[4] Eliza Bryan, an eyewitness to the earthquakes, wrote in 1816 from Missouri Territory that an enormous lake had grown on the other side of the Mississippi River: Lately it has been discovered that a lake was formed on the opposite side of the Mississippi River, in the Indian country, upwards of one hundred miles in length, and from one to six miles in width, of the depth of from ten to fifty feet.

The regional body of water then identified as Wood Lake was located from the north line of Obion county extending south as a marshy swamp.

[8] Radiocarbon dating of artifacts from the Otto Sharpe site indicate a Native American presence in the Reelfoot Lake Basin around 1650 AD.

[10] An archaeological investigation for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1987 stated that Henry Rutherford's survey party encountered a small Native American settlement near the Bayou de Chien, and named the river Reelfoot for the local leader of the village.

In the middle of the ceremony, the Great Spirit stamped his foot in anger, causing the earth to quake, and the Father of the Waters raised the Mississippi River over its banks, inundating Reelfoot's homeland.

The water flowed into the imprint left by the Spirit's foot, forming a beautiful lake, beneath which Reelfoot, his bride, and his people lie buried.

[citation needed] Other origins are also cited, for example, in his 1911 story "Fishhead", Irvin S. Cobb claimed the lake "[took] its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splayed, reeled foot of a cornfield Negro.

"[17] Original landowners and their descendants retained title to ground under the water, but local people grew used to treating it as a common resource.

In this period, major planters in both Kentucky and Tennessee, sometimes based in cities, were also expanding large-scale cotton cultivation into this area.

Related violence by Night Riders in Tennessee culminated on October 19, 1908, with the kidnapping of two White attorneys, engaged by the West Tennessee Land Company to enforce its claims: Captain Quentin Rankin, also a shareholder in the company, was lynched by being hanged and shot; Colonel R. Z. Taylor was wounded, but escaped by swimming across the lake in the dark.

Governor Malcolm Rice Patterson of Tennessee directed an investigation of Rankin's murder and ordered in the state militia to suppress the violence.

[24][25] The state finally acquired the land and lake, years after constructing levees from 1917 to 1920 to maintain the water level to settle property-rights issues.

Since 1930, water levels in the lake have been regulated by the construction and operation of a spillway at the southern end, where the Running Reelfoot Bayou flows out of it.

Reelfoot Lake was a filming site for three movie productions: the 1957 drama Raintree County, the 1967 Oscar-winner In the Heat of the Night, and 1998's U.S.