The New Madrid Quake Chronicles

By Claude Walker

In December 1811, a series of quakes rocked the area near New Madrid, Missouri, a settlement on the Mississippi River. Sparsely populated by French fur-traders, a dwindling number of Native Americans and newly-arrived European immigrants, the region rumbled for weeks. Rivers ran backwards. Gaseous crevasses in the earth gaped, swallowing people and buildings.

While "The New Madrid Quake Chronicles" is a story of a natural calamity, it is also a parable about the imprint a disaster can leave on any family for generations. The reader meets survivors of the Great Quake from two great families headed by Shawnee leader Blue Turtle and German exile Blas Baur, whose descendents share special quake-sensing abilities. Their stories are lyrically told: mighty rivers meeting, mightier tectonic plates clashing.

Historical fiction, family saga and military-political history with a touch of seismic sci-fi, "The New Madrid Quake Chronicles" is a cautionary tale. If an 1811-sized quake hit New Madrid today, an estimated 3,500 residents would die. It would leave 730,000 homeless and 2.6 million without power. Most bridges over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers would fall. Experts agree that a big one will likely strike again in the New Madrid Seismic Zone; how prepared will we be?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462070367

Claude Walker

Author of novels about quakes, baseball, politics, the Seminoles, the Eastland Disaster and drones, Claude Walker was inducted into the Society of Midland Authors in 2003. He has spent decades in politics, including service as Senior Writer for the Illinois Governor. Walker is a top contributor to TripAdvisor.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Author’s Notes

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Appendix #1:

Appendix #2:

Appendix #3

About the Author

Novels by Claude Walker

Currents of Power: A Modern Political Novel (2001)

Seminole Smoke: An odyssey of power, love and blood

in the Seminole Wars (2009)

Currents of Power: A Modern Political Novel (Revised) (2009)

The New Madrid Quake Chronicles (2011)

Coming soon…

The Earth Baseball Tourney: An Invitational to Disaster

Acknowledgements

Maps of the New Madrid and

Wabash Valley seismic zones and of Earth’s tectonic plates

courtesy of the United States Geologic Survey.

For quake victims, emergency first-responders and medical teams,

rescue dogs, disaster volunteers and donors.

First, many species enjoy extraordinary sensitivity to seismic activity. Second, a specific blend of conditions during a quake—gaseous, atmospheric, electromagnetic—may leave a genetic imprint on susceptible witnesses that afford descendents of those witnesses a keen awareness of impending quakes.

—The Kurasawa Hypothesis

new%20madrid%20and%20wabash%20valley.jpg

New Madrid & Wabash Valley seismic zones

Map courtesy of United States Geologic Survey

Author’s Notes

I’ve always been drawn to disasters, both natural and man-made.

Maybe it’s from growing up in a metropolis shaped by disaster (the 1871 Great Chicago Fire), or being scared stiff by my grandmother about such horrors as the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire and 1950 Green Hornet streetcar crash. I’ve dug out from three snowstorms of the century and sweated out Chicago’s 1995 heat wave that killed 700. I saw smoke billowing from the 1966 West Side unrest, and was caught amid the violent 1969 Days of Rage and 1977 Puerto Rican Day riots. I was among the first on the scene to the grisly 1993 Paxton SRO blaze, the bizarre 1992 Chicago River tunnel flood and 1977 CTA derailment, seeing terrified faces of trapped riders in dangling L cars. I’ve felt the spirits of the 1915 Eastland capsizing, 1958 Our Lady of the Angels School fire and 1966 Speck murders. I’ve ridden out hurricanes in Mexico, Nassau and Miami Beach.

I was three hours late to my wedding due to a flood.

Curling up with a good book means re-reading McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood, Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, Larson’s Isaac’s Storm, Brinkley’s The Great Deluge, or Winchester’s superb A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, a lyrical yet scientific treatment of earthquakes.

These are real dramas, not the phony, empty dramas of so-called reality TV. How would you really act when the dam breaks, tornado hits or killer enters? Disasters test people’s skills, nerves, imagination, brains, heart and soul. They create genuine tales of loss or heroism, the random suddenness of life and death. And they offer the writer of historical fiction meaty backdrops.

Two centuries ago, a series of earthquakes rocked the area centered at New Madrid, a settlement on a bend in the Mississippi River. No precise count of casualties or damage was made: it was sparsely-populated by French fur traders, a dwindling number of Native Americans and newly-arrived European immigrants. The first event—December 16, 1811—caused rivers to run backwards. Tremors continued for months.

The New Madrid Quake Chronicles was written prior to Japan’s March, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant tragedies, but after the Indian Ocean tsunami and Haiti quake. My original draft included a meltdown at an Illinois nuclear power plant; but after Fukushima Dai-chi, such a storyline seemed disrespectful, so I scratched it. What happened in Japan will likely happen again.

Chronicles is a story of two families, of Native American relocation and European immigration, of assimilation. Each chapter is a snapshot of a generation. Every family tree somewhere along the way has its warriors, linguists, politicians, entrepreneurs, teachers, athletes, arsonists, artists and con-artists. Every family tree has been touched by disaster at some point.

An obvious metaphor for the coming together of two great families is, of course, the confluence of two mighty rivers. (The region where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers merge is the primary setting for our story.) A seismic metaphor may be just as apt: two families and the massive tectonic plates below them. Ever-shifting, never static, imperceptible changes, friction, tension.

While this is a story of a natural disaster, it’s much more a parable of the imprint a disaster can leave on nine generations of two very different families.

There are slices of Native American Indian history, familiar turf for readers of my Seminole Smoke: An odyssey of power, love and blood in the Seminole Wars. Outgunned Indians using hit-and-run tactics against conventional armies, tribal squabbles, relocation to reservations, a brief Mexican exodus. There are slices of Illinois and Chicago history, familiar turf for readers of my opus, Currents of Power: A Modern Political Novel. We see Lincoln as a state legislator, forging ties with the emerging German-American voting bloc. We see generations of local pols in the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois and in Chicago, and how they respond to corruption. The reader is offered nibbles of near-forgotten military history: the 1813 Battle of Thames (where Tecumseh fell), firebrand Carl Schurz’s German-American unit at Bull Run, Pershing’s first offensive in World War I France, counter-insurgency in World War II Burma, black ops in 1960s Laos.

How did this tome come to be? In 2008, a co-worker dared me to join her in National Novel Writers Month (Nanowrimo). The annual event encourages everyday folks to exercise their writing muscles. (Let’s face it: humanity’s writing muscles are starting to atrophy.) Nanowrimo challenges each writer to pen a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, emphasizing Quantity Over Quality. The notion of a novel set in the Seminole Wars had been rattling around in my head for awhile, so I signed up, along 125,000 others from around the globe. Without Nanowrimo to force me, that book—the only novel to span the entire half-century Seminole conflict—wouldn’t have been written.

And so it was with The New Madrid Quake Chronicles. Inspired long ago by Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to do a multi-generational story, I thought the unheralded New Madrid Earthquake would be a good platform. Once again, I needed Nanowrimo for motivation. By 2010, Nanowrimo had grown to 200,000 participants: 37,000 novelists completed the task of 50,000 words in 30 days. My Nanowrimo effort was the early draft of New Madrid Quake Chronicles.

Writing a novel is an adventure; Nanowrimo adds fuel to the process. While authors are urged to do research and planning in the months leading up to Nanowrimo’s kick-off, no words may be written until the starting bell. Having done four novels by 2010, I was finally learning how to manage the process: timelines, character profiles, sub-plots, tempo. But in the delightful writing frenzy prompted by Nanowrimo, I found myself unexpectedly—and profoundly—changing the novel’s direction in the final days. So, thanks Nanowrimo, for the panic you instill, the creativity it compels and the improved ending to The New Madrid Quake Chronicles.

This was a genre-bending book to start with: historical fiction, disaster chronicle, military and political history, family epic. The new path spurred by Nanowrimo might put it in the sci fi aisle. The Magic Eye literary device provokes discussion of the high-velocity P-Wave and true quake-sensors.

Evident in various species, reports are commonplace of elephants, birds, household pets and cattle becoming agitated before quakes or heading inland before tsunamis. Dogs and human teens discern high-frequency sounds. Many people enjoy an acute sense of smell, vision, hearing, taste or touch. Older folks predict rain with their knees. Natural phenomena such as a full moon, tides and barometric pressure drops affect many.

The use of the Magic Eye prompts questions on the ethics of science. Should new ways to observe and predict quakes be used for diplomatic or military purposes? Is seismo-intel moral? Is pure research helped or undermined by government support?

To prepare for the manuscript’s rewrite, I embarked (with the long-suffering spouse) on Holiday Disaster Road-Trip 2010, a 4,000-mile drive to see New Madrid, New Orleans and the BP oil-besmirched Gulf Coast. We saw the magnificent confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers (site of so much flooding over so many centuries), aging river towns such as Cairo, and the New Madrid Earthquake Museum.

After exploring Katrina ghost towns in the Big Easy and oil spill ghost towns in Florida’s Panhandle, one might sort disasters into three types:

1. Totally natural, such as the New Madrid Earthquake in a sparsely-populated region;

2. Totally human greed, arrogance and incompetence, such as the BP oil spill, and

3. A blend of the two, such as Hurricane Katrina and government’s response to it, or the Japan quake and tsunami, followed by the nuclear meltdown. A Type 1 can easily become a Type 3.

Chronicles is a cautionary tale. In 2010, the Mid-America Earthquake Center ran some scenarios. If an 1811-sized earthquake struck under New Madrid today, it would result in 3,500 fatalities, 80,000 injured, 730,000 displaced victims, 715,000 destroyed buildings, 2.6 million without electricity, a million lacking food or water. About 3,500 bridge collapses, plus paralysis of barge, truck and rail traffic in and out of the nation’s breadbasket. About $300 billion in direct economic loss.

One hopes the various agencies responsible for disaster preparedness and response have learned the lessons from Katrina, Haiti, Japan and elsewhere (but one doubts it). One beacon of preparedness is the Great Central U.S. ShakeOut, during which 3,000,000 participants in 11 states dropped, covered, and held on throughout the New Madrid and Wabash Valley seismic zones at 10:15 a.m. on April 28, 2011. The drill encouraged schools, businesses, government agencies, senior centers and local media to focus on preparedness.

Perhaps disaster awareness has also been boosted by an era in which cell phones, ubiquitous video cameras and YouTube enable us all to see the destructiveness of a hurricane, tornado, quake or tsunami with new furious immediacy.

During our Disaster Road-Trip, we toured the Katrina exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum. We saw the tiny rescue baskets used by Coast Guard choppers to pluck victims off roofs and the flimsy Cajun Navy outboards used by volunteers who saved thousands. It reminded us of the heroism of those first-responders to disasters, be they man-made or natural.

Claude Walker

Summer, 2011

Postscript: Just months before going to press, a 3.9 tremor shook riverfront towns in Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky.

Prologue

December, 2011. Sikeston, Missouri

I have the Magic Eye, right, Big Abuelo?

The aging Congressman grinned as his great-granddaughter covered one eye and made ghost noises. Stroking his distinctive jutting chin, he squinted at little Juana’s distinctive jutting chin.

Everyone at the packed New Madrid Quake Descendents 2011 Reunion was saying, My, she does have your chin, doesn’t she? A pity they weren’t declaring, My, her radiant eyes and charm must come from you, Congressman. That chin didn’t just come from me, he mused. It came from my grandfather’s grandfather and his before that. A ferociously-dominant gene that had hitched a ride across the Atlantic two centuries ago after dashing across half of Germany.

Little Juana has some pretty strong genes herself, the old Congressman could see. Her genes hailed from so many places: Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Philippines, Sicily, Poland. Even a touch of Shawnee, he was told. Sign of the times.

Ooooooh, Juana continued. Magic Eye! Woooo…

It had been ten years since the last Reunion, a momentous evening when two families shared their quake-sensing gifts—the Magic Eye—and from those two families young Juana was born.

As this Reunion was ending, one attendee good-naturedly called out, Tell us about the Magic Eye, Congressman! Yes, Congressman, talk about the Magic Eye, the group beckoned, tell us about the first time! Members of the Sullivan and Baur families gathered around the old man—clearly one with the carriage of both a politician and patriarch—attracting more Reunion attendees and a Paducah, Kentucky, reporter.

Well, I’ll tell you about it only if Professor Sullivan here tells his side of it. The appreciative audience crowded around the head table in the cavernous Sikeston, Missouri, banquet hall.

A man whose eyes twinkled whenever he had the floor, Congressman Francis X. Baur, Jr., sipped his brandy and spoke slowly of his first Magic Eye experience.

A teenager, he was up in the House Gallery waiting for his father the Congressman to orate, when he felt flush. Probably the excitement, he recalls thinking. His vision changed: he saw the insides of things, their forms, their structure. He felt vibrations inside his feet, but when he looked at his feet, they were still. And what a thunder in his ears: a rolling, echoing thunder. Two days later, word came of a quake in Sanriku, Japan, which killed 3,000.

In 1939, Frankie joined his dad on South American Congressional junket. Arriving in Concepción—Chile’s second-largest city—he had a familiar sensation. Vibrating feet, geometric visions. His father—Congressman Francis X. Baur, Sr.,—checked him into the Governor’s personal clinic. For two thundering days, he hallucinated, seeing the underground roots of trees, structure of nearby hills, blueprints of buildings. Frankie was given coca leaves to chew by that cute, concerned nurse, which only intensified the sensations and curbed sleep.

Sitting on the clinic’s veranda, he saw a relationship between the thunder in his head and movement of animals on the hill. Thunder, he’d report when only he had heard it; a second later he and the amazed nurse would see a deer bolt. She whispered: Francisco, you have the Magic Eye.

That night, as Concepción lay shattered and burning all around them, the epicenter of a deadly earthquake, Francisco and the nurse embraced as if the whole world was ripping apart.

The old man paused dramatically in his tale to take a breath. He sipped his brandy and fingered an unlit cigar. Can’t smoke in here, I suppose? Ahh, damned politicians! Little Juana covered her mouth in mock horror: Big-Abuelo said Damn!

He’d felt the Magic Eye often since, such as the 1951 Hawaiian quake that was also felt by