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A bigger jolt came at dawn. First there was a new sound, a hissing roar that was, according to one witness, “like the escape of steam from a boiler.” Then the surface of the river shivered, stirred, and erupted into violent swells. The boats were heaved about in wild convulsions as the men clung on desperately; all around them the banks and sandbars were collapsing and the cottonwood trees along the shore were hurled into the surf—“tossing their arms to and fro,” one witness remembered, “as if sensible of their danger.” The crews in the boat city maneuvered frantically to keep their boats in the middle of the channel, as far away from the sandbars and the falling debris as possible. The river was becoming bloodred with the clay churned up from its bottom. Its surface was alive with whirlpools and was sheeting over with drifts and swirls of foam. The air was particularly strange; it seemed to be “filled with a thick vapor or gas, to which the light imparted a purple tinge, altogether different in appearance from the autumnal haze of Indian summer, or that of smoke.”

Then the river calmed. The aftershocks, according to one account, were “becoming lighter and lighter until they died away in slight vibrations, like the jarring of steam in an immense boiler.” The water was a soup of foul effluvia that had been stirred up from the river bottom. Few were willing to risk drinking it—not for days and weeks afterward, no matter how thirsty they were. They would hang on until they had gotten as far away from New Madrid as they possibly could. Some of them waited for two hundred miles.

Nobody believed the crisis was over yet. The aftershocks never quite stopped. There were hundreds of them over the next month. One traveler on the river a few weeks later recorded twenty-seven in the space of twelve hours; a doctor keeping track in Louisville that winter counted almost two thousand. A pendulum hanging in a store window in Cincinnati didn’t stop swaying until the spring. River travelers making their way through that country in December and into January reported all kinds of odd sights. It was said that just before the first earthquake hit, two pillars of lightning were seen towering up from the hills to the clouds. (This is a phenomenon known as earthquake light, which has a long history of eyewitnesses but still no documentary evidence or scientific theory to back it up.) Afterward there were lights and glows and flashes every night here and there in the hills along the river. There was also a pervasive horrible smell, like burning sulfur, that drifted all through the quake zone but had no detectable source. People added all this up and came to the only possible conclusion: it was the comet. Maybe it had disappeared from the sky because it had crashed to the earth somewhere around New Madrid. Or somehow the earth had become tangled up in its tail, which was lashing the river like a whip. The Scottish botanist John Bradbury, who was traveling on a keelboat when the first quake hit, recorded the discussions of the crew. One man offered the view that the earth was now stuck between the two tails of the comet and the earthquakes were its attempts to roll out again. “Finding him confident in his hypothesis,” Bradbury added, “and myself unable to refute it, I did not dispute the point.”

The next great quake came on January 23. With this quake the stretch of the river south of New Madrid gave up all its snags: hundreds of thousands of planters, sawyers, sleepers, and preachers shook loose of the mud and came bobbing to the surface. Centuries’ worth of rotted logs accumulated in vast plateaus; they covered the river for miles downstream from the quake zone. Scattered in among them were coffins: the cemeteries along the riverbanks, caught in the general collapse, had disgorged their inhabitants into the water.

Two weeks later, on February 6, was the third great quake. It came to be known as “the big shock.” It was so strong that it cracked pavements in Baltimore and rang church bells