Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 Book

If I ever have kids - and ain't that a notion! - I will never let them play video games or watch violent movies or do any of the other things I was so happy to do as a child. That's because I am acutely aware of how a young mind can be indelibly molded by the experiences of childhood. My current (and undiminished) obsessions with the Titanic, Custer's Last Stand, and the Alamo, all flow from my early introduction to these harrowing stories of men and women in the last moments of their life, enacting immortal drams under lethal duress.

Case in point: the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1, 1894.

I first learned about the fire while on a family vacation to Duluth, Minnesota. We stopped in Hinckley to get locally famous cinnamon rolls (which is a crock, because all cinnamon rolls taste the same: pretty good) and saw a sign for the Hinckley Fire Museum. Since this was during my firefighter stage (all boys go through it), we all went.

Oh, such fascinating horrors! There was an old-time fire wagon with hand pump and hose. There were sundry items of daily life, charred almost beyond recognition. There was a papier-mâché diorama. Heck, there was even an animatronic telegraph operator tapping out haunting messages from a town in the path of a firestorm. I learned grim and unforgettable things, of a tornado of fire, and trains racing over burning trestles, and people sheltering in a mill pond even as sawdust floating on the surface exploded into flames.

During college, I plotted out a book on the Hinckley Fire. Why? Because, at the time, there was no great book on the subject. I gathered materials, did my research, and outlined the structure. I even called the helpful librarian at the Fire Museum to get ideas. Then I figured it'd be easier to write a novel, since a novel doesn't require endnotes. Another idea hit me. Why don't I add a serial killer? And what if the "serial killer" was actually a terrifying bear-creature? I thought this was a good idea, because I always liked the idea of writing a crime procedural, but I'm horrible coming up with satisfying conclusions to mysteries (in much the same way as the writers of Lost, I'm afraid). With the fire, my ending wrote itself. Everything burns. Deus ex genius.

(In other words, I meant to combine the Howie Long classic Firestorm with the William Girdler epic Grizzly and John McNaughton's incisive Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer).

I actually wrote three chapters one night. Then I went to the bar, drank myself to a free t-shirt, and never wrote another word. I think about that sometimes, as I pay my student loans.

The point of that digression is that I didn't want to like this book. I wanted the seminal Hinckley Fire work to remain in my hands. Well, it's not. This book is the place to go for everything you need or want to know about Hinckley.

Author Daniel James Brown combines Walter Lord-style personal narratives with fascinating and informative digressions on the forerunner of the National Weather Service, trains, fire science, and the nature of burns. The thing that most impressed me was his ability to transition between the two styles. It makes for a book that is propulsively readable; once you start, you're going to want to finish in one sitting (so maybe don't take it to your wife's house on Easter, okay?).

The book provides facts for your mind, and blood and guts for your 10 year-old boy-mind. Here's what I mean. On one page, you get a little applied science:

Mass fires...generate enormous winds, often of hurricane velocity. Sometimes these winds begin to rotate and become cyclonic, creating fire vortices - tornadoes of fire that may advance well ahead of the main flaming front. Because of the tremendous updraft in their convection columns, mass fires typically pick up thousands of flaming or glowing firebrands...They may carry these as much as 18,000 feet into the air before throwing them miles ahead of their fronts, spawning spot fires wherever the firebrands land in fuel. And because mass fires consume their fuel so rapidly, they often exhaust all the available oxygen in the air before they have finished burning all the carbon and volatile gases that they have released from their fuels. As a result, they produce vast clouds of black smoke, black because it's carrying a heavy load of unburned carbon.

Then, on another page, it's the human dimension. For instance, you might learn about 127 men, women, and children who tried to take shelter in a grassy clearing that - but for a severe drought - would've been a swamp.

[W:]ithin moments, there was no more room to pull back and the flames were upon them, lapping at their feet, blistering their ankles and shins, racing up their clothing, slapping at their faces. One by one, the women's long dresses erupted - large, tangerine-orange blossoms of fire wavering in the smokey gloom. Everyone screamed, but the screams came out thin and unnaturally high-pitched. The withering heat had desiccated their vocal cords, pulling them taut like overstretched rubber bands. Grown men suddenly sounded like young girls. When the screams were over, they had to breathe in, and when they did they inhaled flames and superheated air, sucking the flames into their very mouths.

The destruction of Hinckley, and several other towns in the area, dwarfed the Great Chicago Fire (there were 418 reported deaths, though the number may be twice as high). In terms of pure drama, I don't think Hinckley has an equal. Brown has done an incredible job of marshaling the individual stories and presenting them in a vivid manner, while also giving the context of the disaster. Brown shows how a simple confluence of weather (a drought), clear-cutting of timber (which left a great deal of slash along the railways) and railroads (embers from an engine likely sparked the blaze) precipitated disaster. He analyzes these occurrences, and also, without drawing harsh conclusions, the actions of some of the major players, especially the train engineers (specifically Bill Best and Jim Root) who were accused of driving into the fire in order to maintain their timetables.

If there's a criticism, it's that the chapters after the fire, dealing with Hinckley's rebirth (as a place to get cinnamon rolls on the way to Duluth) are anticlimactic. Really, though, I can't really find fault with this, the last word on the subject of the Great Hinckley Fire.

The only thing it's missing is a serial killing monster from the depths of the forest, loosely-based on Chippewa legends, and perhaps with an environmental motive to its seemingly random slaughter.

That book is yet to be written (please don't steal it from me!)