Remembering-the-Remaking-of-a-Landscape-Review-of-The-Lost-History-of-the-New-Madrid-Earthquakes-by-Conevery-Bolton-Valencius-University-of-Chicago-Pr.pdf

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Book review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
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www.sciencedirect.com
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Remembering the Remaking of a Landscape: Review of The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, by Conevery Bolton Valencius,
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Christopher Steinke
Felt as far away as New Hampshire, the New Madrid
Earthquakes of 1811–12 remade the landscape of the
Mississippi Valley, inspired sweeping indigenous resis-
tance movements during the War of 1812, and prompted
early geological investigations in the midcontinent. In the
Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes,
historian
Conevery Bolton Valencius measures the impacts of these
three 7.0 earthquakes through the shifting environmental
and social history of the New Madrid region as well as the
changing definitions of what constituted credible geological
evidence. Drawing on Native oral histories, folk tales,
newspaper accounts, government correspondence, and sci-
entific literature, she places the middle Mississippi Val-
ley—seemingly a scientific and political hinterland in early
America—at the center of what she calls ‘‘vernacular’’
science of the early nineteenth century. Settlers relied
on bodily sensation and observation to gather evidence
about the causes and power of the earthquakes. As a
history of the production, erasure, and reclamation of
knowledge about the New Madrid Earthquakes, this work
invites historians to think more broadly about where and
how early Americans practiced science.
The history of the New Madrid Earthquakes was ‘‘lost’’
because of the historical silencing of the people they im-
pacted the most: Native Americans and early American
settlers in Arkansas and Missouri. Valencius recovers this
history by using first-person accounts to describe the tim-
ing and physical impact of the three large quakes. They
redrew the landscape of the middle Mississippi Valley and
particularly the St. Francis River belt, a home for displaced
Cherokees. In the first half of the book, Valencius traces
how the earthquakes transformed the St. Francis Valley
into a mostly depopulated ‘‘sunk land’’ as well as how
Native peoples and whites understood the earthquakes.
For the Cherokees, Valencius argues, the disturbances
were a sign that they should support the pan-Indian
resistance movement of the Shawnee brothers Tenskwa-
tawa and Tecumseh. For white participants in the Great
Revival, bodily tremors were evidence of religious power.
The final chapters describe the accumulation and late
twentieth-century salvaging of scientific knowledge about
the New Madrid Earthquakes. Contemporary observers
had linked the earthquakes to inclement weather, volcanic
activity, and electricity. In the late nineteenth century,
however, scientists began to doubt whether the New
Madrid earthquakes had ever happened, and developers
in the region began erasing evidence of their environmen-
tal impacts. In the 1920s, Jesuit scientists at St. Louis
University temporarily revived interest in the New Madrid
Earthquakes, but the emergence of plate tectonics theory
and emphasis on fault lines a few decades later once again
relegated the earthquakes’ mid-plate epicenter—the
swamplands below New Madrid—to a ‘‘scientific waste-
land.’’
Building on the pioneering work of the early twentieth-
century geologist Myron L. Fuller, seismologists finally
began reassessing the New Madrid Earthquakes in the
late 1970s, a shift that coincided with the establishment of
the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at
Saint Louis University. Period newspaper accounts and
letters became crucial sources for estimating the size and
impact of the New Madrid Earthquakes. Seismologists’
reports became a matter of public policy: local officials in
New Madrid, Missouri, and surrounding towns debated
whether similar earthquakes could happen again and how
to plan for them. By connecting these debates with recent
earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand, Valencius stresses
the importance of remembering the New Madrid Earth-
quakes.
Valencius argues that the New Madrid Earthquakes
were forgotten partly because they struck a multiethnic
borderland on the periphery of the expanding American
nation-state. Occasionally the indigenous political land-
scape proves too complicated for the book’s narrative,
which spans two centuries. Although Valencius empha-
sizes the region’s diversity, the pre-1811 history of the
middle Mississippi Valley—and its formation as an indig-
enous and imperial borderland—remains somewhat
blurry, and the impact of the earthquakes on the region’s
older inhabitants (mainly the Big Osages and Quapaws) is
unclear. Her description of the Cherokees on the St. Fran-
cis River as ‘‘earthquake refugees’’ perhaps underesti-
mates the importance of other factors—particularly
hunting territory and game depletion—in their westward
migration and ensuing conflict with the Osages on the
Arkansas River. Still, this work provides an important
new template for future studies of scientific practice and
knowledge production in early American borderlands.
Corresponding author:
Steinke, C. (csteinke@unm.edu)
Available online 3 November 2014.
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.09.003

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