An Excerpt About ‘Trembling Earth’ from “In the Okefenokee” by Louis Pendleton (1895)

Aug 16

After considerable search Joe found a dead pine which had broken into parts in its fall before a wind storm. A section of this, about fifteen feet long and a little more than a foot in diameter, was chosen. Having provided Charley and himself with a light slender pole some twelve feet in length, and strapped the gun, hatchet, powder-horn, shot-pouch, etc., between two short up-reaching branches of the log, although this promised to be almost a useless precaution as long as it rained, the boys proceeded, and not without considerable difficulty, to launch what Joe termed their “life-preserver.”

While they were accomplishing this task, Charley made his first acquaintance with the great curiosity of the Okefenokee, which may be seen along the shores of almost all the islands within or bordering the prairies. Stepping off from the island shore, the little boy walked forward upon a seeming continuation of the land, — a mass of floating vegetable forms, intermingled with moss drift and slime, forming a compact floor capable of sustaining his weight, which, although it did not at once break through beneath him, could be seen to sink and rise at every step for twenty feet around.

“Why, this ground moves!” cried Charley, astonished.

“You'd better look out!” cried Joe. “It won't hold you up much longer. It's not ground at all; it's floating moss and stuff —”

The speaker paused suddenly, as Charley now broke through, and stood in mud and water nearly up to his waist.

“The deserters call that moss and stuff ‘floating batteries’,” continued Joe. “I don't know where they got such a funny name. Father knew about these places, and he said the Indians called them trembling earth. That's what the name of the swamp means, —‘Okefenokee,’ or ‘trembling earth.’”

Once they had dragged their “life-preserver” over the “floating batteries,” or “trembling earth,” the boys made better progress, although they still had to contend with a submerged slimy moss of a green color (sphagnum) and a great variety of crowding rushes. As they staggered along, dragging the log, now only up to their knees in water, now bogging in the yielding ooze till the water rose above their waists, they were for a time much annoyed by a little black bug haunting the sedge, which stung like a wasp.

The clouds still dropped a slow drizzle, and a mist lay upon the great marsh, in which the many little islands, clothed in dun-colored vegetation, loomed up in dim, uncertain outlines. As he looked toward them, Joe remarked that he had heard the deserters call the islands “houses,” but that to him they now rather suggested huge phantom ships.

The above excerpt is from the book “In the Okefenokee: A Story of War Time and the Great Georgia Swamp”, by Louis Pendleton, a southern newspaper editor, columnist, and author. This book, published in 1895, is a fictional account of life in and around Okefenokee during the American Civil War.