“They hurried to the highest land they could find to spend the night, but none of them expected to see the sun rise. Again and again the earth rolled and shook as if it were a blanket. Big trees crashed and snapped like bean-poles, and whole acres of forest crashed into the river. The air smelled of burning sulphur, or some such gases as come out of a sulphur spring.
“Father and the two men crept into a thicket of small brush because they were afraid to stay in the big timber, and father always claimed that in a few minutes it grew as dark as if they had been sitting in a cellar at night.
“Every little while, a dozen times or more, they felt the earth shaking and heard the deep rambling underground and the roaring and rushing of the river.
“When daylight came they hurried home and when they found that father’s family had not been injured they decided to go on to New Madrid, thinking that they might be of some help to sufferers or to shipwrecked boatmen.
“They hardly recognized the river. It was full of landslides, trees, and all kinds of debris, and one good-sized island and its tow-head had entirely disappeared. They found the town of New Madrid in ruins. The land had sunk ten feet or more. About thirty boats in the harbor had been wrecked or carried down stream.. One large barge loaded with five hundred barrels of flour was split from stern to bow and left high and dry on the bank.
“The people had all fled and were camping on high land away from the river.”
“Did the people ever go back?” asked Tim.
“No, they didn’t. The fact is they couldn’t. The river washed the whole town away. The present town is built a little farther up the river.
“The whole country, my father said, was changed by the earthquake. Many good farms sank and many others were covered with sand. Where the lake is now, Bayou de Chien and Reelfoot Creek used to run through a dense forest of cypress trees. You can follow their channels in your bark boat, because there are no stumps or dead trees in the old channels.
“Some of our neighbors were so frightened that they moved away. Father was also going to leave. He was going into Arkansas, but mother would not move. She said she had traveled in an ox-wagon from Pennsylvania to Indiana and from Indiana to Tennessee and that was enough. If the end of the world was coming, Arkansas wouldn’t last any longer than Tennessee.”