When the first great shock hit the Mississippi Valley before dawn on December 16, 1811, the country around New Madrid was not empty. Native towns stood in it, and most of the people in them had come from somewhere else, as refugees.
A buffer of refugees
In the 1780s and 1790s Spanish officials at St. Louis feared Osage raids on their thin settlements. Manuel Pérez, lieutenant governor from 1787 to 1792, pressed to bring emigrant nations from east of the Mississippi to stand between the Osage and the settlers, and he backed the trader Louis Lorimier in persuading Shawnee and Delaware people to settle with him south of Ste. Genevieve. Lorimier had fought beside Shawnee and Lenape against the Americans in the Ohio country, and his first wife was French and Shawnee. In 1793 Governor Carondelet granted land near Cape Girardeau to the Black Bob band of the Hathawekela Shawnee, who became known as the Cape Girardeau Shawnee. Farther south, Cherokee bands who had left their eastern homeland farmed along the St. Francis River.
The ground and the sky
The earthquakes went on until February 7, 1812, seven of them between magnitude six and seven and a half. Land sank and rose, fissures opened, sand blew from the ground, and new lakes formed. The contemporary death count was a handful, but historians now think it missed many deaths on the river and in Native communities. The Cherokee settlements on the St. Francis were flooded and abandoned, and their people moved again, west to the Arkansas River valley, into country the Osage defended.
In the second half of 1811 the Shawnee leader Tecumseh traveled some three thousand miles through the South and West to recruit for his alliance. The record of the journey is fragmentary and folklore has added to it, but he is thought to have met Osage, western Shawnee and Delaware, Muscogee and others. A great comet had appeared in the sky months before. Tecumseh and other Native people took the comet and the earthquakes as omens that his confederacy should be supported. The shaking came weeks after American troops burned Prophetstown, and many saw it as vindication of his brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet. Among the Muscogee, the faction that became the Red Sticks rallied around prophets and took the signs as proof of Tecumseh's power.
Many readings
According to the historian William Foley, Native people generally saw the earthquakes as signs of the Great Spirit's displeasure, both with impure ways of living and with American encroachment, but they answered in different ways. Some took up Tecumseh's militancy. Others chose accommodation, each within their own understanding. American settlers had their own explanations, from God's wrath to the comet's horns.
The Cape Girardeau Shawnee held out against removal to the west until 1833. At New Madrid the historical museum keeps the record of the shaking itself.