The Great 1833 Meteor Shower

By

Janice Moore

Francis Jordan, Sr. together with most of his Sons and daughters and their families loaded up their wagons and headed for Texas. The year was 1833.

On August 7, 1833, a thirty-one family wagon train was organized by Rev. Daniel Parker and traveled from Mt. Vernon, Jefferson County, Illinois to Mexia, Limestone County, Texas. Francis Jordan and his family went with this train to Nacogdoches, Texas.

Francis’ daughter, Easter, told of the excitement of that trip and how the sky looked as they camped out under the stars when the stars seemed to be falling all around them, they were up all night running after “shooting stars”.

This was indeed a very real and well- documented occurrence. On the night of November 12-13, 1833 was one of history’s greatest meteor storms. The sly conditions were perfect, the moon set early, and the weather was clear over eastern North America. Some people noticed an unusual number of meteors as early as 10p.m., but nothing like what occurred between 2a.m. and dawn. Witnesses described seeing tens of thousands of meteors that seemed to come in waves and were too many to count.

The editor of the Augusta Courier in Georgia wrote ‘Meteors!—A most remarkable shower of Meteors—we know not what else to call it, occurred this morning. The whole heavens were lighted by falling meteors, as thick and constant as the large flakes which usher in a snow storm. We might say, it snowed Meteors...”

The Poet Walt Whitman quoted President Lincoln in the book Specimen Days & Collect. “When I was a young man in Illinois.. .I boarded for a time with a Deacon of the Presbyterian Church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the Deacon’s voice exclaiming Arise, Abraham, the day of judgement has come!’ I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers! But looking back of them in the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.  

Some observers reported that the brightest fireballs were accompanied by noises similar to musket and cannon fire. It was also reported in the Litch field Inquirer, a Connecticut newspaper, as thousands of meteors, like shooting stars, constantly descending to earth". and an Ohio newspaper called Noah’s Evening Star claimed that “a broad and fiery space opened at the zenith, which shortly radiated globes of fire in every direction, and rendered it sufficiently light to read.”

In the article on the Leonids on line http://www.leonids.com/1833 the writer states that “Perhaps Yale professor Denison Olmstead, who scrutinized the 1833 Storm and laid the foundations of modern Met reorics, the study of meteors, put it best:

“Probably no celestial phenomenon has ever occurred in this country, since its first settlement, which was viewed with so much admiration and delight by one class of spectators, or with so much astonishment and fear by another class.” Olmsted concluded that a total of about 200,000 meteors had fallen within sight of his location during the storm’s peak between 2:00a.m. and dawn. Modern estimates put the peak rate at 100,000 per hour.

Olmsted announced several conclusions. The meteors originated in space, followed parallel paths, and were consumed in fire as they entered Earth’s atmosphere. He concluded that the meteors were part of a nebulous body revolving around the Sun in an elliptical orbit and that the meteor storm was caused by Earth passing through this swarm. These ideas are essentially what we know to be true today.

Not long after the 1833 display, accounts of similar, earlier showers were brought to light. A great meteor shower was seen at the same time of year in 1832 from Europe and the Middle East, but not from the United States. Apparently these can be seen either from Europe or North America, but not in the same year. These “showers are called “the great Leonid storms” which are a periodic occurrence happening every 33 or 34 years. Apparently there was not another storm quite as spectacular as the storm of 1833 until the year 1966, November 17, when a like number descended like “a rain of shooting stars".

Is it any wonder Easter would talk about that? It has been called one of the 100 most notable occurrences in the existence of the United States of America. Can you just imagine how that must have looked to her on that dark distant prairie on the night of November 12, 1833? How exciting that must have been!