CHAP. XXXIII.] &quot;SUNK COUNTRY.&quot; 179 



felt one for the last fortnight. It was now three years since they 

 had been seriously alarmed by any movement. We looked at our 

 watches, and when we returned to the farm he inquired of the 

 family if any thing had happened. They said they had felt a 

 shock, and heard a sound like distant thunder, at twenty-five 

 minutes past eleven o clock, which agreed exactly with the time 

 when my companion had felt the motion. 



If the information I obtained from several quarters be correct, 

 in regard to the country permanently submerged by the earth 

 quake of 181112, the area must exceed in magnitude what 

 was stated in former accounts. The &quot; sunk country,&quot; I am told, 

 extends along the course of the White Water and its tributaries 

 for a distance of between seventy and eighty miles north and south, 

 and thirty miles east and west. A trapper, who had been hunting 

 on the Little River, told me, that large spaces there were obviously 

 under water, owing to the great shake, because the dead trees were 

 still standing. In the true hunter spirit, he regarded the awful 

 catastrophe of 181112 as a blessing to the country, and expati- 

 ited with delight on the vast area turned into lake and marsh, 

 id the active trade carried on ever since in the furs of wild animals, 

 j^had been the making of New Madrid, he affirmed, which would 

 )me a rival of St. Louis, and exported even now at least half 

 my peltries. There had been taken last year 50,000 racoon 

 skin^and 25,000 musk-rats for making hats and caps ; 12,000 

 mink for trimming dresses; 1000 bears and 1000 otters; 2500 

 wild oats, 40 panthers, and 100 wolves. Beavers there were 

 none, or only five or six had been trapped. He had gone in his 

 canoe, which carried his hut, his gun, and his baggage, over the 

 whole sunk country, and described to me the villages or hummocks 

 built in the swamps by the musk-rats, which he called &quot; French 

 settlements,&quot; a piece of impertinence in which the Anglo- Americans 

 indulge toward the Creoles of Louisiana. He told me that within 

 the area of the sunk country in Arkansas, about eighty miles from 

 New Madrid, is a space called Buffalo Island, containing about 

 twenty-five square miles, where, two years ago (1844), a herd 

 of buffaloes, 300 or 400 strong, was surprised, and six of them 

 taken. 



