At 3 a.m. on February 7, 1812, a flatboat captain named Matthias Speed woke up to find the Mississippi heaving beneath him. By daylight, the water had turned almost black, and just below his boat, where there had only ever been open river, there was now a waterfall. That same night, men on the river watched the current of the Mississippi turn around and run the wrong way. Three massive earthquakes struck the heart of the continent in a single winter, the most powerful ever recorded east of the Rocky Mountains. They knocked down chimneys in Cincinnati, were felt in Washington and New York, swallowed islands, drowned a forest and created a lake that is still there today.

This is the story of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812: the eyewitnesses who lived through them, the first steamboat on the western rivers that sailed straight into the chaos, a lake born from the shaking that men would later kill for, and the first federal disaster relief in American history, which ended up in the wrong hands. It is also the story of the fault that never went away. It still runs beneath Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and the city of Memphis, and scientists still cannot agree whether it is finished or only waiting.

Do you live in the Bootheel, around Reelfoot Lake or in Memphis? Have you ever felt one of the small quakes that still rattle the region, or do you remember December 1990, when a whole region waited for the ground to move? Tell us in the comments. And one question for everyone: is the New Madrid fault finished, or just waiting?

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