THE HOLOCAUST IN MINNESOTA 



649 



ness that made them dangerous fire beds in many cases. 

 The vegetation of the summer was dead and dry ; hay 

 had been cut and stacked. No rain had fallen for weeks. 

 Everything was tinder. Fires, started no one knows 

 how, had been smouldering for days. Forest rangers 

 and patrols had done what they could to extinguish 

 them; but the force available was inadequate. 



Following the Hinckley fire, the state legislature took 

 measures to prevent recurrence of such disaster, and for 

 several years funds were provided to support properly 

 fire prevention work. But in the years that followed a 

 sense of security born of small fire losses, resulted in 

 relaxation. The Chisholm and Spooner fires followed. 



Again the legislature had a spasm of righteousness ; 

 and again it relaxed. At the last session, two years ago, 



detail is even now only difficultly available, and it will 

 be weeks before the full extent of the disaster is known. 



A connected and general description of the fire is im- 

 possible. Personal experiences of those who escaped are 

 mere incidents from scattered localities in the wide fire 

 zone. Refugees crowd the bordering towns ; morgues 

 are full of bodies ; dozens of dead are being buried in 

 trenches where their bodies were found; charred remains 

 of farm buildings and town residences and store build- 

 ings are everywhere visible ; gaunt and blackened tree 

 trunks stand sentinel over scenes of desolation. 



State guard troops, state motor corps, state and county 

 officials, the Red Cross and civilian volunteers under the 

 direction of State Forester W. T. Cox, are fighting fires 

 which break out anew, fanned by the shifting winds. 







Photograph by Underwood and Underwood 



RUINS OF THE ALGER-SMITH LUMBER COMPANY'S YARDS 



Furiously the fire raged at Rice's Point, near Duluth, levelling everything in its path. The last vestige of the lumber piles disappeared, all metal 

 ana wire work welding into a solid mass. The total loss of manufactured lumber was conservatively estimated at over 100,000,000 feet. 



the state forester asked for $75,000, and was granted 

 about half that sum too little to provide adequate 

 protection and an efficient corps of rangers and patrols. 



Perhaps the large sum would not have sufficed. Much 

 of the area over which this latest fire swept was out of 

 the forest boundaries farm lands and sites for growing 

 communities but the state forest service would have 

 had some jurisdiction. 



The fire, or fires, for there were many of them, started 

 and swept onward with such rapidity that the worst was 

 over before information came out of the devasted dis- 

 tricts. Because of destroyed telegraph and telephone 

 lines, highway and railroad bridges, information in 



and giving relief to those who are in need and can be 

 reached. 



Actual loss to the lumber industry is represented 

 chiefly by the destruction wrought at Cloquet. The two 

 large mills of the Northern Lumber Company at that 

 point were burned, with the entire stock of lumber. The 

 planing mill of the Cloquet Lumber Company burned, 

 with much of the company's stock forty million feet, 

 which, with that of the Northern Lumber Company 

 totals one hundred million feet. Five small mills, at 

 Kettle River, Lawler and Automba, manufacturing mixed 

 hard and softwoods for the Parker-Kellogg Lumber 

 Company, of Minneapolis, were destroyed. The loss of 



