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Updated: May 31, 2025
The most interesting effect of the subsidence of the land was the creation of Reelfoot Lake, the fluvial entrance to which is from the tortuous Mississippi some forty-five miles below Hickman, Kentucky. The northern portion of the lake is west of and a short distance from Fort Donaldson, about twenty miles from Hickman, by the river route.
For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I know anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation. The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for thousands of years for millions of years for all I know before Reelfoot came to be.
"Yas, suh!" he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. "Is it?" "It is so!" said Judge Priest. "Every star in the sky shines like a diamond! Jeff, it's the most beautiful evenin' I ever remember!" It goes past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake for you so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mind as I have it in mine.
So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million and the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing, and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the first frost brings gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of dogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.
As Reelfoot Lake possesses the peculiar flora and characteristics of a multitude of other swamp-lakes throughout the wilderness of the lower Mississippi valley, I cannot better describe them all than by giving to the reader a description of that lake, written by an intelligent observer who visited the locality in 1874.
Lieutenant-Colonel Cook found his way through the swamp, on the night of the 7th, to the ferry across Reelfoot Lake. In the course of the night he was joined by about four hundred fugitives, mostly belonging to his own regiment, many of them just from the hospital.
Commencing at Hickman, between Madrid Bend and Columbus, a great swamp, which for a part of its extent is a sheet of water called Reelfoot Lake, extends along the left bank of the Mississippi, and discharges its waters into the Mississippi forty miles below Tiptonville, leaving between it and the river the peninsula which lies immediately below Island No. Ten, and opposite New Madrid.
I showed this carbine to Quill Rose, and the old hunter said: "I don't like them power-guns; you could shoot clar through a bear and kill your dog on the other side." The next day I sold the weapon to Granville Calhoun. Within a short time, word came from Granville's father that "Old Reelfoot" was despoiling his orchard.
Battery No. 1, on the main-land, called the Redan, armed with six guns, was three thousand yards in an air-line above the point of the island. A line of infantry intrenchments, en crémaillère, extended from the Redan to the water of a bayou which connects with Reelfoot Lake. A floating battery, anchored near the lower end of the island, added ten guns to its defence.
The swiftest was Reelfoot, the Placerville cattle-killer that could charge from a thicket thirty yards away and certainly catch a steer before it could turn and run, and that could even catch ponies in the open when they were poor.
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