This was Senator Stanford's house at Palo Alto, about 25 miles from San Francisco, which is situated on a fault or ancient fracture of the earth's surface.] The Mississippi seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like mountains, leaving boats high up on the sands. "The waters then moved inwards with a front wall fifteen to twenty feet in height, tearing the boats from their moorings and carrying them closely packed up a creek for a quarter of a mile. The river fell as rapidly as it had risen, and receded from its banks with such violence that it took with it a grove of cotton-woods which hedged its borders. These trees were broken off with such regularity that it was hard to persuade people who had not witnessed the catastrophe that it had not been brought about by human agency." During all the greater shocks the earth's surface was reported to have been raised in great crumplings, the crests of which opened into fissures. Some of these were six hundred to seven hundred feet long and twenty to thirty feet wide, and water and sand and even coal[13] were spouted out of them to a height of forty feet. Many craters and holes in the ground were formed, surrounded by rings of sand; and traces of them remain to this day, a century-old monument of the destruction wrought. Notable changes in the level of the country were effected; new lakes and new islands came into existence; some lakes disappeared; some of the lakes then formed remain to this day. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi a lake a hundred miles long, six miles wide, and ten to fifty feet in depth was formed; and another lake, known now as Reelfoot Lake, which came then into existence, is twenty miles long, seven miles broad--larger than Windermere, and deeper. The fishermen's boats to-day float over the top of eighteenth-century cypress trees. In addition to sections of country which were depressed and submerged, an area of some twenty miles in diameter was elevated into a low dune twenty to twenty-five feet above the level of the plain of the Mississippi. Many years after the great shocks, smaller ones were felt; and even now scarcely a year passes without slight tremors in this region, and small fissures are still formed in the ground. [Footnote 13: Or "lignite," a form of hard pitch.]