Daniel James Brown

From the Prologue
"Something was afoot that summer—something concealed, not yet revealed. All across the Upper-Midwest, a yellow-gray murk obscured the finer details of terrain and landscape, softening and blurring the outlines of everything one could see, and hiding much that one could not see. Silos in Wisconsin, tall pine trees in northern Minnesota, office buildings in Saint Paul and Minneapolis all seemed to be slightly out of focus and forever fading into a vague gray background. Men piloting steamboats on Lake Superior put binoculars to their eyes and struggled to make out familiar landmarks along the shore. Railroad engineers peered through gray shrouds of haze that hung over the tracks before them, trying to make out what they were about to encounter down the line. Even the fierce, unrelenting sun of that summer seemed to strain to make its full force apparent through the milky gray overcast.

Country women rising early in the morning and stepping out of doors to fetch water from their wells could not see the haze in the pre-dawn darkness, but they noted the sweet smell of wood smoke. Later in the day, even when their kitchens were full of the warm smell of baking bread, they still noted it. People sitting in posh hotel lobbies and ornate railroad stations noted it, even through the ever-present smell of stale cigar smoke. Timber brokers and bankers and clerks working in stuffy city offices in Duluth and Green Bay slid open their office windows and looked out into their gray cities and noted it as well.

Nobody was surprised by it; nobody expected anything other than smoke and ash in the air at this time of year. It was no shock to anyone that hundreds of small fires burned in the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin that summer, as they did every summer. If asked about it, anyone would have said pretty much the same thing, “There’s always smoke and fire at this time of year.” Nobody was surprised, but everyone noted it, and many wondered idly why it seemed so much worse than usual this year, and what if anything it portended."

From Chapter Five
"By 3:45 P.M., things were happening fast in Hinckley. Everyone, indoors and out, could hear the deep rumbling of what was approaching now. A searing wind was blowing dense black smoke, cinders, and firebrands through the dusty streets. When Nels Anderson’s house went up in flames and Chief Craig thundered by on his horse shouting, 'We can’t save the town!' Angus Hay was four blocks from his office. He took off running in that direction, and by the time he got there large cinders were falling all around him. He and his typographer, James Willard, tried to gather together some of the Enterprise’s equipment and files, but through the back door he could see that fist-sized coals were already raining down in the yard. Through the front window, he could see people running past outside on Third Street, yelling and looking for their spouses and children. Judging it to be the most valuable thing in the office, Hay grabbed his subscription book and ran outside to help.

A woman with three children stumbled down the street, blinded by the smoke. Hay took her baby from her arms and carried it to a man who was heading toward the Eastern depot in a buggy. Then he led the woman and the rest of her children, running northward and eastward through the streets to the flooded gravel pit behind the Eastern Minnesota depot where he urged them to get in the shallow, green water.

Hay ran back across town to help more people, but rounding the corner in front of the Morrison Hotel, trying to head south on Main Street, he quickly found that he couldn’t endure the heat blowing up the street, and he began running east, back toward the gravel pit. Running at full tilt now, he looked to the south to see how far away the fire was. A block down he saw a woman he knew only as Mrs. Blanchard with her eleven-year-old son. As Hay watched, Blanchard tripped on a rail on the Eastern Minnesota tracks and didn’t get up. Her boy crumpled to the ground next to her. The heat was too withering in that direction to allow Hay to go to their aid.

A man plunged by with a child in one arm, dragging another by the arm, shouting, 'My God, we’ll die! My God, we’ll die!'"

From Chapter Six
"Everyone now appeared to be out of the train. But in fact not every one was. A young man named Albert Speyer, running through the mud toward the water, suddenly pulled up short and said to his badly burned companion, George Sjoqvist, 'Did you hear a child crying?' Sjoqvist said no, but Speyer was already running back toward the train when everyone within earshot heard screams coming from one of the burning cars. Speyer paused several times, trying to ascertain which car the screams were coming from. Then, without any further hesitation, he approached a car, part of which had already collapsed in flames. He kicked at the flaming splinters on the ground, shielding his face with his arm, and disappeared into the flames. Sjoqvist and the others who were aware of this latest drama stood transfixed in the heat and the wind and the smoke.

A few moments later they saw something white moving through the flames, but it disappeared in a swirl of black smoke. Then it reappeared and Speyer staggered from the fire in his shirtsleeves, carrying a dark bundle. His hair was singed, his shirt and trousers were largely burned off, and his face, throat, and hands were badly blistered, but he had a young girl wrapped up in his coat. 'I got her out alive! I got her out alive!' he exulted over and over again as he carried her down to the water."