• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 787 0

in Montreal. (It’s still the most powerful quake ever recorded in the continental United States.) At the epicenter, near New Madrid, the land was in a frenzy. The earth undulated like a stormy sea; forested hillsides came sliding down into the river in roaring collapses; geysers shot up from ruptured crevasses; waterspouts hissed and rushed and snaked down into the furious depths of the channels. The shock was so large that a titanic backwash of water went flashing northward upriver against the current, swamping boats, flooding levees, and drowning houses on the riverbanks: an impossible apparition terrifying everybody caught up in its furious rush. That strange backwash became the talk of the river for decades afterward. There was no agreement at all about how far it had gone or how long it had lasted—some of the standard histories of the region claimed that the river ran backward for days. (This was in fact a physical impossibility; what’s more likely is that the shock waves sent water washing upriver over the surface for several hours while the main strength of the current continued to flow normally underneath.) One prominent geologist, reviewing the whole story later in the century, was so skeptical about the backwash that he concluded not just that it hadn’t happened, but that the earthquakes themselves were mythical. But it remained the defining event for anyone who lived in the river valley in those years: they all knew where they had been and what had happened to them the day the Mississippi ran backward.

The big shock was the last of the great New Madrid quakes. Together the quakes left the town of New Madrid flattened and had brought down every building in the countryside for miles around. But because the land in that part of the country had been so thinly settled, there were few reports of serious casualties—it was said that only two deaths among the locals could be directly attributed to the quakes. The river was another matter. The first quake had come when the river traffic was traditionally at its highest, right as the boats were bringing the northern harvest down to the markets of New Orleans. There was never an official count, but the death toll was probably in the hundreds. For weeks afterward bodies were found floating downstream, and there were wrecked and abandoned boats stuck on sandbars or drifting in the current all the way down to the delta.

But the traffic resumed. Cautiously, over the next several weeks after the big shock, the first boats came making their way south. They found the wilderness country around New Madrid in ruins. On either side of the river for miles the hills were split and shattered by slips and subsidences and sinkholes and fissures. There were areas where whole forests had sunk into the ground and been covered over by floodwaters; they were now strange, menacing lakes, bristling with the spikes of drowned trees beneath the waterline. A greater surprise awaited them on the river itself. As they approached New Madrid, the view of the waters ahead was lost in mist and spray, and there was an unfamiliar sound: a deep, continuous, full-throated roar. (Ordinarily the river in the channels was preternaturally silent.) With incredulity, and then with mounting panic, the boatmen frantically maneuvered their craft out of the current and into the shallows. Then they got out onto the riverbank and warily approached the source of the noise on foot. There they found what they had suspected but could not bring themselves to believe: the land below the riverbed had split and tilted, and the course of the lower Mississippi was now broken by immense, river-spanning waterfalls.

The river itself was quick to recover. The great waterfalls—there were two of them, one above New Madrid, and one below, about twenty miles apart—proved to be ephemeral. The relentless drag of the current rapidly wore them down; within several weeks they had eroded to the point where that stretch of the river became navigable again, and by spring no trace of them remained.

Then the river rose: the spring flood that