The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science

In the early 1800s a series of gargantuan earth tremors seized the American frontier. Tremendous roars and flashes of eerie light accompanied huge spouts of water and gas. Six-foot-high waterfalls appeared in the Mississippi River, thousands of trees exploded, and some 1,500 people - in what was then a sparsely populated wilderness - were killed. A region the size of Texas, centered in Missouri and Arkansas, was rent apart, and the tremors reached as far as Montreal. Forget the 1906 earthquake - this set of quakes constituted the Big One."

Jake Page and Charles Officer rely on historical accounts and the latest scientific findings to tell a long-forgotten story in which the naturalist John James Audubon, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, scientists, and charlatans all play roles.

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Background Information

Along with the Missouri, the Mississippi forms the longest river system in the world and ultimately drains almost all of the central United States. The San Francisco earthquake inflicted heavy damage in 1906 and was followed by widespread fires that could not be controlled, which devastated much of what had survived the quake. Tecumeh, along with his brother The Prophet, fought to protect the Shawnees against encroaching whites until his death in the War of 1812.

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The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science

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