106 FIRST BOOK OF FORESTRY 



The Miramichi fire of 1825 in New Brunswick, the Pesh- 

 tigo fire of 1871 in Wisconsin, the great fires in Michigan 

 of the same year, and the great Hinckley fire of 1894 in 

 Minnesota destroyed several towns and hundreds of farms ; 

 they cost the lives of many hundreds of people and con- 

 sumed millions of feet of timber. 



The behavior of fire differs very much in different kinds 

 of woods and even in the same woods at different times. 

 In Georgia and Florida pineries it may be merely a light 

 " surface fire/' consuming the thin layer of long pine 

 needles, and usually traveling along at a very moderate 

 rate. In the denser parts of the mixed woods of the Adi- 

 rondacks it is a ground fire, eating along on the surface of 

 the earth and in the dry layer of the duff so slowly that a 

 whole day's burning adds only an acre or two to the burn. 



On the other hand, a fire in one of the large slashes, 

 especially in the drier lake countries and the West, may, 

 after it gets well started, travel by fits and leaps ; and the 

 draft is often so great that burning brands are carried 

 through the air for several hundred yards, lighting new 

 fires as they fall. Then it becomes a forest fire of the 

 dangerous kind, and if the lone settler and his family 

 have any great distance to run in order to reach a large 

 clearing or other point of safety, they are almost sure to 

 be overtaken and suffocated, if not actually burned. 



To what extent the woods are destroyed by the fire 

 differs in much the same way. In the southern pinery it 



