Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

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Overview

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping more than two thousand people. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. As temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, the firestorm knocked down buildings and carried flaming debris high into the sky. Two trains—one with every single car on fire—became the only means of escape. In all, more than four hundred people would die, leading to a revolution in forestry management and the birth of federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires.

A spellbinding account of ...

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More About This Book

Overview

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping more than two thousand people. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. As temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, the firestorm knocked down buildings and carried flaming debris high into the sky. Two trains—one with every single car on fire—became the only means of escape. In all, more than four hundred people would die, leading to a revolution in forestry management and the birth of federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires.

A spellbinding account of danger, devastation, and courage, Under a Flaming Sky reveals the dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the tragedy and brings into focus the ordinary citizens whose lives it irrevocably marked.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
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It was a town that could have inspired The Music Man -- filled with shops, clapboard buildings, trains, and horse-drawn carriages. Young children spent their days eating freshly churned ice cream and drinking root beer, while their older siblings spent their evenings at parties, flirting and square-dancing. But Hinckley, Minnesota, would become famous for a far more terrible reason. It was the site of a massive firestorm at the tail end of the 19th century that killed more than 400 people -- a firestorm so powerful that it continues to influence current forestry and fire-management practices today.

As Brown deftly describes it, the denizens of Hinckley, a lumber-mill town known for its white pine, were having an unusually hot summer, with a record-low rainfall. But without a modern-day understanding of the science behind fires, they had no idea of the danger brewing. So when the massive conflagration sped into town -- leapfrogging to new locations, setting off explosions, and combing with new flare-ups -- the only question was, who would make it out alive?

Readers who enjoyed the recent Discover pick The Children's Blizzard will find Under a Flaming Sky an impressive and richly rewarding read. The descendant of a Hinckley resident, Brown uses first-person narratives, authoritative interviews, and historical documents to piece together an arresting real-life thriller with critical implications for the present. (Summer 2006 Selection)
Publishers Weekly
On September 1, 1894, Hinckley, Minn.-a thriving town with a population of more than 1,200, two railroads, a successful lumber mill and five hotels-was ravaged by a firestorm that grew out of a catastrophic convergence of two ordinary fires, high winds, hot weather and white pine forest. Brown, a textbook writer, gives a human face to natural calamity as he draws on firsthand survivor stories, such as those of his grandfather, who at nine was rescued from the disaster that killed his father, a Norwegian immigrant. A wide range of characters evoke the reader's pity and respect in these well-researched and highly readable pages. A black porter selflessly saves white passengers on a train engulfed in flames; a quick-thinking clergyman plunges into a river with a stranger's baby in his arms; and a survivor is haunted by the death screams of 127 of his neighbors in a swamp. With its pine forests obliterated in the firestorm that claimed more than 436 lives, Hinckley became a specter of its former self. Illustrated with period pictures, this deft slice of regional history will attract disaster and weather buffs as well as fans of Norman Maclean's standout Young Men and Fire. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061236259
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 8/14/2007
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 354,482
  • Series: P.S. Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.31 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.68 (d)

Meet the Author

Daniel James Brown is the author of the widely acclaimed Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. He lives in the country east of Redmond, Washington, with his wife and two daughters.

Table of Contents


CONTENTS

Foreword
Chapter One: Night Music
Chapter Two: Morning
Chapter Three: Home Sweet Home
Chapter Four: Something Wicked
Chapter Five: The Cauldron
Chapter Six: Ragnarok
Chapter Seven: Under the Stone
Chapter Eight: Into the Ring
Chapter Nine: Out of the Ashes
Chapter Ten: The Broken Season
Epilogue
Afterword

First Chapter

Under a Flaming Sky
The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

Chapter One

Night Music

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

—George Meredith,
"Lucifer in Starlight"

September 1, 1894 | 12:30 A.M.

Lying alone on his cot in the darkness, nine-year-old Bill Grissinger wondered what it was that woke him. Then it happened again—the house shuddered, the windows rattled, and the hall door creaked open. This time he heard his mother, Kate, getting up to close the door, and he went out into the hall to meet her. Together, they stood silently by the west-facing window of their small frame house, peering out into the dark streets of Hinckley.

On the northwest side of town, recently installed electric carbon lights illuminated the sprawling yards of the Brennan Lumber Company. The mill was quiet. The night shift was taking its midnight lunch break. But what Bill Grissinger would remember nearly seven decades later was the odd color of the mill's lights that night. Usually intensely white, they had a strange reddish tinge he had not seen before.

The house shuddered again as another gust of wind slammed into it and his mother led him back to his room. He crawled back into bed and waited. Finally he heard the familiar sounds of the mill coming back to life—the rumbling of the carriages carrying huge pine logs into the teeth of the blades,the chomping of the gang saws biting into the wood, the whining of the edgers trimming the boards. He felt comforted by the sounds, but he could not get back to sleep easily. His father was away on a two-day trip, picking cranberries out across the Kettle River, and the house seemed forlorn without him. From time to time, another gust of wind struck the house. Down the hall he could hear his mother singing softly to his younger sister, Callie, trying to lull her back to sleep.

Across town, at about the same time, Clara Anderson was saying good-night to her school friends at Belle Barden's house. The girls whispered in the darkness on the front porch, talking about the school year that would begin on Monday. A cluster of boys stood in the front yard talking softly and jostling one another. It had been a long, boisterous evening of games and dancing and flirting. Earlier, they had rolled up the dining-room carpet to provide a dance floor. Someone had taken out a fiddle, someone else a harmonica, and they'd reeled off song after song as the young people had formed into two squares and flung themselves from partner to partner, clapping and shouting, promenading and do-si-do'ing, stomping wildly on the bare wood floors. Finally, worn out, they had turned down the oil lamps and, sitting on the floor in a circle, Belle and her guests had played Postman, a kissing game. Later, Belle's mother had laid out a late dinner on the sideboard: cold fried chicken, fresh-baked bread, raisin pie, and cold milk.

Now, well past midnight, each girl with a boy to show her home, Belle's guests began disappearing down the dark, dusty street, the boys singing school songs and whooping to one another, the girls shushing them. Clara Anderson told Belle she'd see her at school on Monday. Then she watched as Belle ran back into the house, where Belle's father, Jake, was already putting out the last of the lamps.

At a little before 3:00 A.M., Emil Anderson sat on a bench at Hinckley's Saint Paul and Duluth railway depot, waiting for a train north. A strikingly handsome young man with a boyish face and dark, penetrating eyes, he wore a neatly trimmed, somewhat sparse mustache. He also wore the white, upturned shirt collar of a clergyman. Sitting in a yellow pool of light cast by an oil lamp above him, he pondered why he was waiting there on a railroad platform in the middle of the night. The guest sermon he had delivered that day in Hinckley had gone well enough, but he was nervous about the farewell address that he planned to deliver tomorrow afternoon to his own congregation up in Sandstone. He'd worked intermittently on the address for two weeks now, but he was distinctly unhappy with the results so far. Within a week he planned to be back in Chicago starting his final year at a theological seminary, and he knew that after graduation, he might never again see any of his parishioners. But for now he felt strangely and urgently compelled to be back near them as soon as possible, and so, unable to sleep, he'd decided to start for home now rather than wait for morning. He figured one sleepless night wouldn't do him any harm, and he'd work more on the address as soon as he got home.

At 3:00 A.M., the train pulled into the station and Anderson climbed aboard one of the chair cars. Settling into one of the upholstered seats, he watched the lights of the lumber mill slip by on his left as the train pulled out of town. About four minutes later, the train slowed as it passed through a small brush fire burning on both sides of the track, but it was nothing more than one of many nuisance fires that had been smoldering in the wooded swamps and peat bogs around Hinckley for weeks now. Since early July, fires like these—set by homesteaders clearing land or touched off by sparks from passing trains—had been flaring up and dying down all over Pine County. The train picked up speed, and Anderson sat back in his seat humming Swedish hymns, trying them out for tomorrow. Within another fifteen minutes he was climbing down from the chair car at an unlit crossing called Sandstone Junction. From here it was a three-mile walk to the town of Sandstone and home. Slinging his rucksack over his shoulder, he set off into the dark woods alone.

Under a Flaming Sky
The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. Copyright © by Daniel Brown. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Sort by: Showing all of 7 Customer Reviews

  • Posted January 12, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    9780805072938

    An Experience!

    As a child, riding in our car on the way to Duluth to visit relatives, I recall my father (born and raised in Iowa) would always mention the firestorm as we drove through the stricken area. As a child I felt somewhat removed from it as children rarely can grasp the enormity of disasters, especially those that have happened in another century. Over the decades of my life, I've grow to greatly appreciate history in all of it's forms and I finally stopped simply driving through Hinkley and stopped at the Fire Museum. There I learned of the book. As other reviewers have stated, it's simply engrossing! We're so used to warnings of approching danger that it's overwhelming when the readers put themselves in the place of those who were involved. The Author did a tremendous job in recreating the disbelief and panic of the subjects, but also captures the desperation and determination of those who chose to endanger their own lives in order to save others. I'm left wondering if we as a society that is highly spoiled and self absorbed,are even capable of this type of sacrifice.
    For this very reason, I had my 13 yr.old son read it as well. This book is an educational tool. Socially, scientifically and spiritually.
    I'll be buying more copies as gifts!!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 10, 2010

    Feel the heat, the horror, "Under a Flaming Sky"

    For 40 years, author Daniel James Brown's grandfather had nightmares about a day that began with joy and celebration and ended in ashes and catastrophe in--and around--Hinckley, Minn. in 1894. Brown takes those memories and those nightmares and brings them to horrifying life in "Under a Flaming Sky," a riveting hour-by-hour account of a monstrous firestorm that snaked, spit, and hid in small patches among the flat, drought-stricken woods of northern Minnesota until those patches, pushed by hurricane-force winds, merged and roared out of those woods like a living thing. What makes this book so poignant, what may give you nightmares nearly as vivid as Brown's grandfather, is the fact that these people never saw it coming. They were ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances with no way out. Fires were common in the summer in that area and although the residents of Hinckley, Pokegama and the tiny hamlet of Phillips watched a yellow sun turn red, saw the growing spires of smoke, and heard the low rumbling of a dragon stirring to life, nothing they saw was much different from other summers in these thirsty lumber towns. By the time they glimpsed what lay behind the heated curtain, by the time they actually saw the hundred-foot-high wall of flames, it was far, far too late. The night before, they had gone to bed looking forward to the festivities of the nation's first Labor Day. By Saturday's end, they were decimated. Men, women and children who ran out of their homes to see what was coming were incinerated on the spot, and maybe they were the lucky ones. Others were alive but burned to the bone and still more took in frantic breaths as they tried to outrun the monster, only to have their lungs and throats seared shut. There are many heroes in "Under a Flaming Sky," largely railroad personnel who put their own lives on the line to evacuate as many people as possible, but the real heroes are the simple people residents trying to eke out a living in their new land who who lost their families, their lives, their homes, and their hope--and Brown, for telling their long-forgotten story. By the time you finish reading "Under a Flaming Sky," you'll find yourself checking the clothes dryer, the stove, all appliances, and that heap of brush and wood that is only one fence away, wondering if that really is smoke you smell. "Under e Flaming Sky" is a true story and history books have a long lineage of boring. But "Under a Flaming Sky" reads like the finest novel, drawing you deeply into the lives--and the hideous deaths and wounds--of these simple, anonymous people who did nothing more than go to bed one hot August night and awoke to a nightmare. Brown also wrote the recently released "The Indifferent Stars Above," about a young bride who suffered the tortures of the damned during the ill-fated Donner Party expedition, and it is no less riveting than "Under a Flaming Sky." Next time you're feeling a little sorry for yourself, read either "Under a Flaming Sky" or "The Indifferent Stars Above." Brown takes history and brings it to horrifying life. Your problems will shrink to nothingness when you read what happened to the people of Northern Minnesota in August 1894.--By LYNN BERK

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 26, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    9780061348105

    Phenomenal Author

    If you enjoyed this title, then "The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride", is a MUST-read.
    Brown's work is so thoroughly researched and his writing so intriguing that I found myself totally emerged in it, unable to put it down.

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  • Posted February 20, 2010

    Quick and very interesting read.

    Author has written a compelling history of this tragedy in Minnesota history. He's done a great job of compiling a large number of individual experiences by the participants in to a logical narrative of what took place in the Hinckley fire. I purchased the book because of my interest in genealogy and Minnesota history and am glad I did.

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  • Posted September 5, 2009

    A Must Read

    I could not put this book down. If you enjoy history you will love this book. Brown's in depth research and clearly written scientific explanations provide the background for this fascinating historical novel about the Great Hinckley Fire in Minnesota. One does not realize the astounding depth of the author's research until one reads the notes at the back of the book and realizes how expertly Brown weaves his novel from this unique event in American history. Excellent photos of many of the main characters.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 29, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 29, 2008

    No text was provided for this review.

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