Davy worked with the men he had hired, overseeing the plans for the boats, until everything was well under way, when he had a visit from a neighbor on Reelfoot Lake, who wanted him to take a trip to his part of the country, less than thirty miles distant. Having heard something about this strange body of water, Davy agreed to go, and was in sight of his neighbor’s clearing before sunset of the day following. As he saw the lake for the first time, a feeling of awe came over him, as if he looked into a vista of some old dead or dying world. A fair expanse of shining water, with islands bright with the autumn glories of deciduous trees, and skirted by hills that were dark with pine and hemlock or thickly set with oak and maple groves, was dotted with black and decaying stumps that rose above the surface, high in air, like the masts of a sunken fleet. In places, only the tops of the sunken trees were seen, but everywhere, like the wreck that covers the sea after storm and battle have done their work, were floating logs and drifting limbs, charred and unsightly relics of the wilderness.
Reelfoot Lake is fifty miles long and several miles in width, and where it steams in the sun were once great forests and primeval hunting-grounds. In 1907, it was the scene of a murderous affair that brought the Night Riders of Tennessee into ghastly prominence. On a dark night they killed two men, and a third escaped by hiding under one of the many logs near the edge of the lake. He was wounded by the bullets of the murderers and thought to be drowned. So little is known of the lake, that a description of some of its features should be interesting. In 1909 Richard A. Paddock, in an article in Sports Afield, wrote:
“It is a strange, weird, mysterious place, filled with uncanny sights and sounds, haunted by the ghosts of former dusky inhabitants, whom it swallowed without warning and extinguished in a twinkling of an eye in the most diabolical manner, and whose tortured spirits even now cry out for relief and freedom from cruel bondage on every dark and stormy night. Strange and uncanny are its surroundings, and strange and mysterious are its inhabitants; stealth and superstition lurk on its borders. Danger and sudden and premature death are so common as to be held in contemptuous disregard. Mysterious secrets are hidden in its almost impenetrable islands—secrets and mysteries that I hesitate to mention here, for I have had my warning, and know the danger of disregard.
“The lake is inhabited by a race of people who are a class unto themselves; there are no others like them; they take their living and surplus from the waters of Reelfoot Lake. They have nothing else—no other means of livelihood. It is their sustenance, their farm, their business, their all. These fishermen make no idle threats. They are stern, determined, ignorant, superstitious physical giants, who make and execute their own laws, and recognize no others. They suffer from mosquitoes, malaria, and chills and fever, to such an extent that their livers are always out of order, and life has a bilious hue. They go hungry often enough to make them desperate. They do not take kindly to the visiting sportsman. They feel that he is a trespasser on their rights; he is making them and their children go hungry and naked; he ought to be made an example of, to the discouragement of other future unwelcome guests.”
The lake now has all and more than it can support in comfort. Its inhabitants are very poor, always on the ragged edge, always in a hand-to-hand scramble with starvation. They have no other way of gaining a living; they cannot do manual labor; they never have done it, nor have their fathers before them. It is fish, hunt, and trap, or starve, with them, and they usually do all four.
The people about Reelfoot Lake have among them some of Davy’s descendants. His daughters and sons lived in that part of the State, and his relatives and neighbors from the mountains followed the trail he had made. It is not fair to say that his principles live in the code of the Night Riders, but human nature is always the same, and the hungry fishermen of Reelfoot are as jealous of their preserves as was the Red Man of his hunting-grounds.
One night, when Davy sat with his friend’s family before the flare of the blazing logs in the wide fireplace, there was with them a Catholic Father who for years had wandered from St. Louis to New Orleans and Pensacola, and back again, even as Brébeuf and the beardless Garnier, and Isaac Le Jogue, had dared the dangers of the wilderness, seeing visions of Heaven while their stomachs were empty, and ever blazing the cross upon stately trees in the dark recesses of the forests. Davy asked the Padre to tell him the story of the earthquake to which the lake owed its origin. He filled his pipe with tobacco cut from one of Davy’s twists, and then for a long time looked into the heart of the fire, without speaking.
“Hay catorce años, Señores,” he finally began in the softest of Spanish, and then, realizing that Davy would not understand him, began again:
“It was fourteen years ago, almost, it being the night of the 16th of December, of the year 1811, that I went on shore at the little city of New Madrid, leaving at the landing the boat in which I had come from St. Louis with Brother Anselmo. When we had found a place in which to rest, and had refreshed ourselves with food for the first time in nearly two days, we walked about the place, being cramped and stiffened from our long sitting in the boat.
“The houses were far apart, built of logs, and set in the midst of mud and filth; but in a greater building than all the others, we heard the music of the dance, the sound of many voices, and all the echoes of thoughtless enjoyment. There were the French from New Orleans and St. Louis, boatmen and traders upon the great river Mississippi, and the Spanish of the settlement, with the Americans from the Ohio and the northern lands. We knew that we should see many we had known, among the people there, and with Brother Anselmo I entered the room. It was a great hall, with floors of sawed timber, very smooth for dancing, and not like the floors of hewn logs that were in the houses of that time. There were many candles about the walls, and also torches of lightwood that flared and hissed and threw black shadows of the dancers across the floor. When they saw us, there was silence, and no one moved until we had been seated in a part of the hall where we could watch the others. Never have I seen, Señores, so gay and so thoughtless a gathering; there were beautiful women there, and the bravest of men, and they were young. I saw the soft light of love in the eyes of men who had dared the tomahawk of the Indian as they had dared the soldiers of Napoleon and the dangers of the deep, and the smiles that answered them were sweeter than those of Fortune or of Fame.