When The Feedsack Dress came out in 2007, I started a blog on Typepad that focused on life during the late 1940s and early 1950s. I stopped posting there in 2012, but you can still link to The Feedsack Kids. I’m posting some new blogs and my favorite old ones here.
Category Archives: Historicals
Mid-Continent Earthquakes, Past and Future
About 2:30 a.m. December 16, 1811, an earthquake threw people in New Madrid, Missouri Territory, out of bed and crumbled brick houses and cabin chimneys, forced the Mississippi River to run backward and change course, disturbed sleep along most of the East Coast, and toppled dishes from shelves in the White House.
That marked the beginning of some of the most powerful, prolonged quakes the United States has experienced. These weren’t the first in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which is centered near where Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky come together. Geologists and other scientists have found indications that powerful quakes—rating 7 or higher on the Richter scale—have occurred there periodically for roughly 4,500 years.
Scores of small quakes—many in the 1.5 to 2.5 range—still pester area residents each year.
Geologists expect more big ones to come, estimating a 10% chance that will be within the next 50 years. The area between St. Louis and Memphis is likely to be the hardest hit, but right now the spread and range of the next disastrous earthquakes can’t be predicted any more precisely than the time.
Scientific research on the past and the possible future of the seismic zone continues. The quakes are not just an academic interest. In 2011, an expert panel concluded the zone “is at significant risk for damaging earthquakes that must be accounted for in urban planning and development.”
My characters in Thunder Beneath My Feet had little information on what was happening elsewhere or what to expect as dozens of big quakes and aftershocks and hundreds of tremors hit New Madrid on an unpredictable schedule for weeks on end. Many people there, and elsewhere, thought the world was ending. For hundreds, it did.
I relished researching the unique historical events and creating characters representing the thriving, diverse (Spanish, French, American, Indigenous) community in the frontier riverport. For months, they faced daily terrors, and so will a much larger population when the next big ones hit.
Each fall preparedness groups in the area hold Great Shakeout Earthquake Drills. They recommend these three steps if you feel a quake begin.
- Drop onto your hands and knees so you won’t fall down and can crawl to any nearby shelter.
- Cover your head and neck with one arm and hand to protect you as you crawl under a table, desk, or anything else that will protect you from falling objects. If you have no shelter nearby, crawl to an interior wall, preferably a corner.
- Hold on to your shelter but be ready to move if it gives way.
Happy anniversary.
—Carolyn Mulford
My One-Room School
In the 1940s, my sisters and I sometimes wore feedsack dresses, blouses, and skirts to the one-room school a half mile from our farm. Our family had a history there. My grandmother’s family had donated the land for the school, my father had received his eight years of education there, and my mother had met him while teaching there and spending her summers taking undergraduate courses.
On a typical day, we rushed to school to play a few minutes before the teacher rang the handbell at 8:55 for our 9 o’clock start. In mild weather, the dozen or so pupils in grades one through eight said the Pledge of Allegiance outside facing the flag.
We seated ourselves at old wood-and-metal double desks with the youngest children in the front rows. Each desktop had a hole for an inkwell, but the bottles of ink for our little-used fountain pens usually went onto the open shelf underneath with our few books, Big Chief tablets, pencils, and crayons.
The teacher had a big wood desk up front. Blackboards filled the back wall, and rolled-up maps of the world and the United States could be pulled down when needed. Big casement windows lined the north and south sides of the room. The left front corner hosted the World Book Encyclopedia and the pencil sharpener. An upright piano occupied the right front corner. In the back were a coal stove, coat hooks, and two metal cabinets containing textbooks and recreational reading.
Classes began with the first graders going to the teacher’s desk to read aloud from Dick and Jane books. The rest of us studied for our lessons to come, each class taking its turn with the teacher until the first recess. In that 15 minutes we raced to the outhouses (one for boys, one for girls) at the edge of the schoolyard, pumped water for a drink from the well beside the school, and enjoyed minutes on the swings, see-saw, or slide.
Then we returned inside for arithmetic, usually checking problems we’d completed on paper and working others on the blackboard. To cut down on the number of classes, the teacher taught fifth grade and seventh grade one year and sixth grade and eighth grade the next—except for arithmetic. That had to be studied in sequence.
Other major subjects were spelling, history, science, and geography. When a school program, such as a pie supper, was coming up, we adde music—mostly singing or playing little flutes called Tonettes or such rhythm band instruments as sticks, blocks of wood covered in sandpaper, bells, a triangle, and a drum.
Precisely at noon we ate lunch, typically soup from a thermos or a bologna or peanut butter sandwich, a piece of fruit, and cookies. In good weather we played outdoor games that kids of all ages could play, including group tag, May I, andy (ante) over, and baseball. In bad weather we often played jacks (using up to 40) or pick-up sticks on the teacher’s desk.
At 1 p.m., we took our seats, and the teacher read a chapter from a novel. In first grade I was spellbound by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain remains one of my favorite writers.
We all looked forward to Friday afternoons. We cleaned the school and then chose teams for contests—finding places on the maps, working arithmetic problems on the blackboard, and holding a railroad spelling bee. In the last, a team captain spells railroad, and the other captain spells a word beginning with the final letter (d). The team members take turns spelling words beginning with the last letter of the last word spelled. Little kids could compete with the older ones by spelling simple words, especially ones that ended in x. Failure to think of a word or to spell it correctly eliminated the speller. The team with the last speller standing won.
The day ended at 4 p.m. No one stuck around to play. We all had chores—gathering eggs, pumping water, shelling corn, feeding animals—waiting for us at home.
The one-room schools in my county closed in the early 1950s right after my younger sister graduated from the eighth grade. With the school population dwindling and resources limited, the schools were no longer economically viable. From then on, the country kids rode school buses to schools in town.
Some schoolhouses survived a few years as community centers, private homes, or storage space for hay. Today you’re no more likely to see a one-room school than you are a feedsack dress.
—Carolyn Mulford
Why I Wrote The Feedback Dress
Over more than 30 years, I wrote and rewrote The Feedsack Dress, my first published novel. For the record, here are my recollections of why I began writing it and why I persisted in finishing it and finding editors smart enough to buy it.
I grew up on a small farm near Kirksville, Missouri, in the 1940s and 1950s. With cows to milk morning and evening, we stuck close to home, but on Sunday afternoons my father sometimes drove us around on the gravel roads to see how the crops and livestock were faring on other farms.
My world expanded mightily in 1962 when I joined the Peace Corps. I served as an English teacher for two years in Ethiopia and then traveled (on $5 a day, for the most part) through the Middle East and Europe on a slow trip back to the States.
After working on a magazine in Washington, D.C., for two years, I thirsted for foreign places. An editorial job at a U.N. organization headquartered in Vienna, Austria, enabled me to live (and travel) for three years in Europe. I spent a six months going home through the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.
I returned to the family farm to regroup in 1971. When my parents and I followed country roads to look at familiar places, I saw that my childhood world had changed considerably. Most of the one-room schools and churches had disappeared or been repurposed, leaving no place for neighbors to gather. Several once well-kept farmhouses had broken windows and weedy yards. Chickens no longer ran free near occupied houses. Teams of horses, even retirees, had given way to large tractors and unfamiliar equipment.
The traditional small farm where the family raised much of its food and named most of its animals was being consumed by agricultural enterprises, an accelerating trend that depressed my parents.
Recalling the swift changes following World War II, I reflected that my generation was the last to grow up on a small diversified farm. The transformation from labor-intensive to mechanized farming and from a rural to an urban society had both benefited and disrupted lives.
I kept coming back to these thoughts for a couple of years, reading social histories to supplement my memories and knowledge of the postwar period. Personally and nationally, we’d experienced a great transition, and I wanted to write about it. But in what form? I didn’t have the academic credentials to write a social history or the inclination to write a memoir, and postwar rural northeast Missouri wasn’t a marketable topic for magazine articles.
I’d always wanted to write fiction, and a children’s novel seemed the right choice for the story that my memories and research were germinating. Historical events and economic developments that affected my community and the nation led me to set the story in 1949. For example, the Rural Electrification Act’s lines finally reached us (increasing the number of cows we could milk, decreasing time spent on housework, and enabling us to read and study at night). We bought our first brand-new car (a symbol of growing prosperity).
4-H had come to our community, and mothers joined us in learning to make clothes from such new synthetics as rayon and acetate as well as from cotton feedsacks, a staple for clothing and tea towels during the Depression and the war.
The colorful patterned sacks became my symbol of individual and societal transition—and of being different. By now I’d observed that being unlike the majority—in economic class, skin color, language, religion, whatever—posed a problem wherever you are in the world. Dealing with being outside the norm challenges anyone at any age, but it’s particularly painful for teenagers discovering their own identity. So I forced my heroine to endure being the only girl wearing a feedsack dress as she goes from a one-room country school to ninth grade in town.
The book is set when my older sister went through that culture shock, and the plot is not autobiographical. That doesn’t mean elements aren’t real. The mean girl’s nasty remark about the riffraff on the square on Saturday nights actually came from a favorite teacher, who apologized profusely when I pointed out my family was part of that crowd. I certainly grew frustrated with facing new games in gym class just as I’d learned to play the last one.
I drew on memories in describing mule races and killing chickens. Most events came from my imagination. I don’t remember whether my class elected officers. That plot element derived from the Nixon campaign’s dirty tricks.
Just as Gail, the protagonist, is not me, the other characters are not relatives or classmates. At Class of 1957 reunions, they’ve guessed whom my characters were based on, often naming teachers I never had. I created most by adapting bits of people I’d known during and after high school.
This was my first novel, a major learning experience. I began writing with a setting, a few characters, and little idea of what to do with either. The characters’ personalities and relationships emerged quickly, but the plot had little direction until I realized I needed a major conflict. The first draft that I submitted to agents ended right after the class election. An agent told me I couldn’t end the book on a down note, and I expanded the plot.
The revision still didn’t appeal to New York editors. I put the manuscript aside for years at a time but always came back to it. Each time I reread it, I liked it too much to give up on revising it and finding a publisher.
Thirty years from the time I started writing, I was working with a critique group of mystery writers. Although they were Eastern city slickers, they agreed to give me feedback on The Feedsack Dress. Their ignorance of farming and the mid-century Midwest guided me in clarifying terms and describing things common to me but not to later generations and urbanites.
In a national writers’ newsletter, I read that Cave Hollow Press, a small publisher in Missouri, welcomed submissions set there. The editors bought my manuscript, did a light edit, and published it in July 2007. At the end of 2023, the publisher had six copies left in stock.
In 2009, the Missouri Center for the Book chose The Feedsack Dress as the state’s Great Read at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The warm reception that readers gave The Feedsack Dress encouraged me to continue my transition from nonfiction to fiction.
Few print copies of this novel remain available, but you can buy the e-book at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-feedsack-dress-carolyn-mulford/1103622141?ean=2940012128485.
Memories Sparked The Feedsack Dress
When I began writing The Feedsack Dress almost 50 years ago, I asked my mother and two sisters to talk about their memories of 1949. I’d chosen that year for the novel because my recollections and my research identified it as a time of transition for the country, our rural Missouri community, and our family.
Our discussion evoked many forgotten details and produced a major plot point.
We gathered around the kitchen table at my parents’ farm on a hot summer day. To my surprise, each of us remembered not only different movies and music but also different versions of events, including family reunions and what happened when I broke my arm. (I tested the knot in a rope I’d tied around a tree limb by sliding down it. The knot failed the test.) The discrepancies convinced me of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, a factor I consider in writing both nonfiction and fiction.
Judy, four years younger than I, remembered the least, but even she recalled the drudgery of pumping water for the milk cows and the excitement when REA extended the electric lines past our place. Overnight my parents could milk triple the number of cows, my mother didn’t have to bear the heat of a wood cooking stove, and we could listen to Kirksville’s new radio station without fear of running down the battery and read under strong lights rather than dim kerosene lamps. Electricity improved our daily lives and increased our income.
Donna and I spent many hours on 4-H sewing projects. Our mother taught us to sew on a treadle machine, using patterned feedsacks that had contained chicken feed to make tea towels, potholders, pillow slips, and, as our skills grew, clothing—skirts, blouses, shorts, and dresses. An electric sewing machine made the work easier. New synthetic fabrics didn’t, at least for a couple years.
Unlike me, Donna loved to sew, partly because it gave her a chance to expand her limited wardrobe in an age of hand-me-downs. Five years older than I, she’d been born in the Depression, walked alone a mile and a half to the one-room school (New Hope) that my father and his mother had attended and at which my mother had taught, and become a teenager as my parents put aside every possible penny to pay off the farm they bought at the end of World War II. My big sister became a skilled seamstress. For decades she took pleasure in making clothes to wear to college and then to work as a bookkeeper. She also made clothes for others, including her kids and me.
I took special note of Donna’s difficulties in moving from a class of three in a grade school with about 15 pupils to classes of 30 in a junior high with about 500 students. She was tiny and timid, preferring to be unseen and silent. Our grade school’s limited resources and mediocre teaching hadn’t prepared her well for the tough competition. (Judy and I had an excellent teacher and went to town better prepared.) Determined to hold her own, Donna studied hard and earned membership in the National Honor Society. One test day when snow blocked the roads, she persuaded my father to take her the five miles to high school on the tractor.
A key plot point for The Feedsack Dress came to me when Donna vividly recalled ninth graders passing around slam books, often the little autograph books then popular, with mean comments about fellow students. My protagonist has to deal with those slams as she forms friendships and makes enemies.
I recalled the four of us talking about 1949 recently because my big sister, Donna Lee Mulford Helton, died February 5, 2021. Now no one shares those memories.
—Carolyn Mulford
Earthquakes on My Mind
2020 has been a horrible year. I hope it doesn’t end like another bad year, 1811.
That year, rains brought mud and flood to Upper Louisiana. The nightly appearance of the devil-tailed Great Comet prompted rumors of destruction. The brilliant Tecumseh campaigned for tribes on both sides of the Mississippi to unite to beat back the encroaching Americans. The adolescent United States crept closer to the War of 1812.
Then a natural disaster struck the middle of the newly expanded United States.
In early morning on December 16, a series of earthquakes, aftershocks, and tremors began, interrupting New Madrid’s French settlers’ Sunday night dance and rousting others in the river port from their beds. Brick houses and chimneys collapsed, and fires destroyed cabins.
That night the Mississippi ran backwards, driving boats up the river or capsizing them. Riverbanks gave way, casting camping travelers into the roiling water. Lakes drained, lakes formed. Wave-like furrows formed in fields. Trees fell or split up the middle as birds flocked to safer surfaces.
Many in the lightly populated region where Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee now come together feared the world was ending. The odor of sulfur encouraged that belief, and hundreds of the thousand or so townspeople in New Madrid fled through a giant swamp toward a huge hill. Residents of a village south of there waded through the overflowing river for hours to reach dry ground.
Church bells rang as far away as the East Coast. In Washington, D.C., dishes fell from cupboards, and President Madison was all shook up.
The last of three, or perhaps five, major earthquakes (estimated around 8 on the Richter Scale) occurred February 7, 1812. By then a scientist in Louisville, Kentucky, had measured a dozen or so major aftershocks and hundreds of tremors.
The tremors never really stopped. The biggest one this year has been a 3.6 in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Dyersburg, Tennessee, near quake-born Reelfoot Lake, has experienced two at 2.8 recently. To check on the latest, go to https://earthquaketrack.com/us-mo-new-madrid/recent. The site’s map shows where the tremors occur.
Few people lived near the epicenter (northeast Arkansas) at the time of the New Madrid (Missouri) earthquakes. Yet some researchers estimate as many as 1,500 died, many of them disappearing into the Mississippi.
Scientists have theorized that the earthquakes occur on a cycle, possibly every 500 years, possibly 200. Some expected the big one about 30 years ago. Some schools in southeast Missouri dismissed on the predicted doom’s day.
Today a comparable series of earthquakes would result in billions in damages and affect millions of people, including those who live in such cities as St. Louis and Memphis and rely on bridges to cross the Mississippi River.
I don’t usually think about the ongoing threat except when I pay my earthquake insurance, but 2020 does seem to be a year when bad things happen.
—Carolyn Mulford
When Your Publisher Closes
The publisher of Thunder Beneath My Feet is closing shop December 31, 2017. Both the e-book and print editions will disappear from online bookstores. In 2018, my garage will hold most of the remaining copies of my novel about the devastating New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.
Many writers face this problem. Small publishers often go out of business after a few years of struggle. Big ones discontinue imprints that don’t meet sales targets. One friend’s mystery won an Agatha a couple of days after she heard her big-name publisher was abandoning the imprint. Another friend has seen three of her publishers go under. My Show Me series publisher, a small part of a huge conglomerate, announced to authors in early 2016 that only mysteries already under contract would be published. I sold the fifth book in my series, Show Me the Sinister Snowman, to another publisher and moved on to a new series.
The Thunder publisher, a small independent, notified her authors of the pending closing in November 2016 and suggested they look for another publisher or self-publish. She preferred to write and farm. Who can argue with those priorities?
Now what?
My first thought was to self-publish the book. I loved writing Thunder, and readers have given it great feedback. I brainstormed for a distinctive publishing name, one short enough to fit on the spine and visual enough to suggest a logo. The company name would also need to work if I wanted to self-publish mysteries. Darned tough to come up with a winner.
Over the last ten years I’ve learned that successful publishing involves not only having a quality product but also a good marketing plan and an economically feasible way to distribute books to bookstores and libraries. Few self-publishers live by Amazon alone.
Having earned my living as a freelance writer and editor for some 35 years, I know how much time and effort the business side can take. Did I want to put writing aside to spend time (and money) on marketing and distribution?
The marketing and distribution challenges
I worried about penetrating the most obvious market, Missouri schools, something the publisher hadn’t tried to do and I hadn’t accomplished.
Many writers promote sales, and earn money, by giving programs at schools. That works well if you have several successful middle grade books. I don’t, and I’m not trying to build a career writing MG/YA books. Besides, I had no contacts.
I submitted Thunder to for possible inclusion in the Missouri State Teachers Association’s Reading Circle Program. The reviewer told me she was recommending it, but the list of approved books still hasn’t come out.
In my first efforts to sell to schools, I became a vendor at state conferences of history teachers and school librarians. The librarians particularly liked to my pitch, but they pointed out that they preferred to buy hardbacks. Paperbacks don’t last long in school libraries.
If I were going to publish a new edition, hardbacks seemed the way to go. I did some pricing. The per unit cost goes down as the number of copies go up. Small print runs would mean raising the price of the book to more than most libraries would pay.
One key problem in marketing to schools was the failure to send review copies to such essential professional publications as School Library Journal. (It has precise requirements on submission times of review copies and on national distribution.) Without favorable reviews in professional publications, librarians hesitate to buy. I doubt anyone would consider reviewing a self-published second edition.
National (and regional) distribution to bookstores and libraries constitutes a major problem for both small publishers and self-publishers. Many bookstores dislike (even refuse) to deal with Amazon or Ingram, preferring to buy through such distributors as Baker & Taylor.
Online sales, particularly of e-books, allow some self-published books to flourish, but I didn’t see that as the case for my MG/YA historical novel. Most of my sales have been print copies.
Maybe later
For now at least, I’ll let Thunder Beneath My Feet go out of print. If a demand develops, I can always self-publish. If a publisher with marketing savvy and distribution capabilities wants to pay me to publish a new edition, great.
Meanwhile, I have a couple of dozen copies in the garage. If you want to buy one or more, contact me.
—Carolyn Mulford
1811: Earthquakes Flood Little Prairie
The first earthquake threw the 150 or so residents of Little Prairie out of their beds. The ground roared, moaned, and rumbled. Strange lights flashed from the earth. A dense vapor blacked out the stars.
Thus, at 2:30 a.m. December 16, 1811, began the New Madrid earthquakes, some of the most powerful and far reaching quakes ever experienced in North America. Three major earthquakes, several aftershocks almost as powerful, and at least 1,800 notable tremors terrified the region and disturbed sleep as far away as Quebec over the next three months.
The little Mississippi River frontier village lay near the epicenter (the northeast corner of present-day Arkansas) and suffered some of the most severe damage, forcing the entire town to flee for their lives.
The refugees reported that the shock at 8 a.m. was even worse. The ground quivered and writhed. Cracks appeared in the earth, and steamy vapor, blood-temperature water, and mud blew from them. The earth opened and shut. Water spouted higher than the trees.
Later that morning, a chasm 20 feet wide opened in the town. Quicksand and water gurgled up, and a warm mist carried the smell of brimstone.
The tough citizens of Little Prairie began to pack a few light possessions.
At 11 a.m. a huge upheaval beneath the town lifted and heaved it. A dark liquid oozed from the ground, and water spouted 10 feet high. The town began to sink. Trees, houses, and even the mill went down.
Everyone ran in the warm waist-deep water, children on adults’ shoulders. They waded through the water for eight miles before they reached high ground. Swimming beside them were wolves, possums, snakes, and other animals.
Days later, their hope and food supplies exhausted, they walked north to New Madrid.
If I ever write a sequel to Thunder Beneath My Feet, I’ll find out where they went from there.
—Carolyn Mulford
Great ShakeOut Falls on October 19
More than 52 million people—students, hospital workers, business employees, etc.—will take part in International Shakeout Day Thursday, October 19, 2017.
In the United States, the Great Shakeout earthquake drills start at 10:19 a.m. Well over 2 million of the 18 million Americans learning how to react to quakes live in the large New Madrid Seismic Zone. There three of the nation’s most powerful earthquakes, plus some 2,000 aftershocks, took place in 1811-1812.
But you know that if you’ve read Thunder Beneath My Feet.
Keep in mind three basic steps when an earthquake begins.
- Drop onto your hands and knees so you won’t fall down and can crawl to any nearby shelter.
- Cover your head and neck with one arm and hand to protect you as you crawl under a table, desk, or anything else that will protect you from falling objects. If you have no shelter nearby, crawl to an interior wall.
- Hold on to your shelter but be ready to move if it gives way.
You can download drill manuals for schools and businesses and find information on what to do in various situations on shakeout.org. For example, if you’re in bed, stay there and lie face down to protect your vital organs, cover your head and neck with a pillow, and hold on to your head and neck with both hands until the shaking stops.
I’d always heard to stand in a doorway, but the site says you’re safer under a table.
Even if you don’t do a drill, check out the information and keep it in mind just in case.
—Carolyn Mulford
Tecumseh Predicted 1806 Eclipse
Researching Thunder Beneath My Feet, I discovered that Tecumseh, the renowned Shawnee war chief, had predicted the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Some laughed at him, but others listened because he and his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, had predicted the eclipse of June 16, 1806.
Here’s a short, simple version of a long, complicated true story.
Fighting American Expansion
The original 13 colonies quickly expanded westward into Native American lands, destroying villages and crops as they went. President Thomas Jefferson appointed William Henry Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory, home of the Shawnees and other Native American groups. Harrison had established his reputation as a fighter during the Northwest Territory Indian Wars and had political ambitions.
Tecumseh, a brilliant linguist and military strategist, had friends among the early intruders and learned from them. He recognized the danger the land-hungry Americans posed and set about organizing the tribes to fight back. His younger brother, a reformed drunkard, called the “Long Knives” the children of the Evil Spirit. He earned the title the Prophet by forecasting the troubles ahead and urging Native Americans to ban drinking whiskey, wearing white men’s clothing, eating their food, and even using their rifles.
Harrison’s Challenge
Harrison wanted to discredit the Prophet’s claims to having special powers. He wrote an open letter to Shawnees gathered at Tippecanoe: “If he is really a prophet, ask him to cause the Sun to stand still or the Moon to alter its course, the rivers to cease to flow or the dead to rise from their graves.”
The letter reached the brothers at the home of a friend. According to reports, they deliberated in private for an hour. Then the Prophet spoke to the village, telling them he’d consulted with the Great Spirit. She would give a sign to demonstrate how close she was to the Prophet.
He said, “Fifty days from this day there will be no cloud in the sky. Yet, when the Sun has reached its highest point, at that moment will the Great Spirit take it into her hand and hide it from us. The darkness of night will thereupon cover us and the stars will shine round about us. The birds will roost and the night creatures will awaken and stir.”
The eclipse of June 16, 1806, fulfilled his prophecy.
How did the brothers predict the eclipse? They stuck to the Great Spirit story. Nobody really knows. Some historians believe that Tecumseh had read about the coming eclipse in an almanac and remembered the date.
Tecumseh’s Quake Prediction
As for Tecumseh’s prediction of the earthquakes five years later, no scientist had predicted the quakes in an almanac or anywhere else. A group of Shawnee lived some fifty or sixty miles north of New Madrid, and Tecumseh’s sister (or perhaps cousin) lived in New Madrid. She and others may have told him of odd rumblings.
A few months before the quakes began, he traveled near New Madrid to recruit armed opposition to the Americans and may have felt some disturbance himself. He told an unreceptive group of Osage, “The Great Spirit is angry with our enemies. He speaks in thunder, and the earth swallows up their villages, and drinks up the Mississippi. The great waters will cover their lowlands, and their corn cannot grow.”
However he did it, Tecumseh went two for two.
—Carolyn Mulford
Thunder Beneath My Feet Wins Award
Last night the Missouri Writers’ Guild recognized Thunder Beneath My Feet with third place for the Walter Williams Major Work Award. The honor rarely goes to a middle grade/young adult novel.
Missouri Writers’ Guild Award
Named for the founder of the world’s first School of Journalism and of the Guild, the Major Work Award goes to publications or productions judged “to be worthy of special recognition because of the research or high literary quality involved in its creation.” It is the top award given each year at the annual meeting.
Show Me the Murder won first place in 2014.
—Carolyn Mulford
Memories of Doughnuts Past
Christmas in my childhood revolved around food as much as presents, and one of my strongest memories is my two sisters and I helping my mother make doughnuts in our farmhouse kitchen. We’d spend most of an afternoon on the task.
My mother’s doughnuts weren’t the airy, super-sweet ones with frosting or glazes that most bakeries offer today. She made a dense, delicious cake doughnut, and Using the recipe in a 1930s Rumford Complete Cook Book, she mixed three cups of flour, a dash of salt, three teaspoons of baking powder, 2/3 of a cup of sugar, two eggs gathered the previous afternoon, and a cup of milk from the morning milking. The mixture formed a soft dough that she rolled out with the wood rolling pin.
My sisters and I took turns cutting out the doughnuts with a round tin cutter and putting them on one plate and the holes on another. My mother would smoosh together the fragments left and roll out the dough again. We’d repeat the operation until nothing bigger than the holes remained.
By then my mother would have heated lard from the latest hog butchering in a deep pot. When the fat boiled, she dropped in the doughnuts one at a time. The pot would hold only about half a dozen, and we waited impatiently until she lifted out one batch and dropped in another.
When the doughnuts had drained and cooled enough for us to handle them with our fingers, we put them, one at a time, in a bowl of sugar, turning the doughnut until the grains lightly covered both sides. We did the holes last, rolling them around in the sugar. Many went into our mouths rather than onto the platter.
Years later I learned my mother dreaded making doughnuts because of the time a big batch took and the care necessary to avoid one of us getting burned by the boiling fat.
I haven’t had a homemade doughnut in decades, but I still remember how good they were and how much my sisters and I enjoyed making them.
—Carolyn Mulford
Quake Anniversary: December 16, 1811
The first quake rousted from bed most people within 50 miles of New Madrid and ended the French community’s Sunday dance. While residents of the diverse Mississippi river port fled from their shaking or collapsing houses, people as far away as Quebec, Washington, D.C., and Savannah felt the earthquake’s reach.
December 16, 1811, marked the beginning of a series of three powerful quakes, more than a dozen major aftershocks, and, by the Ides of March 1812, almost 1,900 tremors. With the epicenter near southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, the quakes terrified residents in these and bordering states.
In New Madrid, brick homes and chimneys crumbled. Log homes fared better, but many caught fire. Giant trees split up the middle. Sand boils erupted. Ravines appeared. Lakes formed and drained. Furrows resembling giant waves disturbed the fields. A stench rose from the eruption of rotted vegetation and gases.
The river became deadly. It ran backwards, carrying flatboats upstream or capsizing them. Oceanic waves swamped canoes. Falls formed. Giant trees from the banks and dead ones dislodged from the river floor clogged the water. The water rose like a tide at night, forcing boaters to cut their moorings to avoid being dragged under.
The striking facts of this frontier tragedy led me to write a novel, Thunder Beneath My Feet, about how six young people worked together to survive.
Few Americans will note the quakes’ anniversary—or realize they will come again.
—Carolyn Mulford