In the stillness of a summer afternoon in 1638, the ground beneath New England trembled with unexpected fury. Pots clanged. Trees swayed. Water sloshed violently from earthen vessels along the St. Lawrence River, disrupting Native American meals and colonial conversations alike. To the early European settlers in New Hampshire and Plymouth, Massachusetts, it was a baffling and terrifying act of nature. But to the older members of nearby Native American tribes, it was something eerily familiar.
This event, described in historical accounts from the time, was one of the earliest well-documented earthquakes in northeastern North America. Yet it was not, it seems, a surprise to everyone. According to Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, some of the Native elders told him they had experienced similar tremors four times in the previous 80 years. Their memories stretched farther back than the inked pages of colonial records.
Centuries later, seismologist John Ebel of Boston College is working to piece together the long and largely untold story of earthquakes in this region—using not just geological tools, but the living archive of Indigenous language, place names, and oral histories.
Rattling the Colonial Mind: The 1638 Earthquake
To a 17th-century colonist, an earthquake was not just a geological oddity—it was a cosmic message. Without the science to explain tectonic forces, many early settlers turned to religion for answers. An earthquake could be interpreted as a divine warning or punishment. But to Native communities, who had lived on the land for millennia and observed its patterns, the ground’s occasional unrest had a different context.
The 1638 quake was strong enough to send colonists stumbling from their homes. But according to oral traditions passed down by Native peoples, it was not an isolated event. These tremors were part of a long geological rhythm, felt long before colonists arrived and noted in the rich oral traditions that spanned generations.
Ebel believes these stories, often dismissed as myth, may hold valuable scientific data about the region’s seismic past. “If we can trace these stories back, compare them to known events, and analyze the language used to describe them,” he said during his talk at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, “we can potentially reconstruct a record of earthquakes extending hundreds or even thousands of years into the past.”
A Misunderstood Landscape
To a Californian accustomed to fault lines like the infamous San Andreas, the idea of New England or eastern Canada as earthquake-prone might seem laughable. But the reality is more complex.
Eastern North America doesn’t sit on an active tectonic plate boundary, but it is laced with ancient, buried faults that still occasionally awaken. Earthquakes in this region tend to be felt over broader areas than those on the West Coast due to the geological composition of the Earth’s crust here—older, denser, and more efficient at transmitting seismic energy.
Modern seismic monitoring has detected regular, if subtle, tremors across New England and southeastern Canada. What’s missing, Ebel explained, is a long, detailed historical record—essential for understanding the frequency and magnitude of large, potentially damaging quakes.
“The written record only goes back about 400 years,” Ebel said. “That might seem like a lot, but in geological terms, it’s the blink of an eye. To build accurate hazard maps and predict future risks, we need a much deeper timeline.”
And that’s where Native American stories come in.
Listening to the Land: Place Names as Clues
Language, especially place names, can preserve memory in ways that are hard to overstate. Long before written history, Native American tribes embedded their knowledge of the landscape into the very words they used to describe it. Some of those names are still in use today—and a surprising number of them seem to point to seismic activity.
Take Moodus, Connecticut. To modern ears, the name is quaint. But its origin is far more intriguing. “Moodus” comes from the Algonquian dialect, meaning “place of noises.” For hundreds of years, residents have reported hearing strange subterranean booms in the area—muffled explosions that seem to rise from the earth itself.
“I remember camping in the Mojave Desert as a grad student, shortly after a magnitude 5.1 earthquake,” Ebel recalled. “I heard these distant booms, like thunder underground. When I later visited Moodus and heard similar sounds, it clicked: people have been hearing earthquakes here for centuries. The name wasn’t just poetic—it was observational science.”
Modern instruments have recorded swarms of small earthquakes in Moodus, validating centuries of local experience. Ebel suggests that such place names may be powerful indicators of recurring seismicity.
And Moodus isn’t alone.
The Hill That Shakes
Northwest of Boston, another mystery emerges. Since the 1970s, Ebel and his colleagues have been tracking persistent minor earthquakes in the region. As he dug through historical records in search of explanations, he stumbled upon a Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide from the 1930s, detailing Route 2 and its surrounding geography. One place in particular stood out: Mount Nashoba.
Tucked into the guidebook was a translation: Nashoba, it said, came from a Native American word meaning “hill that shakes.”
Here, then, was another ancient whisper—a name passed down from people who had clearly felt the earth tremble beneath this hill long before Richter scales or seismic labs existed.
It was, Ebel realized, more than coincidence. “You have all these small earthquakes happening in this specific area, and the Native name for it literally means ‘hill that shakes.’ That’s not metaphor. That’s data.”
Linguistic Seismology: The Power of Words
Understanding how Native languages encode seismic experience is a challenge that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Ebel believes collaboration between seismologists and ethnologists—experts in language, culture, and tradition—could unlock hidden patterns in oral histories and toponyms.
The first step is identifying which tribes in the region even have a word for “earthquake.” So far, Ebel’s research suggests that several do, including the Seneca, Cayuga, Natick, and Mi’kmaq. The very existence of such words implies that earthquakes were not only known, but known frequently enough to warrant a place in the language.
And that matters. “If a language has a word for earthquake, that suggests recurrence,” Ebel noted. “If we can match those linguistic patterns to regions with known seismic activity, we might start building a richer, more nuanced understanding of how often and how severely the earth has moved in those places.”
Moreover, stories of trembling ground, thundering mountains, or rivers that ran backwards for a time—often interpreted as myth—may in fact describe real seismic events.
The Science of Storytelling
Indigenous oral traditions are often poetic, metaphorical, and deeply tied to landscape and cosmology. For centuries, Western scientists have tended to dismiss these stories as folklore, not fact. But that attitude is changing.
Across the globe, researchers have begun to take Indigenous knowledge seriously—especially when it comes to natural disasters. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, Native American accounts of ocean surges and ground shaking were instrumental in piecing together the history of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, a massive magnitude 9 event that left its mark from California to British Columbia.
Could similar narratives exist for the East Coast?
Possibly. Ebel and others are now calling for an interdisciplinary effort to systematically study Indigenous stories, legends, and language structures that reference geological phenomena. The goal isn’t just cultural preservation—it’s scientific insight.
“If we can extract descriptions of shaking intensity, landscape change, or sounds from these stories, we might be able to retroactively assign Modified Mercalli Intensity values to ancient events,” Ebel explained. “That would be groundbreaking—literally and figuratively.”
Bridging Worlds: Science and Indigenous Knowledge
The intersection of seismology and Indigenous storytelling isn’t just about history. It’s about future preparedness.
Eastern North America is home to major cities—Boston, Montreal, Quebec City—built on older infrastructure, often not designed with earthquake resistance in mind. A large, unexpected quake in this region could be devastating. Understanding the long-term seismic cycle isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s a public safety priority.
To build more accurate seismic hazard models, scientists need data that goes back thousands of years. Written history gives us four centuries. The earth gives us limited clues unless a quake leaves behind clear geological evidence like liquefaction or offset strata.
But the stories? They span millennia.
Collaborating with Native communities, respecting their knowledge systems, and ensuring that their contributions are recognized and valued, offers a powerful path forward. It also opens up new possibilities for how we define science—not just as measurement and observation, but as memory, language, and place.
The Echoing Ground
The ground beneath our feet remembers. Sometimes it speaks in tremors and aftershocks. Sometimes in the names we give to hills and rivers. And sometimes, it speaks through stories—of booms in the night, of mountains that growl, of valleys that roll like waves.
In Moodus, they still hear the noises.
In Nashoba, the hill may still shake.
And in the words of the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Natick, and the Mi’kmaq, the earth still tells its story—if we are willing to listen.