“On the last evening of August 1894, people in a remote corner of northern Minnesota–people who were about to die or watch their children die–sat around dining-room tables and chatted about their hopes for the future. They gathered around pianos and sang. They read newspapers, they went to their kitchens to get snacks, they kissed their children good-night and tucked them into bed. They crawled into warm beds themselves, by ones or by twos, and put out the lights. When the lights were out, the lovers among them brushed warm lips and pulled each other close and felt each other’s hearts beating. Boys lay staring in to the dark, thinking about fishing, or about girls. Old men lay remembering. Mothers and fathers lay planning. And one by one they drifted off to sleep, dreaming of things past or things yet to come.
But none of them could have dreamed of what was really coming. None of them could have imagined that within thirty-six hours people as far away as New York, San Francisco, and even London would be reading abut the cruel hand that fate was about to deal them.”