the stream that vegetation, even trees of a considerable size are growing upon it. For seven hundred miles above the raft the river is one series of sandbars, among which in summer the water stands in ponds. As you approach the mountains it becomes contracted within narrow limits over a gravelly bottom and a swift, clear, and abundant stream.

The Trinity, the Brasos, and the Rio Colorado have each a course of about twelve hundred miles, rising in the plains and mountains on the north and northwest of Texas and running south and southeast into the Gulf of Mexico. The Rio Bravo del Norte bounds the Great Prairie Wilderness on the south and southwest. It is near two thousand miles long, but it is shallow and for most of its course scarcely navigable at times for even the canoe of the Indian.

The Arkansas, after the Missouri, is the most considerable river of the Great Prairie Wilderness. It takes its rise among the mountains, in places there passing through charming valleys and again through awful chasms. Its total length is two thousand one hundred and seventy-three miles. In freshets, large and heavy boats can pass from its mouth to where the river escapes from the mountains. In the dry season its water are strongly impregnated

with salt and niter.

The trials of a journey across the Great Prairie Wilderness and thence over the mountains, through the western wilderness beyond, can never be detailed in words; to be understood they must be endured. The desolation of one kind and another which meets the eye everywhere; the sense of vastness associated with dearth and barrenness; one half the time on foot treading on the flinty gravel and the thorns of the prickly pear along the unbroken way; and the starvings and thirstings wilt the muscles, send preternatural activity into the nervous system, and through the whole animal and mental economy a feebleness and irritability altogether indescribable.

THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE OF 1811.

THIS memorable earthquake, after shaking the Mississippi Valley to its center, vibrated along the courses of the rivers and villages, and passing the Alleghany Mountains died away along the

shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

The town of New Madrid, in the southern part of Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi, and the settlement of New Prairie some thirty miles below it, appeared to be near the center of the most violent shocks. The first occurred on the night of the 15th of December, and they were repeated at intervals for two or three months. A gentleman who resided at New Madrid a few years

later, derived from eye-witnesses a full account of these disturbances which he has recorded as follows:

From the accounts I infer that the shock of these earthquakes must have equaled, in their terrible heavings of the earth, anything of the kind that has been recorded. I do not believe that the public have ever yet had any idea of the violence of the concussions. We are accustomed to measure this by the buildings overturned, and the mortality that results. Here the country was thinly settled. The houses, fortunately, were frail and of logs, the most difficult to overturn that could be constructed. Yet as it was whole tracts were plunged into the beds of the Mississippi. The graveyard at New Madrid, with all its sleeping tenants, was precipitated into the bed of the stream. Most of the houses were thrown down. Large lakes, of many miles in extent, were made in an hour. Other lakes were drained. The whole country from the mouth of the Ohio in one direction, and to the St. Francis in another, including a front of three hundred miles, was convulsed to such a degree as to create lakes and islands, the number of which is not known. The trees split in the midst, lashed one with another, are still visible over great tracts of country, inclining in every direction and in every angle to the earth and the horizon. The people described the undulations of the earth as resembling waves, increasing in elevation as they advanced, and when they had attained a certain fearful height the earth would burst, and vast volumes of water, and sand, and pit coal would discharge as high as the tops of the trees. I have seen a hundred of these chasms which remained fearfully deep, although in a very tender, alluvial soil, after a lapse of seven years.

Whole districts were covered with white sand, so as to become uninhabitable. The water at first covered the whole country, particularly at the Little Prairie; and indeed it must have been a scene of horror, in these deep forests and in the gloom of the darkest night, and by wading in the water to the middle to fly from these concussions, which were occurring every few hours, with a noise equally terrible to beasts and birds as to men. The birds themselves lost all power and disposition to fly, and retreated to the bosoms of men, their fellow-sufferers in this general convulsion. A few persons sunk in these chasms and were providentially extricated. A number perished who sunk with their boats in the Mississippi. A bursting of the earth just below the village of New Madrid, arrested the mighty Mississippi in its course, and caused a reflux of its waves, by which in a little time, a great number of boats were swept by the ascending current into the mouth of the Bayou, carried out and left upon the dry earth, when the accumulating waters of the river had again cleared their current.

There were a number of severe shocks, but two series of concussions were particularly terrible; far more so than the rest. The shocks were clearly distinguishable into two classes: those in which the motion was horizontal, and those in which it was perpendicu

lar. The latter were attended with explosions, and the terrible mixture of noises that preceded and accompanied the earthquakes in a louder degree, but were by no means so desolating and destructive as the other. Then the houses crumbled, the trees waved together, the ground sunk; while ever and anon vivid flashes of lightning gleaming through the troubled clouds of night, rendered the darkness doubly horrible. After the severest shocks, a dense black cloud of vapor overshadowed the land, through which no struggling sunbeam found its way to cheer the heart of man. The sulphurated gases that were discharged during the shocks tainted the air with their noxious effluvia, and so impregnated the water of the river for one hundred and fifty miles as to render it unfit for use.

In the interval of the earthquakes, there was one evening, and that a brilliant and cloudless one, in which the western sky was a continued glare of repeated peals of subterranean thunder, seeming to proceed, as the flashes did, from below the horizon. They remark that the night so conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the same period in which the fatal earthquakes at Caracas in South America occurred, and they seem to suppose these flashes and that event part of the same scene.

One result from these terrific phenomena was very obvious. The people of this village had been noted for their profligacy and impiety. In the midst of those scenes of terror, all, Catholics and Protestants, praying and profane, became of one religion and partook of one feeling. Two hundred people speaking English, French, and Spanish, crowded together, their visages pale, the mothers embracing their children-as soon as the omen that preceded the earthquakes became visible, as soon as the air became a little obscured, as though a sudden mist arose from the east-all in their different languages and forms, but all deeply in earnest, betook themselves to the voice of prayer. The cattle, much terrified, crowded about the people seeking to demand protection or community of danger.

The general impulse when the shocks commenced, was to run; and yet, when they were at the severest point of their motion, the people were thrown on the ground at almost every step. A French gentleman told me that in escaping from his house, the largest in the village, he found he had left an infant behind, and he attempted to mount up the raised piazza to recover the child and was thrown down a dozen times in succession.

The venerable lady in whose dwelling we lodged, was extricated from the ruins of her house, having lost everything that appertained to her establishment, which could be broken or destroyed.

The people at the Little Prairie, who suffered most, had their settlement, which consisted of a hundred families, and which was located in a rich and very deep fertile bottom broken up. When I passed it and stopped to contemplate the traces of the catastrophe which remained after several years, the crevices where the

earth had burst were sufficiently manifest, and the whole region was covered with sand to the depth of two or three feet. The surface was red with oxydized pyrites of iron, and the sand-blows, as they were called, were abundantly mixed with this kind of earth, and with pieces of pit-coal. But two families remained of the whole settlement. The object seems to have been, in the first paroxysm of alarm, to escape to the hills. The depth of water that soon covered the surface, precluded escape.

The people, without exception, were unlettered backwoodsmen, of the class least addicted to reasoning. And yet, it is remarkable, how ingeniously and conclusively they reasoned, from apprehension sharpened by fear. They observed that the chasms in the earth were in the direction from southwest to northeast, and they were of an extent to swallow up not only men but houses "down deep into the pit." And these chasms occurred frequently within intervals of half a mile. They felled the tallest trees at right angles to the chasms, and stationed themselves upon the felled trees. Meantime their cattle and their harvests, both there and at New Madrid, principally perished.

The people no longer dared to dwell in houses. They passed that winter and the succeeding one in bark booths and camps, like those of the Indians, of so light a texture as not to expose the inhabitants to danger in case of their being thrown down. Such numbers of laden boats were wrecked above on the Mississippi, and the lading driven into the eddy at the mouth of the bayou, at the village which makes the harbor, that the people were amply supplied with provision of every kind. Flour, beef, pork, bacon, butter, cheese, apples, in short everything that is carried down the river, was in such abundance, as scarcely to be matters of sale. Many boats that came safely into the bayou, were disposed of by the affrighted owners for a trifle; for the shocks continued daily; and the owners deeming the whole country below to be sunk, were glad to return to the upper country as fast as possible. In effect, a great many islands were sunk, new ones raised, and the bed of the river very much changed in every respect.

After the earthquake had moderated in violence, the country exhibited a melancholy aspect of chasms, of sand covering the earth, of trees thrown down, or lying at an angle of forty-five degrees, or split in the middle. The Little Prairie settlement was broken up. The Great Prairie settlement, one of the most flourishing before on the west bank of the Mississippi, was much diminished. New Madrid dwindled to insignificance and decay; the people trembling in their miserable hovels at the distant and melancholy rumbling of the approaching shocks.

The general government passed an act allowing the inhabitants of the country to locate the same quantity of lands that they possessed here, in any part of the territory, where the lands were not yet covered by any claim. These claims passed into the hands of