In Northwest Tennessee, just across the Mississippi river from New Madrid, Missouri is a flooded cypress forest called Reelfoot lake.  Spanning 15,000 acres, this shallow, peaceful lake is a birding and fishing paradise. But despite it's placid waters, Reelfoot Lake and the region it inhabits has a grim history starting with it's violent creation as a result of the New Madrid Earthquake. In this first episode of a two part series, we tell the story of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded US history and how it changed the geography of the Riverlands.