“From the Repository

Date

4-8-1812

Newspaper

Argus of Western America

Newspaper Location

Frankfort, Kentucky

Serial Number

244

Abstract

Account sent to possibly the Bardstown Repository, saying that the damage to the river from the earthquakes was exaggerated and that the effect was to drive up prices of grain at New Orleans.

Transcript

FROM THE REPOSITORY. Mr. Editor, Allow me the pleasure to inform you (from a conversation I have this day had with a gentleman of respectability, who left the city of Natchez on the 5th inst.) that the late concussions on the Mississippi, have not materially impeded the navigation of that River-that boats pass daily without any difficulty as heretofore-that those identical boats and cargoes which from panic or inordinate alarm were sold for a mere bauble in February last, about New Madrid, are now vending in the markets of Natchez and New Orleans for extraordinary prices. That some boats as well as lives have been lost, is a melancholy fact which cannot be contradicted! But these losses were only occasioned during the actual convulsions of the earth-upon the remission of the shocks, the passage of the River became as free and uninterrupted as ever. Thus, my western fellow citizens have your apprehensions been aroused by the duplicity of some, and the credulity of others-The man who was hardy enough to brave the tumults of nature, seized upon your fears, magnified the difficulties and raised imaginary falls, stupendous indeed, in the course of that River whose immense volume of waters flow upon an imperceptable desent!! Induced you to dispose of your flour for 50 cents, 25 cents, nay, for a still smaller consideration per barrel-is now receiving for it nine dollars in New Orleans. It is thus, that knavery associates itself with the little fearful feelings and false ideas of the marvelous, the better to obtain its insidious purposes, and I leave you Mr. Editor and the deliberate public to say, how far exaggerated and misconceived newspaper publications may have contributed to the imposition-The falling of the Painted Rock on the hills of the French Broad River, and the volcanic eruption of Spear's Mountain have had their origin in the phrenetic brain of the infatuated Edwards, and the idea of falls in the Mississippi, as might have been well conceived, have not issued from a source more respectable. FELIX.

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