The New Madrid earthquakes affected American and Indian history in many ways, but were soon forgotten, for scientific, social, and environmental reasons. Only since the 1970s have they slowly come back into view as a subject for research and, in the early twenty-first century, disaster preparation. Though subject to intense debate, especially with regard to earthquake magnitudes, they are now regarded as a key example in the study of intraplate earthquakes. The history of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812 illuminates aspects of the history of seismology and earth science, early American and Native American history, and the history of evidence and causation. (pages 1 - 13)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
A Great Commotion - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0002
[William Leigh Pierce, first-person accounts, earthquake narratives, sand blows, booming flood, steamboat New Orleans, earthquake cracks, American settlement, New Madrid earthquakes, middle Mississippi Valley]
This chapter uses first-person accounts, especially by Mississippi River merchant William Leigh Pierce, to narrate the multiple shocks of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812 which struck present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, especially earthquake cracks, sand blows, booming floods, topographical changes, river disruptions, stunting of forests, and tremors felt out to Canada and the East Coast. Letters and newspaper articles across North America testified to the felt power of the quakes and the widespread interest in understanding them. Pierce and many others thought the environmental and social disruption of the earthquakes would retard American settlement of the middle Mississippi Valley and what was then the “Far West.” Yet a simultaneous river voyage—the first steam-powered Mississippi River trip, by the steamboat New Orleans—demonstrated how wrong Pierce was: American technology and commerce overcame environmental obstacles to produce a flood of settlement, contributing to the later forgetting of the earthquakes. (pages 14 - 57)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Earthquakes and the End of the New Madrid Hinterland - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0003
[early western Cherokees, St. Francis River, probate records, New Madrid hinterland, multi-ethnic Indian villages, sunk lands, Native American history, American settlers, middle Mississippi Valley, New Madrid earthquakes]
The New Madrid earthquakes have been regarded as without consequence: they shook but did not change human lives. Newly-discovered probate records, along with environmental and cartographic evidence, demonstrate how they mattered. The New Madrid earthquakes helped destroy a thriving New Madrid hinterland, a multi-ethnic zone of commerce and communication created since the 1780s between New Madrid, Missouri and Arkansas Post, Arkansas, based around the St. Francis River, a Mississippi River tributary that functioned as a main waterway of the middle Mississippi Valley. The New Madrid quakes destroyed the clear channel of the St. Francis River and created the “sunk lands,” destroying the New Madrid hinterland. Early western Cherokee settlers moved further west, multi-ethnic Indian villages dispersed, and the St. Francis became the depopulated morass that later American settlers would take as the region’s original state. The New Madrid earthquakes reveal a new Native American history of the middle Mississippi Valley. (pages 58 - 105)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Revival and Resistance - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0004
[Cherokee Nation, apocalyptic prophecy, Creek/American War, Red Stick War, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, The Prophet, Indian League, War of 1812, New Madrid earthquakes]
The New Madrid earthquakes had important consequences for Indians in North America. For people in the Cherokee Nation in the midst of a period of cultural upheaval and social stress, the earthquakes gave force to a religious movement of apocalyptic prophecy focused on resistance to American pressure. For Creeks resisting American takeover, the earthquakes became an important symbol in the Creek/American war sometimes termed the “Red Stick War.” For Native Americans throughout eastern North America, the spiritual symbolism of the quakes became a reason to ally with the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (both often termed “The Prophet”) in their Indian League, a movement of cultural and military resistance that formed an often-overlooked force in the War of 1812. The New Madrid earthquakes thus reveal political, military, cultural and religious tensions and faultlines in North America in the early nineteenth century. (pages 106 - 144)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Quaking Body - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0005
[electricity, Great Revival, Second Great Awakening, earthquake sensation, early American science, camp meetings, scientific showmen, frontier Christianity, history of the body, New Madrid earthquakes]
Many people across North America experienced the New Madrid earthquakes as a set of physical sensations. The earthquakes made them feel sick, drunk, nauseous, dizzy, and afraid. Their bodily experience suggests a way of understanding earthquakes as the history of the body as well as the earth. Physical sensations linked the quakes to key areas of early nineteenth century life: religion and science. Many Americans felt the jolts of the earthquakes like the jolts of the Holy Spirit. Earthquake sensations contributed to the development of American frontier Christianity, a physically demonstrative movement known as the Great Revival, or the Second Great Awakening, in which open-air camp meetings provided a way for people to experience in their bodies the call of God’s spirit. The jolts of earthquakes also felt to many early Americans like the jolts of electricity, a new area of early American science popularized by itinerant traveling scientific showmen. (pages 145 - 174)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Vernacular Science - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0006
[vernacular science, early American science, electricity, lightning, earthquake weather, Indian knowledge, volcanoes, history of science, New Madrid earthquakes, earthquake sounds]
Animated, widespread discussion of the New Madrid earthquakes demonstrates the vitality of early American science, which has long been dismissed as derivative and inconsequential. Scientific inquiry, conversation, and thinking thrived—but not in the elite scientific journals that already characterized European science. Instead, creative and well-informed discussion of scientific concepts filled newspapers, commercial journals, and everyday correspondence. Through networks of communication, exchange of objects, and quantification of exact timing and measurement, Americans such as physician Daniel Drake debated principles of causation and attempted to understand the resources of their growing nation (and often disagreed with European authorities such as Constantin Volney). This vernacular science sought to draw broad connections: how were earthquakes related to electricity and lightning? Volcanoes? Earthquake weather? Earthquake sounds? What connected events across global distances? What was the role of Indian knowledge? Earthquake theorizing points to a new history of science in the United States. (pages 175 - 215)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Sunk Lands and Submerged Knowledge - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0007
[New Madrid earthquakes, sunk lands, Little River Drainage District, seismographs, Civil War, environmental history, swamp reclamation, Battle of Island Number 10, Southern Tenant Farmworkers Union, Jesuit seismology]
Social, environmental, and scientific changes from the 1860s to the 1960s submerged knowledge of the New Madrid earthquakes. During the Civil War, guerilla warfare and the Battle of Island Number 10 overwrote knowledge of the sunk lands as earthquake territory. Timber railroads built by Louis Houck and swamp reclamation, especially Otto Kochtitzky’s Little River Drainage District, transformed the earthquake territory of the Missouri Bootheel. As planter Thad Snow observed, cotton agriculture, the boll weevil, and share-cropping brought racial conflict, even as Great Depression protests by the Southern Tenant Farmworkers Union subsumed earthquakes in regional perceptions. The instrumentalization of seismology with the development of seismometers led to the dismissal of narrative earthquake accounts. James Macelwane and others in Jesuit seismology tried to create mid-continent earthquake observation parallel with West Coast efforts by seismologists such as John C. Branner, but were stymied by perceptions that California was America’s earthquake country. (pages 216 - 272)
This chapter is available at:
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The Science of Deep History - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0008
[Myron L. Fuller, United States Geological Survey, Otto Nuttli, Iben Browning, CERI (Center for Earthquake Research and Information), paleoseismology, earthquake magnitudes, CUSEC (Central United States Earthquake Consortium), New Madrid Bicentennial, New Madrid earthquakes]
In 1912, United States Geological Survey researcher Myron L. Fuller published an account of the New Madrid earthquakes. This report languished until seismologist Otto Nuttli re-focused scientific attention in 1973. Still, New Madrid science remained on the fringe, partly because of a sensationalized, false prediction by Iben Browning in 1990. Slowly, researchers at CERI (Center for Earthquake Research and Information) and interdisciplinary efforts in paleoseismology assembled evidence for the quakes. Yet the science remained contested. In the early twenty-first century, researchers debated magnitude estimates and likely recurrence. By the New Madrid Bicentennial, consensus surrounded the need for disaster planning in mid-continent, through the efforts of CUSEC (Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium) and related agencies. Planners and scientists increasingly looked to worldwide parallels, just as people had in 1812. In attention to local knowledge, first-person accounts, and bodily experience, contemporary New Madrid science began to draw in surprising ways on historical roots. (pages 273 - 324)
This chapter is available at:
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: Memory and Earth in the Mississippi Valley - Conevery Bolton Valencius
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226053929.003.0009
[sand blows, New Madrid earthquakes, history of earth science, history of seismology, history of knowledge production, disaster preparation]
Sand blows remain visible around the New Madrid earthquake epicenters, but are so large and abundant that they become invisible, part of the unseen background of terrain. In the same way, the New Madrid earthquakes have melted into the background of American history and the history of seismology. Calling them into attention reveals key themes in U.S. history, the history of seismology and earth science, and the history of knowledge production, as well as contemporary debates over disaster preparation. (pages 325 - 334)
This chapter is available at:
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