The Big One The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science Trade cloth - 2004

Details

• Title The Big One The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science
• Author Charles Officer; Jake Page
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 256
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date June 17, 2004
• ISBN 9780618341504

Introduction: Reelfoot’s Folly

You stand at the end of a well-constructed boardwalk over the relatively opaque and windblown water of the lake. Cypress trees with their feathery green foliage stand sociably in the shaded water among the knobbly remains of their immediate ancestors. The bottoms of the tree trunks flare out just above the water line and are called knees. A few hundred yards out, a fisherman’s dinghy bobs in the water. This is Reelfoot Lake, in the northwestern corner of Tennessee, and its dancing waters glisten in the sun. It does not look like earthquake country.
But Reelfoot Lake, some twenty miles long and up to six miles across, was created by the worst earthquakes ever to strike the lower forty- eight states of America.
To get here, you drive about a hundred miles north from Memphis, slowing down to pass through trim little towns strung along the mostly straight highway like beads. Here in these towns there is much manicuring of lawns, and Jesus abides, ubiquitous. It appears to be a serene and trusting existence in this part of Tennessee, and it just does not look like earthquake country.
A few miles closer than Reelfoot Lake to the huge muddy Mississippi River, and beyond its western bank in the boot heel of Missouri, the land is flat—vastly, enormously flat—a place of huge agricultural fields broken here and there by long stands of trees, and on the horizon a long rise of land: a levee, designed to tame the river. Indeed the vast flat land appears to be thoroughly tamed, as most agricultural lands are. It is a serene landscape, if a monotonous one, and it simply does not look like what you would think was earthquake country.
In fact, this is part of the most seismically active region east of the Rocky Mountains and some fifteen hundred miles or so east of the San Andreas Fault, which, as everyone knows, is another way to spell “earthquake.” Tremors, most of them too slight to be felt, occur here regularly, almost daily, and all you need to do if your goal in life is to feel an earthquake under your feet is to stand around this place for a few months. A Magnitude 4 could well be your reward.
Or instead of just standing here, you might try to find the Reelfoot Scarp. A scarp is an abrupt rise, like a cliff, and in this case the name would seem to be a bit of hyperbole on the part of the geologists. In most of its length the Reelfoot Scarp does not rise more than a foot or two above the surround, and at many places along its length it is simply not present for an untrained pilgrim. With superb directions and a nondigital odometer in your car, you might find it crossing State Route 78 a bit less than three miles north of Tiptonville, Tennessee. It is a tiny rise upholstered by corn plants and looking as mild as an old easy chair.
But whatever it was that caused the Reelfoot Scarp also created Reelfoot Lake. The scarp evidently rose high enough to cut off Reelfoot Creek, which, earlier, led into the Mississippi. The land sank and the waters built up, covering cypress forests that still can be seen, witchlike remnants with old dead branches swaying ever so slightly under the water. The locals will tell you that, sure, there was the Big One, but ponds, water, maybe even lakes always existed where Reelfoot Lake now lies. Probably true. This is a watery part of the world. After all, the Mississippi —originally the product of the rapid melting of the glaciers to the north some fifteen thousand years ago—has changed beds with the frequency of a call girl.
The locals, who seem a bit defiant, still also have a certain fondness for a group called the Night Riders who plied these lakeshores back around the turn of the twentieth century. There was a problem about whether the shores were to be the private preserve of a few landowners or open to the public. The Night Riders, adorned with masks made of wheat sacks, evidently terrorized the private landowners and, overcome with righteousness, also took to disciplining any local moral lapses—for example, whipping a young woman who wore clothes they judged to be too cheerful and bright and therefore provocative. After a few years of this sort of vigilantism, the state took over the lake and made it a state park, which it remains today, happily, and the Night Riders disbanded.
In addition to the not altogether denigrated antics of the Night Riders, there is an Indian legend that explains the odd name of the lake. It is said that the chief of a village nearby had the misfortune of being slightly crippled by a clubfoot. His gait was therefore hampered, and he was called Reelfoot. After several years of adulthood and chieftainship had passed, he still had not been able to attract a mate fromm among the young women of his village, so he set out for a village of Chickasaws, where he saw the girl of his dreams.
The girl was evidently no more pleased by Chief Reelfoot than any of the available women of his own village had been. So he went home and plotted to kidnap her. Overhearing this plan, the Great Spirit told Reelfoot that such an act was not appropriate, and were he to carry it out, there would be hell to pay. Overwhelmed by desire, however, Reelfoot descended on the village, snatched up the beautiful maiden, and hauled her back toward his village, no doubt kicking and screaming. Not given to empty threats, the Great Spirit set the land to heaving and buckling, and beneath Reelfoot’s feet it sank and filled with water, creating the lake named for him. To this day, it is averred, his remains and those of his inamorata reside in the mud of the lake bottom among the dead cypresses.
That this explanatory tale may have arisen sometime after 1812 is suggested by the fact that it was in February of that year that the last of three rapid-fire great earthquakes devastated thousands of square miles of the regional landscape, heaving it around as if, in truth, the Great Spirit was annoyed. In the process, the trio of quakes created some ten new lakes, of which one was Reelfoot. These earthquakes were, in combination and in fact, the Big One. They were the most widely felt quakes ever known. They occurred in a place where, as one geologist has said, there is no reason to have an earthquake. And they remain an enigma.
This book is an effort to describe these terrible upheavals and, by way of looking at the history and progress of the earthquake sciences worldwide, to explain what we know about the nature and causes of earthquakes in general and, in particular, the oddball assault on New Madrid, the little river town in Missouri that, however willingly or unwillingly, lent its name to these events.
It is a story, of course, that just might have to be told again when Mother Earth or the Great Spirit or whatever forces are at work underneath this seemingly placid region have another grand mal seizure.

Copyright © 2004 by Jake Page and Charles Officer. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.