David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [51]
When one of the powerful chiefs in attendance resisted and challenged the call to action, an angry Tecumseh made an ominous promise: “Your blood is white…. You do not believe the Great Spirit sent me. You shall believe it. I will leave directly and go straight to Detroit. When I get there I will stamp my foot upon the ground and shake down every house in Tookabatcha.”8
Just as Tecumseh had vowed, two months later there was a tremendous rumble from deep within the earth that toppled every dwelling in the village of Tookabatcha. This put all the people into a complete state of shock, and they cried, “Tecumseh has got to Detroit! We can feel the shake of his foot!”9
The powerful Tecumseh may have been stamping the ground at Detroit, but he had some help from a coincidental and catastrophic natural occurrence. Between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a series of devastating earthquakes shook the Mississippi Valley and beyond when more than two thousand tremors, some of Old Testament proportions, rocked the land.10 Eventually the quakes were called the New Madrid Earthquakes because tiny New Madrid, in the boot-heel region of what was to be named Missouri, was the village closest to the epicenter. It was estimated that the tremors affected more than a million and a half square miles, making whole towns disappear, swallowing up untold numbers of people, and even causing the Mississippi to reverse course and flow backward for several hours.11 Between the shocks, people heard the moans of the dying, the bleating of animals, and the screeching of birds. The air was clogged with a thick vapor that smelled like sulfur. Dazed survivors of the initial tremors believed the end of the earth had come and the gates of hell were opening.
The earthquakes were so powerful that they were felt by people in all directions—in New York, New Orleans, Canada, and on the western fringes of the Missouri River. President James Madison claimed that he was tossed from his bed in Washington by the initial shock. It was said that the catastrophic quakes stopped clocks in Boston and set bells ringing in Virginia.12
If people from so many locales experienced the shocks, Crockett certainly had to have felt them at his home near the border of Tennessee and Mississippi Territory (Alabama). But he never made mention of it, even though this natural disaster would come to have quite an impact on Crockett. Besides helping to spur on traditional Creeks to war (because they perceived that Tecumseh’s prediction had come true), the earthquakes created a remarkable lake, twenty-five miles long and from one-half to eight miles in width on the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River.13 Later named Reelfoot Lake, this body of water sat untouched for many years after Chickasaw Indians and the few white settlers living there vanished due to the many quakes. During that time the area became a paradise for hunters and fishermen; it would later become known as “the land of the shakes.”14
Throughout 1812 raids and reprisals for massacres took place between militant Creeks and the “Friendly” Creeks siding with the Americans, thus widening the divide within the tribe. The Upper Creeks, called Red Sticks because of the bright red war clubs they carried, were determined to halt further white encroachment. While these Red Sticks were proud of these wooden clubs, which had come to symbolize the traditional Creek warriors, they also knew that more powerful arms were needed in order for them to triumph over their enemies.15 In July 1813, Peter McQueen, a mixed-blood Creek leader, and a party of his Red Sticks journeyed to Pensacola, in Spanish-controlled Florida, to purchase guns and gunpowder from the Spanish governor.16 On July 27, during their return trip to the upper villages in Alabama, at the time Mississippi Territory, they paused at some springs near a small settlement called Burnt Corn, on the Old Wolf Trail. After a meal, the Red Sticks were resting on the creekbank when 180 militiamen hiding in the surrounding forest ambushed them. The force of white and mixed