CHARACTERISTIC INCIDENTS OF THE MICHIGAN FIRE.
FIRES had been burning in Sanilac, Huron, and Tuscola counties, but no one apprehended any danger. Farmers had set fire to slashings to clear the ground for fall wheat, but this happens every fall, and the fact that not a drop of water had fallen in from fifty to seventy days was not considered by those who saw the smoke clouds and replied that there was no danger. There was danger. Behind that pall of smoke was a greater enemy than an earthquake, and it had a tornado at its back, and two hundred miles of forest in the front. From noon until two o'clock a strange terror held the people in its grip; then all of a sudden the heavens took fire, or so it seemed to hundreds. In some localities it came with the sound of thunder. In others it was preceded by a terrible roaring as if a tidal wave were sweeping over the country. Almost at the same minute the flames appeared in every spot over a district of country thirty miles broad by one hundred in length. At Richmondville, ten miles above Sanilac, one hundred and fifty people had comfortable homes, stacks of hay and grain, teams, cows, pigs, sheep, and no fear of the fire which they knew was burning a mile away. At two o'clock the flames rushed out of the woods, leaped the fences, ran across the bare fields, and swallowed every house but two, and roasted alive a dozen people. It is hardly forty rods to the beach of the lake, and yet many people had no time to reach the water. Others reached it with clothing on fire and faces and hands blistered. The houses did not burn singly, but one billow of flame seized all at once and reduced them to nothing in ten minutes. I saw many and many a spot where the billows of fire jumped a clean half mile out of the forest to clutch house or barn. The Thornton family were wiped out with the exception of a boy. Thornton had hitched up his team to drive the family to a place of safety, but when he saw that they were all surrounded by the flames he unhitched the horses in despair. Before they could be unharnessed they bolted in different directions, and the old man became so confused that he ran directly toward a big slashing, which was then a perfect mass of flame, and dropped and died with his head toward it. Meantime the mother and children had taken refuge in the root-house. This was a structure mostly sunk in the ground and the roof well covered with earth. Here they were all right for a time, but when the father failed to join them, one of the sons went out to see what caused the delay. He was hardly out of the place before the door through which he had passed was in flames. In this emergency he ran to a dry creek, and by lying on his face and keeping his mouth to the ground he lived through it. I talked with a woman who lived neighbor to the Thorntons, and who escaped by fleeing to a field of plowed ground. This was only a few rods from the root-house, and she said it was fully an hour before the screams and shrieks and groans from the people inside grew quiet in death. One by one they were suffocated by heat and smoke, and their bodies presented a most horrible appearance. To one riding through the district it seems miraculous that a single soul escaped. The fire swept through the green trees the same as the dry. It ran through fields of corn at the rate of twenty miles an hour, and fields of clover were swept as bare as a floor. Dark and gloomy swamps filled with pools of stagnant water, and the home for years of wildcats, bears, and snakes, were struck and shriveled and burned almost in a flash. Over the parched meadows the flames ran faster than a horse could gallop. Horses did gallop before it, but were overtaken and left roasting on the ground. It seemed as if every hope and avenue of escape was cut off, and yet hundreds of lives were spared. People spent ten to twenty hours in ditches and ponds, or in fields under wet blankets having their hair singed, their limbs blistered, and their clothing burned off piece by piece. In dozens of cases the first flames spared houses and barns, but after seeming to have passed on for miles, suddenly circled back and made a clean sweep of everything. Unless one rides over the burnt district, he cannot believe the eccentricities of a forest fire. In the great swamp, between Sanilac and Sandusky, it burned everything to the roots for a mile in breadth. Then it left patches from ten feet to ten rods wide. Then again it struck in and burned lanes hardly twenty feet wide, leaving half a mile of fuel on either side. In the timber it seemed to strike the green trees harder than the dry ones. It was like a great serpent making its way across the country. It would run within three feet of a wheat stack, and then glide away to lick up a house. It would burn a stack and spare a barn ten feet off. People felt the heat while the fire was yet miles away. It withered the leaves of trees standing two miles from the path of the fiery serpent. The very earth took fire in hundreds of places, and blazed up as if the fire were feasting on cord-wood. The stoutest log-buildings stood up only a few minutes. The fire seemed to catch them at every corner at once, and after a whirl and a roar nothing would be left. Seven miles off the beach, at Forester, sailors found the heat uncomfortable. Where some houses and barns were burned, we could not find even a blackened stick. Every log, beam, and board was reduced to fine ashes. Seven miles back from the lake at Forester a farmer gathered up fifteen persons in his wagon and started for the beach. The fire was close behind them as they started—so close that the dresses of some of the women and children were on fire with the sparks. It was seven miles of up hill and down, with corduroy ruts, and roots, and the horses needed no whip to urge them into a mad run. As the wagon started, the tire of a hind wheel rolled off. They could not stop for it, and yet, even on a good road, the wheel would have crushed down in going twenty rods without it. It is an actual fact, the horses pushed over that seven miles of rough road at a wild run, and the wheel stood firm. A delay of five minutes at any point of the road would have given fifteen more victims to the flames which followed on behind. I saw the wagon at the lake, and I saw the tire seven miles away on the roadside. The people who sought the beach had still to endure much of the heat and all of the smoke. Wading up to their shoulders, they were safe from the flames, but sparks and cinders fell like a snowstorm, and the smoke was suffocating. The birds not caught in the woods were carried out to sea and drowned, and the waves have washed thousands of them ashore. Squirrels, rabbits, and such small animals stood no show at all, but deer and bear sought the beach and the company of human beings. In one case a man leaped from a bluff into the lake and found himself close behind a large bear. They remained in company under the bank nearly all night, and the bear seemed as humble as a dog. In another instance two of the animals came out of the forest and stood close to a well from which a farmer was drawing water to dash over his house, and they were with him for two hours before they deemed it prudent to jog along. Deer came out and sought the companionship of cattle and horses, and paid no attention to persons rushing past them.—Detroit Free Press.