Holy Old Mackinaw by Stewart H. Holbrook

Author:Stewart H. Holbrook [Holbrook, Stewart H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / HIS054000 - Social History, HISTORY / United States / State & Local / HIS036110 - Pacific Northwest (OR
ISBN: 9781941890073
Publisher: Epicenter Press
Published: 2016-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

Death in Hinckley

Hard work, and rum, women, and what they called “song” wasn’t all that occupied lumberjacks of the Lake States. Sometimes they had forest fire. It struck worst, perhaps, in 1871. On the dim morning of October 8, that year, one John Mulligan, ex-pugilist who was a logging camp foreman for I. Stephenson & Company, rode a singed and bedraggled horse into the small town of Menominee, Michigan. “The whole town of Peshtigo has been wiped out,” he said. “Not a soul remains.”

Mulligan didn’t exaggerate much. The booming young lumber city of Peshtigo, in near-by Wisconsin, had been wiped out by forest fire that swept in so quickly from the surrounding timber that eleven hundred persons were cremated.

Relief was rushed from near-by towns for distribution at Menominee, and a scene remained long in the eyes of a lumberjack. He saw smoke so thick over Lake Michigan’s Green Bay that two men were posted on the dock at Menominee, lifting and dropping heavy planks to serve as a signal of port to smoke-bound relief steamers.

Rescue crews found little to do, for the fire had been thorough. They did find old John Leach, logger-settler, sitting disconsolately on a warm rock, smoking his pipe. Inside twenty-four hours he had buried eleven children and grandchildren. John Leach was a sample survivor.

As a relief party moved over the hot and smoking ground, Isaac Stephenson marveled to see to what small compass the bodies of big lumberjacks could be brought by the heat of a million pine trees burning. “Nothing remained,” he recalled, “other than a mere streak of ashes that would scarce fill a thimble.”

Yet the Peshtigo holocaust received little attention. The great city of Chicago, down at the other end of the lake, was being consumed by fire at almost the same time. Americans like their disasters to be big, and the magnitude of Chicago’s fire shadowed the horror in the Wisconsin backwoods. Reporters flocked to Chicago to make Mrs. O’Leary’s cow famous and they missed a true reporters’ incident near Peshtigo when, six days after the flames had burned themselves out, a body crashed heavily to the ground from high in a tree. It was that of a young camp foreman, much sought since the fire, who had either forgotten his woods lore or preferred death on a pyre to death on the ground. The body was the last of the Peshtigo victims.

Today, in 1938, not a hundredth part of Wisconsin’s citizenry ever heard of the Peshtigo fire. Old lumberjacks know of it, however, for bunkhouse historians have passed it down to classes around barrel stoves. They tell that the Peshtigo fire bred a thousand moose birds overnight.45

It was a bit different, later at Hinckley. No Chicago fire got in the way.

There was little of dawn about the morning of September 1, 1891, in the woods of Eastern Minnesota. The clock in the sawmill and logging office of the Brennan Lumber Company at Hinckley indicated the time to be eight o’clock. But nothing else did; it was all sort of graylike, neither day nor night.

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