Eventually the very tracks the trains traveled on burned and no orders came. John Blair, a sturdy black porter, passed up and down the aisles between the seats, reassuring everybody, talking calmly, and giving wet towels to women whose hair had caught fire.
The fire left a path of death and destruction too horrible to believe.
Left was the ground choked with limbs and stumps from the trees that the loggers had felled.
“When that wave struck them one wail of anguish went up from the whole people as one man, and in less than a minute after everything was still except for the roar of the wind and the crackling of the flames.”The man who heard that final cry was named Alien Fraser. The air was constantly hazy from the smoke.September 1st would have gone by as each day had before except for certain conditions. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com.Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949
Drifting sparks would settle here and there, starting little fires that crept through the slash—debris left by the lumber operations—throughout the summer. Barry gave two sharp tugs on the whistle cord—the signal to pull out—and began to back the train away from the depot. But Jesmer, his clothes on fire, climbed down into the river, where his wife and four children were waiting for him. The piles of lumber stacked there began to burn. It was a terrible job; burning embers kept swirling toward them through the scalding murk, and the forests were blazing all around.
He had been determined to save the people of this area. McGowan tried to help him, but the engineer protested: “Leave me and go help the passengers into the water.”The fireman took a pail, and went out to join the conductor, who was dousing the burning steps so that people could get off.The passengers tumbled into the lake while the fire boomed through the sky above them. They were badly burned, and he didn’t want to rub them together for fear the flesh would come off.Dazed though he was, Root had long since given up any idea of outrunning the fire. They picked their way along until they reached Hinckley, where they saw nothing left standing save the roundhouse and water tower.
They died quickly. After the war he drifted west to visit an uncle in Minnesota, took a liking to the vicinity, and became an engineer on the St. Paul & Duluth.Still, the run started out somewhat differently from most.
When asked to describe the experience, all Fadden had to say was that he “had been in hell, and saw everything there was to be seen except Satan himself.” “Everything is burned up!” screamed Bartlett.Root waited while men with their eyebrows burned away threw their wives and children into the train. That seemed to be the end of the Eastern Minnesota emergency train. It seemed a logical choice. The panic that massive exodus caused, as hundreds fled the fire, separated many of the families and in many cases it was several days of anxious worry and waiting until they knew if their loved ones were alive and safe.Those that somehow survived in water holes, potato fields, or by some other miracle were in very poor condition. By mid afternoon, a gigantic wall of flame developed as the smaller fires, fed by the wind and cool air, combined into a racing cyclonic fury.As the fire consumed its territory, 418 people perished in Hinckley and the surrounding communities.
“This lit up the atmosphere in a very peculiar way—into a sort of dull, glowing, yellowish twilight, which had a brilliant but at the same time unnatural effect on the things within the range of vision.”Root had pressed on diligently through “total darkness about forty miles” when he saw that lurid, beautiful light. At about the same time, he heard people yelling in the forest and looked to see three men making for the train. Little rain had fallen over a period of three months and conditions were ripe for fires. 19 were here. The next morning another train started out from Pine City.
“You can cross it now and it will go down in five minutes.” Barry ran the train across the trestle. Every once in a while a barn would go up, but prior to 1894 nothing really terrible had ever happened in Pine County.Hinckley was a healthy, steady town of twelve hundred inhabitants, most of whom drew their livelihood in one way or another from the Brennan Mill Company, a big operation capable of cutting two hundred thousand board feet of lumber in a day. As people fought the multiple fires, it soon became apparent that it was a losing battle. The train backed out of the blazing town.
The official death toll was 418, not counting hundreds of Native Americans who lived in and around the town and others who were never found.
On Saturday, September 1, 1894 between the hours of 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., a great firestorm consumed and destroyed Hinckley and 5 smaller communities, namely Mission Creek, Sandstone, Miller, Partridge and Pokegama.Picture a land covered with giant pines, some hardwoods, many swamps and small rivers; a virgin land untouched. “What do you think of putting the freight engine behind us?” Powers asked.
The train moved on, and an hour later Sandstone was gone and forty-five of its people dead.Just beyond the town a bridge stood 150 feet above the Kettle River.
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