The Mississippi Was Seen Running Backward in 1812. One Woman in New Madrid Wrote It Down.
Oddment Cabinet
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In the small hours of December 16, 1811, the ground under the river town of New Madrid began to shake, and it kept on for months. Four years later a woman named Eliza Bryan set down what she had lived through for a travelling preacher, including two moments when the Mississippi went the wrong way. Boatmen, a botanist and a President left their own lines about that winter. Here they are side by side, with what geologists make of them now.
Based on real accounts. The pictures are reconstructions made with AI tools in the style of period photographs, and the narration is produced with AI tools. The wondering is our own. Photography did not exist in 1812. Every picture is a reconstruction, and the thumbnail reconstructs one sentence of her letter. The old spellings in the quotations are the writers' own.
Main sources: Eliza Bryan to Lorenzo Dow, March 22, 1816, in Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or, Lorenzo's Journal, pp. 344-346. Matthias Speed, letter of March 2, 1812. William Leigh Pierce, letter of December 25, 1811. William Shaler, letter of March 23, 1812. John Bradbury, Travels in the Interior of America (1817). J. H. B. Latrobe, The First Steamboat Voyage on the Western Waters (1871). James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, February 7, 1812 (Founders Online). Act of February 17, 1815 (3 Stat. 211). Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (1849). Myron L. Fuller, The New Madrid Earthquake, US Geological Survey Bulletin 494 (1912). US Geological Survey, "Summary of 1811-1812 New Madrid Earthquakes Sequence" and General Information Product 134 (2011). Hough and Page, Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011). The eyewitness letters were read as page scans in the University of Memphis CERI New Madrid Compendium.
Oddment Cabinet: real accounts, open questions.
The Mississippi Was Seen Running Backward in 1812. One Woman in New Madrid Wrote It Down.
Oddment Cabinet
9 views
In the small hours of December 16, 1811, the ground under the river town of New Madrid began to shake, and it kept on for months. Four years later a woman named Eliza Bryan set down what she had lived through for a travelling preacher, including two moments when the Mississippi went the wrong way. Boatmen, a botanist and a President left their own lines about that winter. Here they are side by side, with what geologists make of them now.
Based on real accounts. The pictures are reconstructions made with AI tools in the style of period photographs, and the narration is produced with AI tools. The wondering is our own. Photography did not exist in 1812. Every picture is a reconstruction, and the thumbnail reconstructs one sentence of her letter. The old spellings in the quotations are the writers' own.
Main sources: Eliza Bryan to Lorenzo Dow, March 22, 1816, in Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or, Lorenzo's Journal, pp. 344-346. Matthias Speed, letter of March 2, 1812. William Leigh Pierce, letter of December 25, 1811. William Shaler, letter of March 23, 1812. John Bradbury, Travels in the Interior of America (1817). J. H. B. Latrobe, The First Steamboat Voyage on the Western Waters (1871). James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, February 7, 1812 (Founders Online). Act of February 17, 1815 (3 Stat. 211). Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (1849). Myron L. Fuller, The New Madrid Earthquake, US Geological Survey Bulletin 494 (1912). US Geological Survey, "Summary of 1811-1812 New Madrid Earthquakes Sequence" and General Information Product 134 (2011). Hough and Page, Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011). The eyewitness letters were read as page scans in the University of Memphis CERI New Madrid Compendium.
Oddment Cabinet: real accounts, open questions.