Minnewaska Musings

By Paul Gremmels

Hinckley, Minnesota September, 1st 1894: A burning train coasts into the Hinckley train station. The station manager, sitting at his bay window, sends the last telegram of his life to Duluth. It reads simply, “I believe that I have stayed too long.”

  

I enjoy visiting the Apostle Islands area of northern Wisconsin. To get there from my home, I usually drive through Hinckley, and I am embarrassed to say, that I have driven by a gigantic, black obelisk for years, without ever stopping to see what it represented. This year, I stopped.

   Standing before the obelisk, I marveled at its mass. A smaller, darker version of the Washington Monument, it is sculpted out of solid, black marble and stands some fifty feet high. It dwarfs you. After reading the inscription on the face of it, I was humbled. The monument is in honor of the 476 people who died in The Great Hinkley Fire of 1894. The death toll is believed to be much higher, as many people were unaccounted for and disturbingly, the loss of Native Americans was not even tallied. Directly behind the memorial, are four, boxcar long depressions in the ground, cordoned off by a sagging, shin-high chain. These are mass graves. A resting place for the 476 men, women and children who lost their lives as the fire swept over the town of Hinckley. Many of them, were unidentified.

   Puffy cumulus clouds slowly passed over with patches of brilliant blue between them. I stared down at the depressions in the ground and thought of what an awful but important task it must have been to dig these trenches and lay the bodies in them. I thought of the fire and how it killed and destroyed everything within a quarter million acres. And quickly. That terrible day was dry and hot, with low, heavy cloud cover. These clouds kept the heat of the fire growing like a broiler. Until, as a forest fire expert told me, the flames punched holes in the cloud cover, allowing cool air to rush in from above. This, combined with the poor logging practices of the time, which left all the trimmings on the ground, called “slash,” created a rare and incredible anomaly called a Fire Storm, blowing up much like a Super-Cell thunderstorm. But the rain of this storm was burning brands of timber and the tornados were whirlwinds of fire.

   After the fire had subsided, few things remained. Some people had survived by climbing into wells or submersing themselves in lakes and swamps. But mostly, everything was dead and destroyed. All the buildings were gone. The fall stores, cattle, personal belongings, and horses; all gone. No birds sang. No wildlife was seen. Only a few of the larger tree trunks stood black, and smoldering against the bleak horizon. This, is what the obelisk represents.

   No one places flowers on these graves anymore. All cemeteries have this section. The section that marks losses that are just too long ago and too many generations removed for anyone to be alive that would visit or care. A dilapidated storage shed sits next to the cemetery, one of its doors hangs askew, creaking in the breeze. Across the busy highway you can buy a used car or RV. A waving, inflatable tells me there is a sale. Cars rush by heading for the casino down the road.

   I am standing in the shadow of the obelisk now, looking down at the depressions, shutting the sounds out from around me. I say some words to the close and holy darkness and decide that the next time I pass this way, that I will bring flowers.