A U.S. historian, a scholar of Chekhov, and a Japanese medievalist board a Cessna bound for the skies over the Missouri Bootheel. Knowing that a series of major earthquakes befell this region, they’re looking for evidence of sand blows, the result of liquefied subterranean sand forced under intense pressure up through the earth’s surface. The Chekhovian and the medievalist, just along for the ride, don’t show up elsewhere in this story; they’re incidental, though they’re a nice detail. The historian, Conevery Bolton Valencius, is a scholar of environmental history and the U.S. Civil War; she knows what she’s looking for—circular formations of sand visible on the surface of otherwise fertile soil—but at first has a hard time finding it. Eventually she realizes: the sand blows are so dominant in this landscape that they’re everywhere. The scars the earthquake left on the land aren’t a blemish; they’re a feature.
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Until the last couple of decades, the New Madrid earthquakes, which struck the Mississippi Valley in late 1811 and early 1812, were more or less lost to history. They were lost for a number of reasons, not least that there were a few other things going on at the time. In an obscenely interesting new book, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Valencius uncovers the quakes and their rich and various meanings—to increasingly diminished Native populations, who interpreted them as a sign to return to tradition in the face of colonial encroachment; to a young nation about to enter into another war with Great Britain, with some religious revivalists of its own; and to a burgeoning scientific community that still placed a premium on anecdotal evidence. Which is to say stories—stories that became lore, and eventually not much more than that. Into the 20th century the earthquakes had largely disappeared from common knowledge. Valencius tells the story of how knowledge of the quakes was made and then, eventually, unmade.
Part of the reason the quakes were forgotten is that the scientific documentation of them was, in Valencius’s term, vernacular—their story wasn’t told through scientific journals but instead through the newspapers of the day, which privileged the voice of any white man who happened to be around to witness an event. (Accounts like one by the traveler William Leigh Pierce, which Valencius examines at length, were “excerpted, quoted, and reprinted” nationally throughout the press, appearing “in multiple forms, quoted and re-cited”: early modern aggregation!) The shaking of the earth was experienced and recorded bodily, with reference to the spirit of god and the new technology of electricity, which the sensation was likened to.
In 1990, a onetime meteorologist predicted that another major earthquake would soon hit New Madrid. His claims, promoted by a single scientist, entered the public record as legitimate, despite a broad scientific consensus against them. The quakes didn’t happen, of course, and the meteorologist’s claims drew scorn. For a time afterward, Valencius quotes a geologist saying, “it was hard to get anyone to listen about New Madrid earthquakes.”
By Conevery Bolton Valencius (University of Chicago Press)
