John Cole: Well, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. I'm John Cole. I'm the Director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is an arm of the Library of Congress that promotes books and reading around the country and, indeed, around the world. We were created in 1977 and I've been a lucky person, because I'm a book person who also is in the position of getting other book people to come to talk to the Library of Congress. And I'm also involved with the Library's relatively new National Book Festival, which will be on the Mall this year, on September 24th. One of the many ways that we promote books and reading here at the Library of Congress is through talks, such as this one. And it's a great pleasure to have Jay Feldman here to talk about his book with this wonderful cover. And he will tell you all about When The Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes. Before I introduce him, though, I would like to acknowledge the help of the Geography and Map Division here at the Library of Congress. They've helped us get this wonderful crowd we have today. One of the rationale behind the "Books and Beyond Lecture Series" is we like to showcase books that are based on the Library of Congress's collections. We like people to know that there's a library behind the book, as well as an author. And in this case, Jay made extensive use of our manuscript collections, in particular, but I thought it was appropriate for the Map Division to be the co-sponsor and also to help us promote the book. A book signing will follow the presentation. It will be in this room. The books are for sale outside the room. Jay is going to tell you about the book, so I'm going to do something that authors do like when they have a chance to hear others praise their book. I'm going to read what Howard Zinn said about this book. I don't know how many of you know Howard Zinn, but he is a well-known historian and this is quite a blurb. "Jay Feldman has produced a fascinating work of social history, meticulously researched, elegantly written, and awesomely original in its conception. He finds the convulsions of the natural world reverberating on slavery, war, and Indian resistance and tells the story with verve and with style." Jay is a widely published freelance writer. His work has appeared in "Sports Illustrated", "Newsweek", "Smithsonian Magazine", "Gourmet", "The New York Times", and a broad variety of other national, regional, and local publications. He also has written for television the highly acclaimed but short-lived CBS series "Brooklyn Bridge". He has written for film and for stage. He lives in Davis, California and came out here today to present his talk to us. Let's welcome Jay Feldman. Jay? [applause] Jay Feldman: Thank you very much, John. It's really an honor to be here at the Library of Congress. [noise] Thank you all for [laughs] -- [laughter] -- an auspicious beginning [laughs]. [laughter] Thank you all for coming out on such a day. If it happens once more, I'll take it off. When The Mississippi Ran Backwards is the story of the largest series of earthquakes ever to hit the United States. It's also a social and political history of the early Frontier. When we hear the word Frontier, our minds jump to the area around Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas and the years 1860 to 1875. But, the Frontier was actually a very fluid concept. And the Frontier we're dealing with here is 50 years earlier and a thousand miles east of that Frontier. The Frontier was always changing and it was always moving. And, one of the defining characteristics of the Frontier is that no one group or nation could claim sovereignty over any given area for any extended period of time, so that one year or one month one group might be in charge and then the following month or the following year somebody else would hold sway. The book weaves together five different stories to create a complex tapestry of the early Frontier. The story starts in 1790 when George Morgan, a patriot of the American Revolution, set out to establish a colony in Spanish Louisiana. It's generally forgotten that, until 1800, the Spanish owned the Louisiana Territory. The way Spain got the Louisiana Territory was that at the end of the French and Indian War, in the early 1760s, the French King, in order to avoid having to cede the Louisiana Territory to the British -- that's how the British got Canada, remember, at the end of the French and Indian War. In order to avoid having to give this Spanish King, in order to avoid having to give the Louisiana Territory to the British as well, instead gave the Louisiana Territory to his cousin, who just happened to be -- Excuse me -- the French King, in order to avoid having to give the Louisiana Territory to the Spanish gave it to his cousin who happened to be the Spanish King. Keep it in the family. And so the Spanish closed the Mississippi River to American boat travel. George Morgan set out to obtain a land grant from the Spanish King, give or take a million acres on the western bank of the river, with the idea of setting up a colony that would attract American immigrants. The Spanish saw this as a buffer zone against an attempt to take over the river. His plans were generally foiled by the shenanigans of a character named James Wilkinson, one of the boldest scoundrels in early American history. And, as a result of his machinations, things didn't work out quite the way Morgan hoped. James Wilkinson was later involved in the Aaron Burr scandal, a sordid episode in which Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson raised a private army with the intent of overtaking the western territories of Kentucky, Tennessee, extending all the way down into Mexico and Panama. And the idea was that Aaron Burr himself [laughs] would become the Emperor of this new nation. That's the reason why Aaron Burr was exiled. It had nothing to do with the Alexander Hamilton duel. Nobody cared too much that Burr killed Hamilton. But when he tried to take over the western part of the country, they thought, you've gone too far this time, Burr, you'll have to leave. James Wilkinson was involved in that and many other sordid episodes in early American history. Things didn't work out the way Morgan intended, but the town of New Madrid -- named New Madrid to flatter the Spanish King -- was established and continued until 1800, when Louisiana was grabbed back for France by Napoleon, who then sold it to the United States to finance his war against Britain. So, New Madrid is a flourishing river town located at the largest S-curve in the lower Mississippi. And it was built where it was because of its strategic value. You can see miles upriver and downriver from New Madrid, and therefore you could quickly notice who was coming. The second story involves the great Indian Chief, Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader who had set out to form a pantribal confederacy to resist the advancing land acquisition of the federal government of Native American lands. It wasn't the first time that an Indian leader had tried to establish this type of confederacy. Leaders like the Ottawa, Pontiac, and the Mohawk, Joseph Brant, and the great Creek Chief, Alexander McGillivray, had also attempted to form pantribal confederacies, but none of them had the success that Tecumseh did, and in no small part because of the force of his own personality. He was an extremely charismatic individual, a great orator, and he could really fire up a crowd. And, after organizing the northwestern tribes, which the area that we call the old Northwest Territory would be the area around the current states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, that part of the country. In the fall of 1811, Tecumseh undertook a recruiting trip to the southern tribes, which would be the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek, down in the areas around Georgia and Alabama. And, in one particular meeting with a Creek group, in trying to enlist this one particular Creek chief, who he considered important to his cause, he was encountering a lot of resistance. And finally, he said to this Creek, "Okay, I understand what's happening here. I know why you're resisting. You don't think that I've been sent by the Great Spirit. But I'll tell you what, when I leave here, I travel to Detroit, and when I reach Detroit I'm going to stamp my foot on the ground and I'm going to knock down every house in this village. Well, the Creeks were mightily impressed by this and when Tecumseh left, they began calculating the number of days it would take for him to reach Detroit. In fact, he was nowhere near Detroit when the first earthquake hit on December 15, 1812, but that's not the important part. The important part is that the Creeks believed he was there and it set them on the road to war. At first, a very bloody Civil War and then a devastating all-out war against the United States, which all but decimated the Creek fighting force. That war, known as the Creek War of 1813 and 14, was actually the southern front of the War of 1812. It's generally forgotten that the War of 1812 was every bit as much a war against the Native Americans as it was against the British. This is the history that you didn't learn in school. There were three fronts in the War of 1812. There was the Niagara front, there was Detroit where Tecumseh and the Northwestern Indians fought with the British against the United States, and there was the southern front, which was the Creek War of 1813 and '14. Had a devastating affect on the Creek Nation. And by the end of the War of 1812, in January 1815, Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley, the Northwest Territory, the Mississippi Valley and the southeast, with the one exception of the Seminoles who carried on into the 1850s. By the end of the War of 1815, Indian resistance was crushed, finished and over in that whole part of the country. Many contemporaries refer to the War of 1812 as the Second American Revolution. I think probably from our perspective, it would be better to say it was the war that consolidated the American Revolution, because by the end of the War of 1812 and five years later when the Spanish were driven from Florida, the entire country from the eastern seaboard to the Canadian border, to the western reach of the Louisiana territory down to the border of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico, were indisputably U.S. territory and there were no foreign countries that had any more claims on that territory. The third story involves an unspeakably horrible murder, by two nephews of Thomas Jefferson, of one of their slaves. On the evening of December 15, 1811, these two nephews of Jefferson -- If I said December 16, 1812 earlier, please accept the correction here -- December 15, 1811, these nephews of Jefferson, Lilburn and Isham Lewis, brutally murdered one of their slaves and threw his body parts in a fire to destroy the evidence. The Lewis brothers had emigrated to Kentucky from Virginia and were on a downward spiral of wrecked fortune. They had squandered what was left of the family bank account and begun drinking heavily, and by the end of the year 1811, they were in pretty sorry shape. When this slave was murdered and the body thrown in the fire, it was a few short hours before the first earthquake on the morning of December 12, 1811 -- December 16, 1811 [laughs] -- the dates are swimming here. The first earthquake brought down the chimney, which extinguished the fire, preserving the body parts. The chimney was rebuilt and the body parts were hid in the masonry. The third of the major events in the New Madrid sequence, on February 7, 1812, brought down that chimney and, not to spoil the whole story, but led to the exposing of the murder and the nephews being brought to justice. The fourth story involves the steamboat New Orleans, the first steamboat voyage on the western rivers, the Ohio and the Mississippi. The steamboat New Orleans was built by Nicholas and Lydia Roosevelt, the great-granduncle and great-grandaunt of Theodore Roosevelt. Nicholas Roosevelt was an inventor and a mechanic, an engineer, who set out to prove that the western rivers were capable of handing steamboat travel. Remember, this is only three or four short years after Robert Fulton's Clermont successfully negotiated the upriver trip from New York City to Albany on the Hudson River. And Nicholas Roosevelt took it into his head that he could build a steamboat that would go down the Ohio and the Mississippi as far as New Orleans. There was some skepticism about this, and for good reason. The western rivers were much wilder, much more dangerous rivers than the Hudson, which was fairly placid. So in 1810, Nicholas and Lydia Roosevelt undertook a flatboat trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans to gauge the feasibility of the currents and the hazards. Lydia Roosevelt was two months pregnant when they left Pittsburgh and by the time they reached New Orleans six months later, she was eight months pregnant on a flatboat. They took a sailing ship back to New York, where she gave her birth to her first child, a daughter. And then they set out for Pittsburgh to build the steamboat. When they left Pittsburgh in October 1811 [laughs], Lydia Roosevelt was eight months pregnant with her second child -- [laughter] Wait, it gets better. She gave birth to the child on the steamboat while it was docked in Louisville, waiting for the falls of the Ohio to rise so they could overcome that particular hazard. When they talk about the grit of pioneer women, I don't think they come any grittier than Lydia Roosevelt. The fifth story, of course, is the story of the earthquakes themselves. They went on for four months, into April 1812. The ground was in virtually constant motion. There were 2,000 separate events, the three largest of which on December 16, 1811, January 23 and February 7, 1812, would have measured up around 8.0 on the later devised magnitude scales that we popularly refer to as the Richter scale. They were felt over an enormously large range of country, and I'll talk about why later on. They rattled China in New York, they range church bells in Boston, they were felt in Detroit, they were felt in Washington, D.C., Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans, and very likely just as far west but, the literacy rate being what it was at that time, there wasn't much of a written record west of the Mississippi. My research for this book took me to many places. I went to Spain because, if you recall, the beginning of the story about the establishment of New Madrid begins when the Spaniards still owned the Louisiana Territory, and many of the documents pertaining to the Land Grants and the establishment of the colony and James Wilkinson's activities, are still in Spanish archives. We have copies here at the Library of Congress of some of them, but some of them are exclusively in Spain. I was at the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid and in the Archivo de Indias in Sevilla. I conducted research, as John said here, at the Library of Congress and also at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. I took a barge trip down the Ohio River, because I wanted to get the feeling of what it would be like to be out on the river for an extended period of time. And it was very helpful because, although the river has changed, there are locks and there are urban areas built up on the river. Once you get away from those, the river, I think, is probably very much the way it was 200 years ago. There are still bald eagles and many other, you know, wonderful birds I drove up and down the banks of the Mississippi between St. Louis and Memphis, searching out surviving evidence of the earthquakes. There was a fellow named Marion Haines in Blytheville, Arkansas who dug up his backyard with his backhoe to show me where the sand had been extruded. There's a layer of sediment and then coming up through there, there's sand. That shouldn't be there because the sand is much deeper. But the pressure from the quakes caused water to come up through the sediment, brought sand with it, and he said, "See, that's from the 1811 and '12 series." I consulted with a couple of seismologists and geologists at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information in Memphis, Tennessee. These people are real experts who spent most of the good part of their careers on the New Madrid earthquakes. Everything else, I was able to get from inter-library loan at the University of California, Davis, my hometown, from the people there. I was keeping them in business for two years. I have no doubt [laughs] -- [laughter] -- that there were many times when I came and they said, "Oh my God, here he comes again." But they were very gracious and they fulfilled virtually every request. I'd like to read a section from the book, a short section, and then I'd like to talk about the making of the book and why there are earthquakes in the Mississippi Valley, including the meaning of the title. The section I'm going to read is the first meeting between William Henry Harrison and Tecumseh. "In August 1810, a Landmark Council was held in the town of Vincennes, Fort Knox, an Indiana territory. The conference included a number of territorial officials and a dozen Chiefs of the Northwest tribes, and it brought together for the first time the two men who had become the principal adversaries in the U.S. - Indian struggle for control of the Frontier. Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, and Indian Territory Governor William Henry Harrison. The meetings were held at a fenced-off grassy area in a grove near the Governor's home. As agreed upon beforehand, Tecumseh left behind most of the 75 warriors who had accompanied him to Vincennes, arriving at the clearing with an escort of only a dozen Chiefs. Also by agreement, Tecumseh and his party left their firearms at their camp, bringing only tomahawks and war clubs to the Council. Arriving at the meeting ground, they found the Governor seated on a platform with several other Indiana officials. Nearby, a small guard of a dozen soldiers from Fort Knox stood nervously by. Also present were several pro-government Chiefs, including Harrison's Pottawattamie sycophant, Winamac, whom Tecumseh had already threatened to kill for his part in the signing of the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which had transferred three million acres of tribal lands to the United States a year earlier. Harrison sat stiffly in his chair, awaiting the arrival of his opponent. He had prepared a chair for Tecumseh next to his own on the platform. When the Shawnee Chief entered the Council area, Harrison beckoned him to come and take the seat that had been reserved for him. "Your father invites you to be seated," said the Governor in a patronizing tone, gesturing toward the empty chair. Solemnly and defiantly, Tecumseh pointed at the sky. He paused for emphasis and said, "Governor Harrison is not my father. The Great Spirit is my father." He pointed at the ground saying, "The Earth is my mother and I will repose upon her bosom." Then he sat on the grass. Following Tecumseh's lead, the rest of his party took their seats on the ground. "The effect," wrote one chronicler of the Council, "was electrical and for some moments there was a perfect silence." The meeting had gotten off on a note of friction and the tension would build steadily over the next few days. At 37, Harrison was five years younger than Tecumseh. The Governor, who had many years of experience intimidating defeated and accommodationist Chiefs, was taken aback by the Shawnee's boldness. It was he, after all, not this savage, who was in charge. Harrison was a hardliner. When it came to acquiring Indian lands for the federal government, few men could match the ruthless and heartless zeal of William Henry Harrison. Between 1802 and 1805 alone, employing trickery, bribery, cajolery, threats, and whiskey, the Governor had signed seven treaties with various tribes, giving the United States title to vast areas of present-day Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The tribes were compensated at the rate of two cents an acre. Harrison began by telling Tecumseh he understood that the Chief had issues to raise, and promised to listen fairly. But diplomacy was not Harrison's long suit. He insisted that he had always treated the Indians honorably and justly and that Tecumseh was the first to accuse him of acting otherwise. Harrison also stated that he had heard reports blaming Tecumseh for stirring up trouble between the Northwestern tribes and the United States by claiming that the Chiefs who sold the lands in the Fort Wayne Treaty had no right to do so. He challenged the Shawnee to declare, under a clear sky and in an open path, whether these reports were true. Tecumseh slowly rose to his feet. In his compelling style, the Chief began by putting forth the position that tribal lands were held in common and declared that the treaties had been negotiated deceitfully and were therefore null and void. He spoke scornfully of the Indians who sat near Harrison, heaping abuse on Winamac and promising the accommodationist Chiefs that they would be punished for their betrayal, which so unnerved the Pottawattamie that he began loading the pearl-handled pistol he had received as a gift from Harrison. Finally, Tecumseh acknowledged that he had organized a confederation to resist further encroachments by the government, but insisted he did not want war. If the government would return the land of the Fort Wayne Treaty, there would be no hostilities. John Batlett [spelled phonetically] of the Vincennes Land Office, an outspoken critic of Harrison's, wrote his friend, Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, that, "Tecumseh spoke with a freedom and sense which excited surprise. He reproached him in the face of day with having bought the land from tribes which had no right to it or from persons whom he himself had made Chiefs. It is my opinion that government ought to look closer into this business and rather to cherish than exasperate that man that the Indians want nothing but good treatment to become well-disposed to the United States." That day and the next, as had come to be expected of him, Tecumseh delivered a long series of powerful speeches, in which he chronicled the past injustices of the United States government toward Native Americans. The litany of wrongs went back decades and covered a great deal of ground. "There are unfortunately too many of them," wrote Harrison to Secretary of War William Eustis, in his account of the proceedings. Harrison's answers to Tecumseh's charges were vague and evasive. He was offended by Tecumseh's lack of deference, later writing to Eustis that while Tecumseh was obviously the great man of the party, his speeches the first two days were sufficiently insolent and his pretensions arrogant. After several days, frustrated by the sense that he was getting nowhere with Harrison, Tecumseh looked the Governor in the eye and told him earnestly, "Brother, I wish you to listen to me well. As I think you do not clearly understand what I before said to you, I shall explain it again." He once again enumerated a lengthy list of atrocities committed by the whites against Native Americans, including the 1782 massacre of 96 peaceful Christian Delawares at the Moravian Mission at Gnadenhutten by U.S. soldiers. "How," Tecumseh pressed Harrison, "after this conduct can you blame me for placing little confidence in the promises of our fathers, the Americans? How can we have confidence in the white people; when Jesus Christ came upon the Earth, you killed and nailed him upon a cross." Tecumseh concluded his talk with a typical flourish. "Brother, since the peace was made, you have killed some of the Shawnees, Winnebago's, Delaware's, and Miami's, and you've taken our lands from us, and I do not see how we can remain at peace with you if you continue to do so." Tecumseh's plea fell on deaf ears. In answer to the Chief's accusations, Harrison denied that the government had ever acted in bad faith and asserted that the U.S. had always treated the Indians fairly. He disputed Tecumseh's contention that the tribes were one nation, citing as evidence the fact that the Great Spirit had given them many different tongues. He chastised the Shawnee leader, telling him that the Fort Wayne Treaty lands had been purchased from the Miami tribe and Tecumseh had no right to come from a foreign land and tell the Miami's what they could and could not do with their own lands. The speech was first translated into Shawnee. Then, as the interpreter began to explain Harrison's double-talk to the Pottawattamies, Tecumseh lost his temper and leaped to his feet. Using emphatic and uncharacteristically violent gestures, he interrupted the translator and angrily accused Harrison of lying. The interpreter quickly turned to the Governor and informed him that the Shawnee had called him a liar. Harrison's face flushed with anger and he jumped up out of his chair. Immediately, everyone else on the platform followed suit. Seeing this, Tecumseh's entourage sprang to their feet. In a flash, the thin faade of civility had crumbled, exposing the animosity that lay just below the surface. Territorial Secretary, John Gibson, who understood Shawnee, urgently told Harrison, "Those fellows intend mischief. You had better bring up the guard." Harrison signaled for the guard to move in and Winamac once again charged his pistol and primed it for firing. Tecumseh's men crouched, prepared to do battle, as the soldiers stepped forward, bayonets at the ready. The warriors brandished their war clubs; the troops cocked their rifles. Tecumseh raised his tomahawk; Harrison drew his sword. For one interminable, heart-stopping minute, the threat of violence hung over the Council as thick as the humid Indiana summer air. But everyone froze in place and, when nobody made the first move, the Governor lowered his sword and ordered the soldiers to let down their rifles. Sheathing his weapon, Harrison declared the Council over, telling Tecumseh that he would respond to the Chief's charges in writing and that if Tecumseh ever again wanted to speak to him, he should do it through an intermediary. Tecumseh's party left the meeting ground and returned to their camp. That night, while Harrison was assembling three companies of militia to protect the town, Tecumseh was regretting his impetuous words. The next morning, he sent a message of apology, which was accepted. The Council resumed later that day. At a final meeting, Tecumseh spoke calmly and politely but firmly, still defiant. He warned Harrison not to interfere in inter-tribal affairs and stated, "I am alone, the acknowledged head of all of the Indians." As he finished, he made one last poignant plea. "Brother, they want to save that piece of land. We do not wish you to take it. It is small enough for our purposes. I want the present boundary to continue. Should you cross it, I assure you it will be productive of bad consequences." After Tecumseh, Chiefs from several of the other tribes spoke, affirming what the Shawnee had said and acknowledging him as their leader. At the end of the meetings, Tecumseh asked Harrison to send his remarks to the Great Chief, President James Madison. Harrison agreed, but cautioned that there was little chance Madison would approve of them. Hearing this, Tecumseh shook his head sadly. "Well," he said, "as the Great Chief is to determine this matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true; he is so far off he will not be injured by the war. He may still sit in his town and drink his wine whilst you and I have to fight it out." One of the first questions I always get is how did I get on to this topic? How did I get interested in it? Well, living in California where I do, earthquakes are always a subject of conversation. And about seven years or eight years ago, a friend and I were casually discussing the latest earthquake, whatever it had been, and he asked me casually, "Did you know that there was a very large earthquake around St. Louis about 200 years ago?" I had never heard of such a thing, so I set out to do a little research. And I looked into it very quickly and found out not only was there an earthquake but there was this massive series of earthquakes. They were called "The New Madrid Earthquakes", et cetera. They went on for four months. I filed the idea in the back of my mind, thinking perhaps about a historical novel, using this setting for a historical novel. It was a very vague notion, maybe connect it with Louis and Clark somehow; I really didn't know. About three or four years after that, I had just completed another historical novel called Suitcase Sefton and the American Dream. It's about a Major League scout who discovers a pitcher in a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during World War II. It'll be published next spring by Triumph Books. And, having finished Suitcase Sefton and the American Dream, I was casting about for another project and these earthquakes surfaced from the back of my mental filing cabinet. And I set about looking into them in earnest. I discovered three things. Right off the bat, I realized that I couldn't write it as fiction; that it was just way too far-fetched to be a novel -- [laughter] -- that the coincidences and the confluence of forces and events were just too bizarre and too much of a stretch to be credible. The other two things I found were: first, the earthquakes came to represent for me something much larger than just geological and seismological occurrences. They came to take on a metaphorical meaning for me, representing the turmoil and the upheaval that was on the early Frontier at the time. And the last thing that really made the story most compelling for me is that in reading about these pieces of the tale, I was really astonished to find how many themes and issues that are still with us as Americans in the 21st Century, were there at the beginning of the Republic. So, I set out to write a proposal on the book. I told my agent it wasn't going to be fiction; it was going to be non-fiction. That's how it works in the non-fiction world; you write a proposal. As opposed to fiction where you write the novel and your agent sells the novel. In non-fiction, you write a proposal and the better it's written and the more credible it is, the more compelling, the more likely you are to sell it and the more money you're likely to get as an advance. So I worked for about six months on it. It was about 110 pages in all. It was done in the summer of 2001. And the publishing industry shuts down in the summer, so my agent said, "Well, we'll send it out after Labor Day." Well, after Labor Day, the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th. And for about three or four months after that, publishers weren't buying anything but books about Islam and terrorism and political analyses and things like that. So now we were approaching the holidays, which is another time when the industry closes, and my agent said, "Don't worry, we'll send it out after the first of the year." And by now I was checking the balance in my bank account -- [laughter] He did send it out after New Year's and in February we had several houses interested and we decided to sign with Simon & Schuster for a number of reasons. So that was about a year after I started work on the book -- on the proposal. The book itself was two years in the writing and a year in production and it was released in March. Why are there earthquakes in the Mississippi Valley? A study of the Earth's crust reveals a cyclical process. Many of you are probably familiar with the idea of continental drift. Over millions and billions of years, the continents drift together, float together, on the oceans and they slam up together and come smashing into one another and form one or two huge land masses called supercontinents. And then, over the course of millions of years more, the supercontinent or two supercontinents break up and they float out on the oceans again, forming smaller continents. They come back together and they float out again. During the last break-up of this supercontinent, the predecessor of North America was created. Geologists call it "Laurentia" and it looked a little bit different than the continent that we live on. What's now the Gulf of Mexico extended up much further north, so that the states of Mississippi, western Tennessee, western Kentucky, much of eastern Missouri, Arkansas, east Texas, Louisiana, they weren't there. That was all under water. At some point, at the northern point of this Gulf, the continent started to split apart again. It was as if the eastern half of the continent wanted to float off and forms its own new body of land. But, for some reason or other, nobody knows why, the rift failed. However, when the crust was open, magma, molten lava, came bubbling up from underneath the crust, spreading out on both sides of the river. And, as it cooled -- excuse me, on both sides of the land. As it cooled -- this was before the river. As it cooled, under much the same circumstances that cake will fall when you take it out of the oven at the wrong time, the Earth's crust sank. So, now we have a valley in the middle of the continent 350 miles long and 50 to 100 miles wide and three miles deep. Much later, when the Great Inland Sea that covered most of North America began to drain, that's the place it found as the path of least resistance. And it came down through that rift valley, which persists as a scar in the crust, and it brought with it millions and billions of tons of silt, unconsolidated sediment, and filled in the areas that I already mentioned: Louisiana, Mississippi, all in through what's now the Mississippi Valley and the Mississippi Delta. But, underneath three miles of silt there's still this break, this scar, in the continental crust. In fact, seismologists refer to it as "the area of greatest seismic risk east of the Rocky Mountains." Unlike the places where two tectonic boundaries come together, like the West Coast of the United States up through Alaska, where two tectonic plates are bumping and grinding into each other all the time and producing a high incidence of great earthquakes, the build-up in the middle of the continent is much slower. So, paleoseismological studies indicate that there was a great series of earthquakes around 900 A.D. and again around 1450 A.D. And so every three to 500 years, this fault goes in a big way. What causes it is that underneath the Atlantic Ocean, at the Mid Atlantic Ridge, new crust is constantly being created and force up to the surface. And, as it spreads east and west, it creates tremendous stress on the North American plate. So, these stresses build and build and build and crunch the New Madrid fault until there can only be one result, a massive series of earthquakes. It will happen again. The title of the book refers to -- very quickly. I want to finish up as quickly as I can here. The reason that these earthquakes were felt so far and wide -- before I talk about the title -- as opposed to the 1906 earthquake, which was basically around 8.0 and was hardly felt in Nevada and Oregon, in the west the rock is much newer, warmer, and much more broken. So that when the energy of the fault rupture is transmitted outwards, it finds these breaks in the rock and dissipates as it moves out. In the middle of the continent, the rock is much older, much colder, and much more brittle. It's the difference between hitting a piece of soft wood with a hammer and hitting a piece of steel with a hammer. When you hit a piece of steel, the shock is going to be transmitted quite severely throughout and probably, as well, up your arm. The title refers to two separate incidents during the first and third of the major quakes, on December 16, 1811, and February 7, 1812. When a huge piece of land -- I'm talking about miles and miles of land being thrust upwards. And this piece of land crossed the river, crossed the Mississippi River. So now there's an impediment, a large barrier to the flow of the river. Well, it's like when you're in a bathtub and you push the water away from you and it hits the other end of the bathtub, there's only one place where it can go is back towards you. So, the river, all of this water flowing down, hits this impediment and flows backwards with the same force as a tsunami. It was not a tsunami, because it wasn't an ocean phenomenon and it wasn't created by the same conditions that create a tsunami, but the effect was the same. A 30-foot high wall of water -- think about that for a second. A 30-foot high wall of water went rushing upstream, spreading out over both banks, carrying ships and boats with it, destroying structures for miles and miles on either side of the river. Well, this piece of up-thrust land being unconsolidated sediment has no solid form, so it was worn down quite quickly and the river resumed its natural course. In fact, the second time, on February 7th, the waters receded so quickly that there's an account of boats being left high and dry miles from the river where they had been swept and fish being unable to swim fast enough to keep up with the receding waters and being left on land.