Forest Fires

Before settlers came to what is now Minnesota, Indigenous people stewarded forests by setting fires. These controlled burns eliminated dead trees and underbrush that could have fueled unstoppable, more destructive fires. Although settlers continued this practice in the 1800s, they did so as industrial expansion was building up ignitable fuel. The Hinckley Fire of 1894 and the Cloquet Fire of 1918, caused by this buildup as well as drought, rank among the deadliest forest fires in recorded history.

Fire has fundamentally shaped Minnesota’s environment. In forested regions through the mid-1800s, Native people set controlled fires to break up the habitats of game animals, and to make space for crops and wild plants like blueberries. They did this regularly to support both the environment and their own goals. High-intensity crown fires, by contrast, were uncontrolled. Also called stand-replacing fires, these were caused by natural sources such as storms (which downed trees) and lightning (which ignited them). They burned treetops, sometimes casting firebrands that sparked new fires miles away. Unlike the fires set by Native people, stand-replacing fires occurred every couple of centuries and started new cycles of forest succession.

Colonization transformed the region’s longstanding fire regime. Settlers used fire as a tool to clear brush and transform forest into farmland. Setting fires every year, however, desensitized them to seeing smoke, which they regarded as a regular occurrence. Beginning in the 1870s and continuing through the 1920s, Minnesota experienced periods of drought at the same time that the logging and mining industries developed. The expansion of railroads into northern Minnesota’s forests began in earnest during the 1880s alongside the development of the Iron Range, which allowed logging companies to push deeper into previously inaccessible regions. Sparks from trains caused more than half of all forest fires. In this environment of increased settlement, industrial activity, and drought, small fires converged to form large, destructive, stand-replacing fires.

Before 1900, logging was an incredibly wasteful industry, with most companies leaving behind their slash (narrowed tops, branches, etc.). Slash dried out in the spring and summer, and by fall became a powerful incendiary. One result was the Hinckley Fire (1894), which killed at least 413 people. Survivors buried their deceased family and friends in mass graves (“death trenches”), with one serving as the final resting place for ninety victims. The fire wiped out the city of Hinckley, home to about 1,200 people at the time. But the region was also home to an uncounted number of Native American and backcountry settlers. At least twenty-three Ojibwe people living on the Mille Lacs Reservation died in the Hinckley Fire. The number of dead among other Indigenous people, squatters, and backwoodsmen may have been much higher.

The Hinckley Fire helped reform forest-management policies. Afterward, Minnesota created the position of chief fire warden and appointed Civil War veteran Christopher Columbus Andrews to the post. Once in office, Andrews deputized local fire wardens to levy fines against companies that did not burn the slash piles they left behind. This was an imperfect system, however, as local wardens hesitated to punish their community members. Since there was no minimum penalty for not burning slash, many fines were, according to Andrews, “as low as $5.00 and $1.00.”

Not all destructive fires resulted in high death tolls. The 1908 fire season, for example, burned more than 400,000 acres across Minnesota. The costliest of these was the Chisholm Fire, which burned 20,000 acres of forest on the rapidly industrializing Mesabi Iron Range. Flames imperiled the Mesabi, with reports that fire completely surrounded Hibbing. The fire did not cause any casualties, but it did cause nearly $1.5 million in damages in the richest iron-producing region in the world. It also led to renewed calls for fire prevention as the state narrowly avoided a second Hinckley.

After Chisholm, the state followed Andrews’s advice by passing H.F. No. 76 in 1909. The law divided the state into fire districts, employed rangers, and increased the state’s annual fire budget to $21,000. While this was an improvement, the Forestry Commission was still woefully underfunded. Andrews had asked for $38,000—a figure he regarded as inadequate to manage Minnesota’s fire problem.

Drought persisted in Minnesota, and the 1910 season was the worst of all. The historically dry year made the Forestry Commission burn through its funds as fast as the fires raged across the state. By the end of August, the fire fund had run out, forcing Andrews to recall his rangers from their districts on September 1.

On October 7, a mere thirty-six days after Andrews pulled his rangers out of their districts, perfect weather conditions whipped up fires that had been smoldering for weeks into an inferno. More than a million forested acres burned in Minnesota during 1910. The biggest of these, the Baudette Fire, burned more than 300,000 acres, destroying the towns of Baudette and Spooner, killing at least twenty-nine people, and leaving thousands more homeless. Andrews and many other Minnesotans claimed the responsibility for the disaster lay with the state legislature. According to Andrews, if the legislature had approved his request for a $38,000 budget, it would have allowed the ranger service to continue through the rest of the fire season. Less than a year after the Baudette Fire, the state established the Minnesota Forest Service.

World War I contributed to slash buildup in Minnesota and relaxed policing of logging companies. William T. Cox, the state’s chief forester, was appointed special recruiting officer for forestry engineers and contributed 1,000 men for work in forestry battalions in Europe. As a result, however, Cox reported that “the war had drained so many men out of the north country that it was hard to find even an emergency fire-fighting force.”

In early October of 1918, flames raged across more than 250,000 acres toward the densely populated Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, home to more than 100,000 people. Like most settlement-era fires, what became known as the Cloquet Fire was not one fire but many, whipped into a conflagration by prime weather conditions. It left the Twin Ports largely unaffected but destroyed much of the surrounding area, including the towns of Cloquet and Moose Lake. Most of the Fond du Lac reservation burned, resulting in a devastating loss of property and livestock––though the Ojibwe people living there suffered no deaths.

The Cloquet Fire killed at least 453 people and injured or displaced more than 52,000 others, most of whom sought refuge in the Twin Ports. Relief efforts for the white settlers was swift, largely administered by the National Guard and the American Red Cross. The Fond du Lac Ojibwe, however, were not as lucky. Only those who had accepted the allotment of land into private plots received relief, and even this took years to arrive. The Cloquet Fire is the worst disaster in Minnesota history, and it, like the other fire disasters, was only partly natural.

Logging’s decline, the US Forest Service, and state regulation reduced forest fires in Minnesota overall after 1920. Large fires persist in the twenty-first century, however, due to the Forest Service’s fire-suppression policies––efforts to remove fire from the American landscape that build up fuel loads. Fuel-load buildup contributed to both the Ham Lake Fire in 2007 and the Pagami Creek Fire in 2011.

Warming temperatures and renewed use of fossil fuels in the early 2000s made fires—and their smoke—common sights in Minnesota, Canada, and the Upper Midwest. Despite regulations passed during the 1990s and 2000s to reverse ozone deterioration, explosive forest fires undid that progress.