Daniel James Brown

The Hinckley firestorm was no ordinary forest fire. Ordinary forest fires move in fits and starts. They give people a chance to get out of the way. The enormous Biscuit fire in southern Oregon in the summer of 2002, for example, took almost two weeks to burn its first 350,000 acres. The Hinckley firestorm, in stark contrast, took only five hours to rip its way across the same amount of land. It was, according to those who lived through it, more like a massive explosion than a forest fire. As the firestorm broke over Hinckley, flames towered 200 feet above the surrounding forest. Enormous bubbles of glowing gas drifted in over the town and then ignited suddenly over the heads of horrified onlookers. Fire whirls—tornadoes of fire—danced out ahead of the main fire, knocking down buildings and carrying flaming debris high into the black sky. Temperatures at the core of the fire soared above 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt steel.

More than two thousand people were in the immediate vicintiy of the fire when it errupted into this monstrosity. The all-volunteer Hinckley Fire Department rushed to the southern edge of town and fought valiantly but hopelessly against the tide of fire. Within minutes, they and everyone else in town, were running for their lives.

But there was no way one could outrun this fire. The only hope for salvation lay in two trains that happened to be in town. By the time the day was over, almost everyone who was still alive owed his or her life to one of those trains, and to one or more of a half-dozen unlikely heroes who manned them.

The firestorm swept over Hinckley and obliterated it, then moved on to consume the prosperous town of Sandstone, five miles to the north, and half a dozen other, smaller communities. Across hundreds of square miles, desperate people fought to preserve their lives in shallow lakes, dried up swamps, and stiffling root cellars. In the end, although thousands were saved, more than 400 were dead.

In the hours and days that followed, impromptu rescue parties struggled to reach survivors and bring them aid. The most immediate and effective help came not from government relief efforts but from ordinary citizens who took matters into their own hands—donating their own clothes and food, burying bodies with their own hands, taking survivors into their own homes.

The firestorm left massive environmental as well as human consequences in its wake. The virgin white pine forests of north-eastern Minnesota were utterly destroyed, never to appear again. Unlike naturally occurring fires, this fire, fueled by vast accumulations of logging slash, burned so hot that it literally consumed all the organic material in the soil over many thousands of square acres. The land that was left behind could never again support a forest and could support only limited agriculture.

In the end, there is much that we citizens of the 21st century can learn from the story of the Hinckley Firestorm. We live in an age of terror—never knowing when and where an attack or natural disaster will strike. And, as we’ve recently seen in the case of Hurricane Katrina, we can’t always count on government to come to our aid. In this sense, we’re in the same situation as the people of Hinckley on the morning of September 1, 1894. As the firestorm swept into Hinckley, ordinary working men and women did what they needed to do. They stood tall, put the welfare of others ahead of their own welfare, and strove to remain strong in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.