Relevant History welcomes former magazine editor and freelance writer Carolyn Mulford, who worked on five continents before making the transition to fiction. Thunder Beneath My Feet is her second middle grade/young adult historical novel. The Missouri Center for the Book selected the first, The Feedsack Dress, as the state’s Great Read at the 2009 National Book Festival. Show Me the Ashes, the fourth in her award-winning contemporary mystery series for adults, will be released in hardback and ebook on 16 March. To learn more about her and her books, visit her web site, and follow her on Facebook and Goodreads.
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The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 must have been part of my Missouri history class in grade school, but I’d forgotten about them by the time I wrote a reading comprehension exercise about the quakes for a textbook. Soon after I wrote a travel article featuring Tennessee’s 15,000-acre Reelfoot Lake, an overnight creation of the quakes.
Memories of those assignments resurfaced thirty years later when I was searching for a topic for my second middle grade/young adult historical novel. I’d loved reading historical novels since discovering Lucy Fitch Perkins in the third grade, and I wondered why I’d never seen a novel about three of the country’s most powerful earthquakes.
By the time I figured out the answer, I was committed to the project.
Just the facts
I began by reading everything I could find about the quakes. Opinions differed on whether three or five quakes occurred and whether they rated closer to 7.6 or 8.6 on the Richter scale. The latest and most official source, the U.S. Geological Survey, recognizes three big ones: 16 December 1811, 23 January 1812, and 7 February 1812.
Sources agree that Jared Brooks, a Louisville engineer, made the best contemporaneous measurements of the severity of the shocks (quakes) and shakes (aftershocks). He recorded 1,874 shocks, eight violent and ten very severe, over three months. His records of the shocks (and the weather) gave me a basic timeline. I filled it with fragmented accounts from residents and travelers. The title, Thunder Beneath My Feet, comes from one of those accounts.
No one can cite an exact number of deaths. Older books said about 100 people died. A recent source estimated 1,500. The disparity derives from neglecting to count Native Americans (the major inhabitants of the hardest hit area), slaves, and many who vanished in the Mississippi.
The river became deadly. It ran backwards, carrying flatboats upstream or capsizing them. Oceanic waves swamped canoes. Falls formed. Giant trees from the banks and dead ones dislodged from the river floor clogged the water. The water rose like a tide at night, forcing boaters to cut their moorings to avoid being dragged under.
In New Madrid, brick homes and chimneys crumbled. Log homes fared better, but many caught fire. Giant trees split up the middle. Sand boils erupted. Ravines appeared. Lakes formed and drained. Furrows resembling giant waves appeared in the fields. A stench rose from the eruption of rotted vegetation and gases. The shocks and shakes went on and on, sometimes around the clock, sometimes concentrated in one part of the day or night, always unpredictable.
I had the facts. They yielded no natural narrative line, no obvious heroes or villains, no dramatic climax, no happy ending. That’s why novelists had avoided the story. I spent weeks conceiving a satisfying plot.
Plus the people
Events become memorable when we see how they affect individuals. Obviously the quakes brought months of intermittent terror and constant misery to New Madrid. They also frightened people in most states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Louisiana.
I focused my research on the 1,200 or so people in New Madrid, Upper Louisiana Territory—soon to become Missouri Territory. Positioned on a huge river bend roughly 200 miles south of St. Louis and 50 miles south of where the Ohio entered the Mississippi, the ambitious river port drew traders, suppliers, and the usual restless frontier folk. Some envisioned New Madrid competing with St. Louis.
The quakes took place eight years after the United States bought Louisiana from France, which had just acquired it from Spain. In the village’s broad streets and parks, people spoke English, Spanish, French, and Native American languages. Apparently the groups both objected to and adapted to each other’s ways.
One person’s trauma
Choosing a protagonist was easy. I preferred to relive the disaster with a teenage farm girl. Left in charge of her younger brother and the family farm outside New Madrid, she has no idea what’s happening when the first quake throws her out of bed. A French-Canadian identifies the disruptions as earthquakes but can’t explain what causes them or, more important, say when they will end. The sensible, courageous girl concentrates on food and shelter, on surviving the chaos. My childhood experiences on a pre-electricity farm and many visits to historic sites helped me figure out what she would do.
The odds are that no one there had ever experienced an earthquake. Some probably had heard that quakes toppled steeples in Boston in 1755. Certainly no one anywhere anticipated the diverse damage this series would cause and how long it would last.
By the third day, hundreds of people near the epicenter believed the world was ending. They fled from the flatlands to the nearest big hill, about a two-day walk, to escape anticipated floods and to pray for deliverance. A dark, dense, odiferous fog and occasional flashes of light coming from the ground make the teenager wonder if they could be right.
Circumstances compel her to remain on the farm, but she realizes she and her younger brother can’t stay alone. Their parents may have died in the quakes, and the nearest relatives live in eastern Kentucky. She takes in four newly homeless people—a French-Shawnee teenager, a young French-Spanish couple, and a mute slave woman. The story centers on how these six people respond to disasters and to each other.
As I worked on the manuscript, I realized that the frontier society’s problems foreshadowed the divisions that turned Missouri into hell during the Civil War and haunt it today.
Seismologists say that the earthquakes come in 200- and 500-year cycles. Human behavior appears to be a continuum. I can’t do anything about either, but I added earthquake damage to my home insurance policy.
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A big thanks to Carolyn Mulford. She’ll give away a paperback copy of Thunder Beneath My Feet to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available in the U.S. only.
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I am a member of Daughters of the War of 1812 and we’re always looking for books to add to local libraries. I will recommend this and am so pleased you have chosen this time and event since the 1812 period is so often overlooked.
Thank you, Carole!
Yes, that period has been neglected. One of my ancestors took part in the War of 1812—fighting in Canada.
Since we in Kansas are feeling mild earthquakes a bit more these days, perhaps I too should get earthquake insurance. The book sounds very interesting. I love historical fiction.
I’ll be eager to read this novel. I mention the 1811-1812 earthquakes in an adult historical I have under consideration by my publisher and did know about the Mississippi running backwards and some of the devastation. But the level of detail here is wonderful. Thanks for a very informative post.
Good luck with it. One agent I met at a conference thought I’d made the quakes up.
Carolyn, one agent turned me down for my first Cressa Carraway book because is takes place at the lake resort in Illinois (where my mom had a cabin) and she said there weren’t any lake resorts in the Midwest. Argh. New Yorkers!
Oh my goodness, Kaye.
Unfortunately the people who vet historical fiction to publishers don’t always know history. NYC publishers’ editors who read the first ms. of my series told my agent that they didn’t think there had been an American Revolution in the South. :-O
I grew up knowing about the New Madras fault, but never knew details about the quakes. I find this the saddest sentence in your post: “The disparity derives from neglecting to count Native Americans (the major inhabitants of the hardest hit area), slaves, and many who vanished in the Mississippi.” But that was what would be done then, I’m sure. This is going to be a great book!
I don’t think you can look at any time in history and not find major events, but we tend to teach about wars and rulers and ignore other things.
That’s why I started the Relevant History feature on my blog five years ago, Carolyn. History is so much more than wars and rulers.
Oh my! It’s interesting what has happened in different parts of our country. I don’t recollect knowing anything about this particular earthquake. We grew up with the great hurricane and the dust bowl days. Life can certainly be interesting.
Never heard of this disaster before but it would make for an exciting historical novel.
I remember during the late 1980’s or early 1990’s there was a rumor that the New Madrid fault was overdue for another active period and that a large catastrophic series of earthquakes were overdue. There was a bit of speculation as
to when it would happen and it seems to me that there was something about the numbers 123456789 that predicted the time and date of the expected eruption of the quake(s).
I also remember that my brother and his wife lived close to
Crowley’s Ridge on the New Madrid Fault area. I had forgotten about all that until I saw your post today. Thank you for reminding me about those events and I look forward to reading your book.
The Missouri National Guard, and probably those in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Illinois at least, trained for catastrophic quakes in the late 1980s or early 1990s, or both. At a recent signing, a man from southeast Missouri told me that in his student days school closed for two days when they expected the earthquakes to hit. A woman remembered thinking it would happen December 3 but didn’t remember which year.
The tremors have never stopped, and some of them register 3+ on the Richter scale.
Thank you for an informative and fascinating post. So many associate earthquakes only with the West Coast that they are surprised to hear the major New Madrid fault is in the heartland of the country. I too heard about the disaster response organizations planning their reaction to an expected major earthquake in the 1990s but thankfully they have not had to take action. Your book sounds wonderful and I am going to ask my local library to buy it.
I’ve seen no precise predictions for the next big earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone. I attended a conference at which a scientist said it’s likely to be within the next 50 years. Let’s hope the fault is on the 500- rather than the 200-year cycle.
This is really an interesting article! Thanks ever so much for sharing with us!
Suzanne, you always have the most interesting guests! As a fifth generation Californian I’m inured to earthquakes and had grandparents and other family survive the 1906 San Francisco quake. I’d read about the New Madrid quakes but didn’t realize there was such a swarm. It must have been terrifying for those who went through it. The book sounds fascinating.
Many people living near New Madrid left the area permanently and settled elsewhere, often near either the Missouri or the Mississippi rivers.
I really enjoyed the first two ‘Show Me’ mysteries by Ms. Mumford (I’m trying to get my library to buy the next two), and since I am even more interested in historical mysteries (I belong to a book club that often reads them), I really am interested in Thunder Beneath My Feet. I’ve known about the New Madrid earthquakes, but not in any detail at all, so this book sounds fascinating!
Thanks for the comments on the Show Me mysteries. You’ll find that my teenage and adult protagonists both show a lot of courage. Other than that, the books are quite different.
All history (social studies) teachers should find Carolyn Mulford’s vivid description of the time of the New Madrid earthquakes invaluable as they teach. Just reading it is exciting to contemplate and students would be challenged to wonder how they might react in such a momentous time and to be more empathetic to people enduring similar events happening today throughout the world. Fortunately, we can learn from reading, not just from actually experiencing such trauma.
I hope you’re right about students making the connections to past and present traumas and empathizing with people not like them.
I knew nothing about the New Madrid earthquakes until I read Carolyn’s book, which makes the history come alive. Thanks for your blog post, Carolyn, for filling in the details about that event.
This is an amazing story. I had no idea what “Thunder Beneath My Feet” was about, and I knew nothing about the Missouri earthquakes. And what an interesting process Carolyn went through before writing it. Excellent. I can’t wait to read it. Judy Hogan
Coming up with a plot that would show the fear and hardship without being a terrible downer was a challenge. And I felt I had to follow the sequence of events as accurately as I could determine them.
Interesting discrepancy between fatality figures then and current estimates!
This historical event was completely new to me. What I like about the book is that you live through what must have been terrifying if you had no notion of what was happening. The plot forces the girl to stay near her homestead waiting for her parents’ return. Also, a great introduction to the diversity of people in the area so soon after the Louisiana Purchase. Five stars!!
Thanks, Helen, and others who’ve commented.