St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

Fire in the Forest

On September 1, 1894 the acrid smell of smoke was heavy in the air about the sawmill town of Hinckley, Minnesota. That was nothing unusual for the town's twelve hundred residents. For more than a month the threat of fire hung over the town as the dry swamps and cutover lands of Pine County smoldered, unchecked by fire crews or precipitation. In fact no rain had fallen for more than a month. For weeks trains traveling between Minneapolis and Duluth had been delayed by the blankets of smoke that obscured the track. While the situation was worrisome to the people of the St. Croix Valley, it was not unique. August and September were the driest months of the year and fires often broke out amid the cuttings. In the course of logging swampers cutaway all branches from the logs. These slashings were left where they fell and over the course of a season would become dry and very combustible. Fires frequently broke out in such terrain, but rainfall usually put them out before they could cause much damage. As morning turned to afternoon in Hinkley the sky darkened and the air became still, as if before a thunderstorm. But there would be no rain that day.

Hinckley was a mill town on the northwestern edge of the St. Croix valley. It was located on a small tributary of the Kettle River known as Grindstone Creek. It was thanks to the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad that it owed its existence, however, not its meager creek, nor the Kettle River. The railroad had sped the rate of cutting all along the western fringe of the valley. Instead of loggers merely working their way up toward the headwaters of streams such as the Snake and Kettle from the St. Croix River, the harvesting of pine also proceeded from the railroad toward the river. This two pronged attack of pine plains of the region ensured that, in spite of density and quality of its timber, the area was striped of its trees faster than any other part of Minnesota. By 1894, the town of Hinckley was surrounded by vast stretches of combustible cutover land. As the summer fires spread unchecked from one field of slashings to the next they merged to form one great-unrestrained storm of flame, surging to the east then the west, directed only by the whims of the wind.

Incredibly, there were several Hinckley residents who had lived through the terrible Peshtigo Fire twenty-three years before in 1871. That blaze, caused by a similar set of circumstances, killed more than one thousand people in spite of the fact that the residents of Peshtigo had both a river and Lake Michigan available as a place of refuge. As they saw the smoke darken the sky these veterans, like those who knew no better, continued to work at their jobs, but surely they must have given some thought as to how they would save themselves if holocaust again stalked them. [95]

All thought of work was cast aside a little after noon when word came over the telegram that the town of Pokegama, just nine miles to the south, had been engulfed in flames. As word spread that most of Pokegama's inhabitants had been burned people at last awoke to their own danger. But it was too late. Almost as soon as they entered the street, they saw an ominous black cloud boil up on the horizon and quickly spread its shadow over Hinckley. The volunteer fire department barely had time to deploy to the edge of town when the monster fire struck. A wave of scorching, overwhelming, heat swept over the fire fighters as building after building broke out in flames. In an instant the town was lost and people fled to save themselves. The foolish sought valuables, the prudent gathered up loved ones and immediately fled to the train station. With Hinckley transformed into an island in a sea flames the steel rails were the only way out. Hastily a train was assembled from a collection of cars sidetracked at the village. By the time several hundred panicked people filled the train, the heat was so great that the paint on the passenger cars was beginning to blister. The train sped through the blazing forest till it reached the town of Sandstone where it warned the inhabitants of the coming conflagration. The firestorm, however, was hard on their heels and within minutes of the train leaving Sandstone, that town was destroyed with the loss of forty-five people. When the train reached the trestle bridge over the Kettle River, they found it in flames. If the Hinckley refugees could be gotten across the river, they would be able to out run the fire, if not, they would be trapped and killed. The engineer opened the throttle and the train made it across just before the bridge collapsed into the inferno. [96]

For those in Hinckley who missed the train horror and death stalked them. Many fell dead in mid-flight, killed by the "suffocating choking gases" that preceded the flames. A contemporary reported that:

Dogs, cats, chickens and stock were stricken instantly and died in their tracks without serious burns. In one instance a man was stricken down, but not burned enough to destroy his clothes, and in one of his pockets was found a small leather purse in which were four silver dollars welded together in one solid piece.

Those killed by the gas were said to have fallen "in the twinkling of an eye." Others suffered the ravages of fire. More than ninety discreet piles of gray ash, in human form, were later found along a railroad embankment. An equal number who had sought refuge in a partially flooded gravel pit near by survived. Another group of about two hundred people ran for their lives up the track of the Mississippi and Lake Superior Railroad. As the flames gained on them the slow of foot perished one by one. Most of them, however, managed to keep running until they met a train. The train was unable to outrun the flames and it caught fire, but not before unloading its terrified passengers near a bog, into which they sought refuge. [97]

The great forest fire of September 1894 became known as the Hinckley Fire. It wiped out the Minnesota towns of Hinckley, Sandstone, Pokegama, Mission Creek and Partridge and killed 413 people. But it was not restricted to Minnesota. The conditions that caused the fire, dry weather, combustible cutovers, and high winds, existed across the Upper St. Croix valley. On the Wisconsin side of the valley a wave of fires swept up the track of the North Wisconsin Railroad. Fires born by bad logging practice consumed little mill towns that had lived off the harvest of the forest. Phillips, Wisconsin was consumed in July 1894, while the town of Barronett was burned on the same day as the Hinckley disaster. At the time of the fire the manager of the Barronett mill was in Minneapolis holding forth before a group of lumbermen how his mill was in no danger because it was surrounded by cleared ground. He was brought up short by a telegram that informed him the fire had leaped cleared land and consumed the mill. The refugees of Barronett no sooner found shelter in Shell Lake than flames surrounded that town. Although more than fifty buildings burned, Shell Lake was able to save its mill and the lives of its citizens. Among the other mill towns devastated that fire season were Comstock, Benoit, Marengo, and Mason. An estimated 1.4 million acres of pinelands and cutover was consumed by the fire. [98]

Although the 1894 fires were the worst that swept over the St. Croix valley, they were neither the first nor the last. Forest and brush fires had been a regular feature of life in the valley from the time logging developed as a large-scale commercial enterprise. During the 1870s and 1880s virtually all residents of the valley understood that if there was a dry spring a bad fire season was likely to follow. In 1877, for example, a lack of snowmelt had hampered the spring log drive. Water was so low in the river that in Polk County boys were wading across to Minnesota. By July massive fires raged across the valley. The Stillwater Lumberman estimated that "fire on the upper St. Croix has destroyed more timber than was cut last winter." Nothing would be done to restrain such wild fires. In 1879 fires ranged all around Grantsburg, Wisconsin. Only when buildings in town were threatened did "all the men and boys" turn out to fight it. The fires in the hinterland were ignored until "the rains put most of them out." [99]

A common misconception of these massive fires was that they burned up thousands of acres of pine timber. This occasionally happened with very intense fires. The 1877 fire on the Upper St. Croix and Namekagon generated heat "so terrific" that it burned "out all traces of stumps." Usually what happened was that a forest fire passed through standing timber fast enough that it only badly singed the trees. A fire-ravaged forest was reduced in value but it still boasted most of its board feet. The trouble was that fire killed most of the trees. This meant that the charred timber had to be harvested within a year or be severely degraded by insect damage. Forest fires reduced an asset that was rapidly appreciating to one that had to be immediately liquidated. In this way forest fires increased the pace of logging and accelerated the diminishment of the valley's future as a lumbering region. Massive salvage logging ventures worked against time to get the damaged logs out of the forest and were necessarily more wasteful. An increased pace of logging in kind increased the likelihood of more fires as more of the forest was replaced by fields of slash. The risk of forest fires discouraged lumbermen from sitting too long on their standing timber assets. This cycle of destruction was the long-lasting damage wrought by forest fires. [100]

The Hinckley Fire was particularly devastating not just because of the loss of life and standing timber, but because it forced the big lumber companies that now dominated the valley to accelerate their logging activities. The construction of Nevers Dam indicated that they were building for the future when they moved into the St. Croix. The Weyerhaeuser syndicate had discussed cutting back on forest operations due to the fallout from the Panic of 1893. With the market for building materials depressed they had thought it best to keep their pine in the forest. The fire, however, forced their hand. "It is too bad to have such timber as that wasting," lamented the head of Liard, Norton, & Company, and he ordered a massive salvage operation. The 1894 fires may have destroyed five hundred million board feet of timber, but equally as damaging were the impact of scorched earth for future forest growth and the loss of pine seedlings and saplings. [101]

The loss of life that accompanied the Hinckley Fire necessitated some type of political response. The Wisconsin state legislature passed a bill designating township officials to organize fire fighting crews with compensation pegged at $1.50 per day, per man, but for no more than ten days a year. Minnesota appointed a statewide fire warden and gave him the impossible charge "to prevent and suppress forest and prairie fires." The man appointed to the task, Christopher Columbus Andrews, worked tirelessly to make something of the job. He appointed deputy fire wardens and surveyed the state's forest resources. He eventually convinced Minnesota to create a School of Forestry, although it was not until well into the next century that Andrews was able to lead the state to establish state forest reserves. By that time the St. Croix had been thoroughly logged over and annually bedeviled by fires. [102]

Fires continued throughout the 1890s and into the 1900s because of the reluctance of loggers to change their practices. The big downriver mill owners would have liked to have held their pinelands for better prices but they were unwilling to force changes on the way logging operations were conducted. Most of their timber was cut by contractors squeezed into operating at a low margin of profit. These small businessmen were not inclined to take on the extra cost of piling the branches and brush left behind after logging and conducting a controlled burn. Although a generation of experience taught them better, they left behind the fuel for future forest fires. Farmers who purchased logged over land were confronted with acres of slash that could be removed economically only one way -- by fire. A farmer working alone on his homestead lacked the ability to contain a blaze once it began. He merely doused his cabin with water and waited for the fire to stop of its own accord. Hundreds of fires set in this manner swept over the upper valley each year between 1890 and 1910.

Figure 23. The chaos of the almost annual log jam at the Dalles of the St. Croix. From Outing Magazine, March, 1890.