SOME FAMOUS EARTHQUAKES 



ings and carrying them closely packed up a creek for a 

 quarter of a mile. The river fell as rapidly as it had 

 risen, and receded from its banks with such violence that 

 it took with it a grove of cotton-woods which hedged its 

 borders. These trees were broken off with such regu- 

 larity that it was hard to persuade people who had not 

 witnessed the catastrophe that it had not been brought 

 about by human agency." During all the greater shocks 

 the earth's surface was reported to have been raised in 

 great crumplings, the crests of which opened into fissures. 

 Some of these were six hundred to seven hundred feet 

 long and twenty to thirty feet wide, and water and sand 

 and even coal l were spouted out of them to a height of 

 forty feet. Many craters and holes in the ground were 

 formed, surrounded by rings of sand ; and traces of them re- 

 main to this day, a century-old monument of the destruc- 

 tion wrought. Notable changes in the level of the country 

 were effected ; new lakes and new islands came into existence ; 

 some lakes disappeared; some of the lakes then formed 

 remain to this day. On the eastern bank of the Missis- 

 sippi a lake a hundred miles long, six miles wide, and ten 

 to fifty feet in depth was formed ; and another lake, known 

 now as Reelfoot Lake, which came then into existence, is 

 twenty miles long, seven miles broad larger than Winder- 

 mere, and deeper. The fishermen's boats to-day float 

 over the top of eighteenth-century cypress trees. In 

 addition to sections of country which were depressed 

 and submerged, an area of some twenty miles in 

 diameter was elevated into a low dune twenty to twenty- 

 1 Or "lignite," a form of hard pitch. 

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