Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [27]
The landscape around New Madrid came back more slowly. The big open scars and fissures in the hills were gradually smoothed over by the wilderness. The new lakes and rivulets eventually aged into place, until they seemed as venerably weathered as any other feature of the countryside. But the terrain remained broken and jumbled. People were very leery of returning to it. In the years and decades that followed the time of the Great Shakes, wave after wave of new settlers came into the river valley; the population doubled, and doubled, and doubled again—but the area around New Madrid remained deserted. It didn’t regain its sparse pre-quake population until the middle of the century. Those that did return, and the few new settlers willing to chance life there, reported that the land never did settle down; there were accounts of weird rumbles and tremors and quiverings until at least the 1840s.
The legal and economic aftershocks went on for just as long. The federal government made its first major foray into disaster relief after New Madrid; it passed an act granting compensation to property owners for their losses. The result was a fury of speculation and an instant, rapidly expanding, and inextricable tangle of lawsuits. Many of these suits dragged on for decades. The Supreme Court was hearing appeals on New Madrid cases in the 1840s; the last one wasn’t settled until the middle of the Civil War. By then a “New Madrid claim” had become a byword throughout the river valley for legal chicanery and fraud.
But the most immediately significant event of the aftermath went unnoticed by everybody except the river people. When the boats came gliding again downriver into the lower valley, the voyageurs all braced themselves for their inevitable encounter with the Crow’s Nest pirates. But nothing happened. They saw no pirates. As they approached the Crow’s Nest itself, still expecting the worst, they discovered why: there was no Crow’s Nest any longer. There was only a dissolving sandbar where the island had been.
Almost a century later, a monograph about the quakes published by the United States Geological Survey offered a description of the fate of the Crow’s Nest, as summarized from the eyewitness testimony of one Captain Sarpy. This Sarpy claimed that his boat had been lured to the Crow’s Nest on the evening of December 15, just before the first quake. He quickly realized that it was a trap, and before the pirates spotted him, he dropped back into the river out of sight and set in to wait until morning. The earthquake came, and when the haze cleared in the dawn light, he found that the island was gone. The pirates, their hideout, their hidden stashes of loot—the river had taken them all.
4
Like Bubbles on a Sea
TIMOTHY FLINT CAME TO THE RIVER as a missionary. That was in 1815, during the first big wave of migration to the Mississippi valley. The towns of the Mississippi were believed to be sorely in need of ministers: they already had a reputation for wild licentiousness, for gambling, for prostitution, for casual violence, and for prodigious, near-suicidal drinking. The churches and missionary societies of the East Coast were commissioning every warm body they could find. But Flint was in fact a reasonably good prospect. He had trained as a minister straight out of the highest and most conservative Puritan tradition—he was born in Massachusetts in 1780, was graduated from Harvard in 1800, and had already spent more than a decade serving at local churches in New England. His religious training had put the stress on sobriety, purity, and unquestioning obedience to church doctrine. He added to that his own personality—stiff-necked, querulous, and perpetually aggrieved. A college friend observed of him that there were two striking aspects