My husband collects disaster stories.   I think it goes back to his childhood when he read A Night to Remember.  The account of Titanic’s sole voyage was so researched, so well-written and evocative, he’s been chasing disaster accounts ever since.   Me, I like these books for the slice-of-life history that comes with each account, the context of how people lived in some different time and era and who they were.  For whatever reason, we both love disaster accounts and this summer I found a good one.  Under a Flaming Sky (by Daniel James Brown) is one of those books that flies under the radar until the author gets a hit later on.  Here’s hoping the author’s good luck with his current release will give this story a deserved second look.

UAFS is the story of Hinkley, Minnesota, a town on the edge of the prairie near the end of the Guilded Age.  Hinkley had done well as a town, booming along with the twin streams of business and labor.  Lumber was the town’s biggest business and a steady stream of immigrants kept it moving from forests through the sawmills to the trains.  Everyone was in a hurry to get up, get moving and make the product that brought a paycheck and that was fine, except there was rarely time to clean up. As the trunks of the trees went to the mills to be planed and sectioned, the extra got left behind.   Leaves, branches, pine needles and the wood shavings that come from lumbering were left in the fields with the stumps to dry in the air and sun.  A lot of debris had dried by September of 1894; less than two inches of rain had fallen since May. A fire was probably inevitable but Hinckley got an inferno.

Two wild fires started, one south, one southwest of town, each generating high convection winds and low-hanging smoke.  These winds (and the ground debris) fed the fires until they met and the combined flames beat up through the smoke into the cool air above.   It was like adding gasoline.  The wildfires became a gigantic firestorm, a moving wall of flame between four and five miles high.   The thermal winds produced blazing whirlwinds that broke away from the firewall and caught new things alight.  The heat on the ground melted barrels of nails and train rails and people.  In less than four hours,  480 square miles of Minnesota – almost a quarter of a million acres – were consumed.

No one knows how many died in the fire; officials weren’t counting the Native Americans back then and many folks just disappeared.  But hundreds of people survived because a couple of trains drove through the conflagration, picking up fleeing settlers along the way.   Every bridge they crossed had to be checked for safety because the rails were softening under the hideous heat and that meant letting the fire catch up behind you while the brakeman tested the tracks.  A few other people survived by jumping into water, either the river or the standing water in the town’s gravel pit.  But hundreds had no chance at all.

One nine year old boy survived the conflagration and moved to California, eventually becoming a family man and executive but he never really escaped from the fire.  Night after night, while his daughter was studying, the man dreamed of his Minnesota boyhood and woke up screaming.  His daughter couldn’t forget his screams.  Her son created this book.

Under a Flaming Sky, is, in the end, not the story of a disaster but the people who faced it, both those that survived and died.  And that’s why these stories are important.  The survivors inspire us to overcome our own low points and the lost are not forgotten.  We take all of them with us when we close the book and they continue because we remember.  And remember’s a fine thing to do.