Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [24]
The boatmen stormed the islet. They took the pirates completely by surprise. Quickly they fanned out through the interior and seized control of the caves and of the boats they found docked in the hidden cove. They didn’t turn up much loot—or at least they didn’t admit to finding much. But they did discover a printing press for counterfeit money, which they ceremoniously wrecked. They also captured a couple of dozen men, two women, and a teenage boy. They let the women and the boy go. At dawn they hanged the men.
The news of their astonishing victory rapidly spread up and down the valley. It was famous in the river folklore for decades afterward: any man who looked old enough and who could claim to have been on the river for long enough would modestly admit, after a few drinks, that he had taken part in the storming of the Crow’s Nest. But in the real world, the triumph proved to be short-lived. The Crow’s Nest wasn’t put out of business. Maybe the surprise of the attack hadn’t been perfect; the worst of the pirates might have had some advance warning and escaped. Or maybe it had gone perfectly, but the gang had simply sprouted up again with new leaders. Or maybe the raid had never happened at all, and was just a story the river people told to buck themselves up. In any case, by 1811, the Crow’s Nest was as feared on the river as it had ever been.
The year 1811 was a hard one on the river anyway. The spring flood was disastrously high; towns were swamped all along the Ohio and Mississippi. By summer there was a bad outbreak of yellow fever, the worst that anybody had seen in years. In the fall there was another deadly fever, never identified, that swept the length of the valley. (It was described by the doctor Daniel Drake as a “bilious remitting and intermitting fever … clearly referable to the vegetable putrefaction which was the consequence of that flood.”) And then in the autumn there was the comet.
The comet appeared in the first week of September. Initially it was just an unusually large new star that burned brightly each evening in the afterglow of sunset. As the weeks passed, it didn’t wink out or dwindle away, the way strange sights in the sky usually did; every night it was more brilliant, and within a month it was growing a tail. This tail was an alarming, two-pronged fork like a devil’s tail. By December the comet was a dazzling point of light surrounded by a vague milky halo almost as large as the moon, and the forked tail had stretched out into two enormous ghostly plumes that covered half the sky.
Everyone knew what it meant: some strange disaster was imminent. Then there was another sign—or so it was said long afterward. “As the splendid comet of that year continued to shed its twilight over the forests,” the British travel writer Charles Joseph Latrobe wrote decades later, “a countless multitude of squirrels, obeying some great and universal impulse, which none can know but the Spirit that gave them being, left their reckless and gamboling life, and their ancient places of retreat in the north, and were seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South.”
Soon after the squirrels left, the comet disappeared. And then the earthquakes began.
The first quake was on December 16. Its epicenter was on the Missouri side of the river south of the junction with the Ohio. According to one eyewitness account, the quake was felt first in the boat city off New Madrid. When the crews were awakened in the middle of the night by the commotion, they had no idea what was happening. They all thought they must be under attack, by the river pirates or by the Indians. But the river was deserted. There had only been the sound—a deep, hollow, rolling thunder—and the brief violent chop of the river. Everyone went back to sleep; they had the vague idea that some large nearby stretch