American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

5. Quakes

In the confluence region, the second decade of the nineteenth century began with a series of unsettling natural occurrences. In January 1811, the temperature rose to nearly eighty degrees in St. Louis. The balmy weather persisted for a couple of weeks, before plunging in a matter of days to ten below zero and leaving the Mississippi River frozen from bank to bank. With the spring thaw came a devastating flood and widespread illness. During these months of unusual happenings, a comet streaked across the night sky, which many took as a foreboding sign. Their worst fears were realized around two o’clock in the morning of December 16, 1811, when a violent earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 8.4 on the Richter scale rocked the confluence region (and shook people and structures along the entire Mississippi valley and as far east as the Atlantic coast). Near the epicenter at New Madrid, a resident described being awakened by a “very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, . . . which was followed, in a few minutes, by the complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurious vapor, causing total darkness.” Then came “the screams of the affrighted inhabitants , running to and fro, not knowing where to go, or what to do—the cries of the fowls, and beasts of every species—the 5.  Quakes AMERICAN CONFLUENCE  150 cracking of falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi—the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes.” Through that night and subsequent days and weeks, scores of sharp aftershocks kept nerves frazzled. Panic peaked anew on February 7, 1812, when another destructive tremor rumbled under the middle Mississippi valley.1 For the superstitious, the quakes and other phenomena of 1811–12 foretold the end of the world; for the historian, the tremors merely serve as an apt metaphor for a decade of seismic shifts in which some old worlds were shaken as never before and what had been a borderland glimpsed its future as a border state. On the heels of the great earthquakes, in which the Mississippi briefly reversed its current, a war between Great Britain and the United States broke out. For many Indians in the confluence region , the War of 1812 revived hope of a reversal of recent history and a return to the previous era of full-fledged interimperial competition. Again, however, stalemates on battlefields did not prevent the signing of what for Indians proved a catastrophic peace. Rather than resurrecting the borderland of the past, the 1810s witnessed a decisive retreat of British and Spanish influence from the confluence region and a torrent of American newcomers . To the pioneer Baptist minister John Mason Peck, who likened the rush of Americans in the immediate postwar period to “an avalanche, it seemed as though Kentucky and Tennessee were breaking up and moving” into the lower Missouri valley, with the Boon’s Lick Country as the new promised land. At the risk of mixing metaphors of natural disaster, whether likened to an earthquake, an avalanche, or a flood—the newest newcomers crushed what stood before them.2 About one in seven of these postwar immigrants were slaves, usually swept west against their will. On the Missouri side of the confluence region, their presence excited little controversy. Not so in the nation’s capital, however. There, near decade’s end, debates about statehood for Missouri became entangled with sectional squabbles about slavery. These arguments sparked an unexpected firestorm, the heat of which transformed the confluence region and the nation far more lastingly than had the powerful earthquakes at decade’s start.  151 Quakes Before the Flood Before 1815, a rough balance of Indian and non-Indian numbers still prevailed on the western side of the confluence region. In 1810, the territorial census for Louisiana registered a little over 20,000 non-Indian inhabitants between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers; the combined Indian population was approximately the same, with the Osages accounting for about 30 percent of this total, and Shawnees, Delawares, Cherokees, and Choctaws composing most of the rest. Of course, these Indians presented no united front. Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees in the Louisiana Territory firmly aligned themselves with the United States and against the Osages. Among the Osages, the emergence of pro- and anti-American factions overlay earlier divisions —and further undermined Osage unity. But the nonIndian population suffered...