An Earthquake in Louisiana

On Saturday, May 7, 1842, Catahoula Lake, without warning, rose more than six feet, according to an inhabitant of Catahoula who was fishing in the lake at the time. First reported in the St. Martinsville Creole, the story was unusual enough to be reprinted in papers across the country, including the Indianapolis Indiana Journal and The Jeffersonian Republican, a weekly paper out of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. I have reproduced the brief article from June 8, 1842 here in full.

(Note that Catahoula Lake was known as Catahoulou in the 19th century. Also note that “the 7th instant” in this context means “the 7th of the current month.”)

“The St. Martinsville (La.) Creole states that “on Saturday, the 7th instant, at about three o’clock P.M. an earthquake, which lasted two or three seconds, was felt in this parish. A respectable inhabitant of Catahoulou, who was angling at that time, in company with some ladies, on the banks of the lake, told us that the lake rose, during the space of some minutes, to more than six feet. One of our friends, who arrived from Opelousas yesterday, says that the shock was also felt in that part of the country. From the declaration of the oldest inhabitant of this parish, this would be the second earthquake felt in Attakapas.”

At the time the article was written no one knew that a devastating earthquake had occurred in Haiti, almost 1500 miles away from the tiny lake in St. Martin Parish. The 1842 Cap-Haïtien earthquake had an estimated magnitude of 8.1 and triggered a destructive tsunami. The shocks annihilated the northwest Cape and killed 5,000 people (about half the population) at Cap-Haïtien alone. In less than one minute the towns of Cap-Haïtien, Santiago de los Caballeros, Port-de-Paix, Mole St. Nicolas, and Fort Liberte were reduced to heaps of ruins.

A month later, an article in the Mecklenburg Jeffersonian, a newspaper out of Charlotte, North Carolina, connected the two events. The June 14, 1842 article is reproduced here in full:

“It is stated that the earthquake which destroyed some ten thousand lives in St. Domingo, on the 7th of May, was felt on the same day, and nearly on the same hour in Louisiana, where it caused the waters of the lake at Catahoulou to rise suddenly six feet. There was also a violent shock and much alarm on the same day at Mayaguez, Porto Rico. It is greatly feared that some of the other West India Islands have suffered seriously by a similar visitation.