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Chapter Eight

Weather and the Fires of 1871

Huug van den Dool

Introduction1

On the evening of 8 October and into the very early morning hours of 9 October 1871, the United States was hit by one of the worst natural disasters on record. The 1871 fire storms in the Great Lakes area are very high on the list of the worst natural disasters in the United States that also includes the Galveston hurricane (1900) and the San Francisco earthquake (1906). For natural disasters involving the element of fire, the 1871 event was in fact the very worst. Four million acres burned, mainly in Wisconsin and Michigan, and 1,500 to 2,000 (or maybe 3,000) people died, which is extraordinary for the thinly populated upper Midwest at that time. If we widen the time window by a week on either side, then we would include significant (wild) fires in Minnesota (prairie fire), New York, and across the border in Ontario, Canada.

What lives on in the collective memory of Americans is mainly the Great Chicago Fire. But as shown in figure 1 (take note of the black areas), the acres burned were primarily in Wisconsin (both sides of the Green Bay) and Michigan (many places). Chicago had about two hundred deaths, but the aftermath of the destruction of this emerging world city had a huge economic impact, making it all the more memorable. The largest loss of lives, however, was in the Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo, where at least 1,200 people may have died.2 The near simultaneous eruption of fire storms very late on 8 October

1 My sincere thanks to Gil Compo, Jeff Whitaker, and Cathy Smith for their help with the “Twentieth Century Reanalysis” data; to Michael Douma for the information about the immigrant Becler; to Geoffrey Reynolds, Bob Swierenga, and Catherine Jung for providing me with copies of local newspaper articles published after the Holland fire; and Dave Rodenhuis for his comments.

2 There were too few survivors to identify the dead or report the missing.

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1871 in Chicago, Peshtigo, Manistee, and in Holland, Michigan—places quite distant from each other—is very significant. Obviously, it is the disaster at the latter location that lives on in the memory of history-conscious Dutch Americans. Whereas there had been many small fires for weeks, the bulk of the damage occurred in just one or two hours in all locales mentioned.

Figure 2 shows the timeline of the event. The precise timing is very important for the understanding of what exactly happened in terms of the weather and because many errors about the dates have crept into the remembered history of that dreadful event. Part of the difficulty is that the worst of the fires (which occurred within only a few hours) happened around Holland, Michigan at mid-night, spanning two dates, the eighth and the ninth of October. Local (solar) time was

Fig. 8.1. Schematic weather map, 2100 EST, 8 October 1871 (Copyright 1970 from “When the Midwest Burned” by Donald

A. Haines and Earl L. Kuehnast. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., http://www.taylorandfrancis.com)3

3 Shown are central pressure (998 millibar) of the low pressure area, the warm and the cold fronts across northern WI and western IA respectively, and some wind strength and direction information. Note the areas in black (dark cross-hatch) in WI and MI that were to burn nearly simultaneously and within a few hours of this weather analysis. The Chicago area that burned is too small to see on a map of this scale. The weather map was reproduced from D. A. Haines and E. L. Kuehnast, “When the Midwest burned,” Weatherwise 23, no. 3 (June 1970): 113-19. Henceforth HK.

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used naturally in the olden days, a time broadcast to people in the area via a central place, usually the church tower. The concept of standard time and time-zones in the United States was first organized in 1883—well after 1871. Descriptive eyewitness accounts are relative to whatever local time was used.

Another complicating factor regarding the timeline is—for Chicago at least—the nebulous distinction between a “large” fire (on Saturday the seventh) and a “great” fire (late on the eighth). Newspapers on the eighth reported that the largest fire in Chicago’s history was under control after a battle of eighteen hours. What began to be called the “large fire” preceded the “great fire” by one day (or by only hours, from the time the large fire was thought to be extinguished and the great one started). To be sure, the great fire mentioned at all locations occurred very late on Sunday the eighth and into the very early hours of Monday, 9 October, 1871 (see fig. 2).

It is rather obvious, and not new, to assume that drought preconditioned an unusually large part of the United States for the possibility of wildfires in the late summer and fall of 1871—the season when fires are most common in any year. Nor is it new to assume that the dry weather and strong winds in early October were the catalyst of the disaster. In this article we will pay more than usual attention to what constitutes fuel for such fires and to logging practices in those early days. The issue of ignition will also be covered. A relatively unknown aspect is the role played by the nocturnal (low-level) jets in the atmosphere in orchestrating a firestorm in all affected areas around the same time. Obviously, given the audience at this conference, we have to describe the Dutch American angle as well, although excellent descriptions have been set down earlier, most notably in the 1996 Van Raalte book4 and its various references.

Fig. 8.2. Timeline: 6-9 October 1871, in Chicago,

Peshtigo, and Holland

4 “The 1871 Holland Fire,” in Jeanne M. Jacobson, Elton J. Bruins, Larry J. Wagenaar, Albertus C. Van Raalte: Dutch Leader and American Patriot” (Hope College, 1996), 180-93.

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History of United States weather observations and analysis

Surprisingly, the weather in all of the United States in 1871 can be studied through instrumental surface observations of pressure, cloud cover, temperature, and wind (strength and direction). A forerunner of what is now called the National Weather Service (NWS, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] in the Department of Commerce) had been set up the year before, in 1870. It was called the Signal Service, and although it was part of the War Department, it had the non-military subtitle “Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce.” The telegraph was the one single advance in technology that made both weather reporting (to a central place) and dissemination of a forecast in a timely manner possible. All original United States weather maps made in real time (about three times a day) would, after usage, languish on dusty piles in libraries. Recently these records have been saved and can now be consulted by anybody for free on the Internet.5

At the beginning there were just thirty-two reporting stations across the country, one of which was Chicago. That is rather significant because a trained observer, who lived through the disaster we describe here, reported on it (that is, beyond dry numbers, because this person’s own office was destroyed). Many other observations were taken for various reasons by states, universities, agricultural schools, and so on, within the entire nation in October 1871 (as they were in any month) but not reported for immediate use by the Signal Service. One hundred years later, in 1970, Haines and Kuehnast made a serious effort to retrieve all the historical observations from various archives, plot the data according to modern conventions, and use it for a “hand” analysis of surface weather maps for a few days in October 1871. Forty years later the HK article is, from a meteorological standpoint, still the best on the 1871 fires.

Meanwhile, the analysis of manual surface weather maps for a limited area has been replaced entirely by computer analysis of the global atmosphere in three dimensions, including the state of the land surface and into the deep of the ocean. Since 1990 we have been contemplating a retroactive re-analysis of all weather maps using this modern computer analysis, going back as far as possible. A number of scholars began one such effort, beginning in 1870 and covering 140 years.6 One can thus pick any period and any country for any event

5 http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/data_rescue_daily_weather_maps.html. 6 Compo, G. P., J. S. Whitaker, P. D. Sardeshmukh, N. Matsui, R. J. Allan, X. Yin, B.

E. Gleason, R. S. Vose, G. Rutledge, P. Bessemoulin, S. Brönnimann, M. Brunet, R.

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worth further study. The present author takes some credit for pushing the beginning of the “Twentieth Century Reanalysis” (as it is called) back to 1870. So we can now study this historically significant event in 1871 in the same way we did already for some windstorms and water-surge events that hit Scheveningen in the Netherlands in 1894 and 1897,7 which incidentally heralded great economic innovation.8

“Think Fuel”

In modern times the United States government has had a National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho to manage the resources to fight fire in uncultivated areas. People and equipment are moved around the nation to be on hand where and when needed most. Obviously the weather and short-term climate forecast is part of the planning, and often the NWS issues “fire weather” statements about conditions being particularly conducive to fire (like high winds, dry air, no rain) in the face of large amounts of “fuel” being available. “Think Fuel” is a slogan used constantly at courses given by NIFC. Fuel for wildfires is usually dry undergrowth. So, if a spring has been wet, the undergrowth would be lush and plentiful. A dry summer after a wet spring could produce a terrible fire season, even worse than when both spring and summer are dry. Healthy trees are usually not very good fuel, because they are hard, and contain a lot of water. In natural conditions trees in forests do not burn more often than once every few hundred years.

Logging, however, changed everything in the pioneer days, and logging debris added manmade fuel. When a tree was cut, as much as one fourth of the tree (sawdust, smaller branches, twigs, stumps) was left behind, and loggers’ debris was excellent fuel. Manmade fuel also included the structures erected in towns, especially wooden structures, and the huge supply of lumber which was awaiting the next project. When small fires repeatedly affect a forest over a period of months, they do precondition a previously healthy forest for a devastating fire that will consume the whole trees.

I. Crouthamel, A. N. Grant, P. Y. Groisman, P. D. Jones, M. Kruk, A. C. Kruger, G. J. Marshall, M. Maugeri, H. Y. Mok, Ø. Nordli, T. F. Ross, R. M. Trigo, X. L. Wang, S. D. Woodruff, and S. J. Worley, 2011, “The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 137, no. 654 (January 2011): 1-28. Hereafter cited as Compo et al.

7 De Bruin and Van den Dool, “De storm van 1894: Een ramp voor Scheveningen, en een test case voor moderne meteorologen,” Zenit (2010): 316-20.

8 It is a sad fact that disaster may bring about innovation; the destruction of Rotterdam by enemy bombardment in May 1940 is an example.

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A fire also needs ignition. Unfortunately, ignition was rarely in short supply in the pioneering communities.9 Humans can set a fire (on purpose, or by negligence), or nature (lightning) can do the job. Old fires can live on in the ashes or in the soil for a very long time and be rekindled many days or even weeks later. It is worth noting that in the nineteenth century, fire was used on purpose everywhere as part of the pioneering process. The debris left by logging was set on fire to be destroyed and left to burn itself out after the loggers moved on to the next project. Fire was also used to open new land for farming and to build railroads and the like. Most of the time this practice caused no problem because rain would extinguish the fire or the fire would run its course by exhausting the available fuel. But in a year with plenty of fuel (natural as well as man made) in combination with many small manmade fires within the community, a huge problem could potentially exist. Aside from 1871, the same conspiracy of factors caused a disaster on the fourth through the sixth of September 1881.10 While the 1871 out-of-control fires were more widespread, the availability of far more meteorological observations in 1881 made this event an even better case study for determining what caused the most dangerous fire-weather in the Great Lakes area. Note that Port Huron, Michigan was devastated both in 1871 and 1881.

A fire needs fuel. A moving fire, to sustain itself, needs fuel in the direction it is moving. Under relatively benign conditions (low wind speeds, cool weather), humans have a chance of stopping a fire with shovels, water, and the clearing of areas by any means possible—even setting small controlled fires to rob the advancing bigger fire of its fuel. A fire storm can break out when conditions are not benign (high winds, dry air, plenty of fuel). In that case the fire moves at the speed of a human long distance runner, and all thoughts of fighting the fire should be given up, and instead, all thought must be given to saving lives (including the fire fighters themselves). Firestorms in natural conditions have to move; otherwise they run out of fuel in a very short time. By contrast, firestorms caused by aerial conventional bombardment (Rotterdam, Dresden, and Hamburg in World War II) are stationary and develop such heat that the fire consumes material that would not normally be considered fuel.

9 Even today the NIFC does not teach “think ignition.”10 Mark D. Schwartz, “Meteorological Causes of the 1881 Fire in Michigan’s Thumb

Area,” in Weather and Forecasting 5:148–57.

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The Dutch angle

The story about the 1871 fires is relevant to Dutch American history because Holland, Michigan, was one of the places hardest hit. Thanks to good preparation for such a calamity, the loss of life was minimal, although two-thirds of the city turned into ashes in two hours. This was a cataclysmic and defining event for a town that had existed for fewer than twenty-five years. The whole area had been a wooded wilderness until Dominie A. C. Van Raalte settled there in 1847. There were also fires in surrounding Graafschap, Noordeloos, Collendoorn, and on the boundaries of Zeeland and Groningen. Eyewitness accounts of the weather were published jointly by De Grondwet, De Wachter, and De Hope (since two of the three presses had burned) on 10 and 12 October 1871. From these accounts we obtain the following observations “by proxy” (observations without the use of instruments). There had been: (1) uninterrupted drought for weeks, (2) persistent fires in all directions (from Holland) in the week prior to 8 October, (3) stormy southerly winds and unusually warm temperatures on Sunday afternoon, (4) near hurricane winds turned to the west by eleven o’clock on Sunday evening, and (5) rain on Tuesday the tenth, but winds remained strong. The observations in the above list are correct and completely in line with the HK’s weather maps for these days. The observation that winds turned to the west at (near) hurricane force may not have been representative of the ambient weather conditions, but the result of the firestorm creating its own strong inflow near the surface, and from all directions (as asserted by the Chicago weather observer from first-hand experience).

The fires had predictable consequences, such as acts of heroism, confusion, misery, suffering and dependence on charity, and a period of rebuilding the city of Holland—a last opportunity for Van Raalte to be a community leader. Among the most unexpected consequences for Dutch Americans was the accumulation of great material wealth. This was the case for recent immigrant and unemployed construction worker George Birkhoff Sr. when Chicago burned down.11 Jan Vogel, the founder of the Dutch American wilderness settlement in Missaukee County,12 was equally fortunate when the rebuilding of Chicago made

11 Huug van den Dool, “George David Birkhoff (1884-1944): Dutch American Mathematician Extraordinaire,” in The Dutch in Urban America, Robert P. Swierenga, Donald Sinnema, and Hans Krabbendam, eds. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives of Holland, Hope College, 2004), 76-93.

12 Huug van den Dool, “Jan Vogel and the Dutch Settlement of Missaukee County Michigan,” in Across Borders: Dutch Migration to North America and Australia, Jacob

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the price of lumber skyrocket. Material collected for the study of Jan Vogel also shows that the forests in Missaukee County were filled with smoke for weeks on end in the summer of 1871, making breathing difficult according to the eyewitness account of Leendert Herweijer.13 Weather reports at a few official locations confirm the smoky skies and poor visibility. Small fires were thus going on nearly continuously in the wilderness, but whether a firestorm occurred subsequently and was reported as such (killing people and destroying property) is an entirely different matter. One may safely assume that loggers, such as Jan Vogel, contributed mightily to the loggers’ debris as fuel for the fires.

The following account shows how this event touched people in most unexpected ways.

In rare times of distress, the Dutch foreign service came to the aid of the immigrants. When the Dutchman F. P. A. Becler arrived in Chicago in 1871, just after a great fire had ravaged the city, he found that there was as yet no Dutch consul in the city. Becler’s story shows that while the Dutch Foreign Service was without the resources to provide their consuls with salaries, they were concerned to aid Dutch immigrants in trouble. Fearing that his luggage had gone up in the flames, Becler appealed to the Consul Voswinkel Dorselen for aid. He received $200. But just days later, Becler’s baggage turned up at the train station in Danforth, Illinois, where he was staying with a friend. Though spared from the flames, the luggage had been ransacked and pilfered. Becler asked the Consul whether he would now be required to give the aid money back, considering that he wasn’t, in fact, a victim of the fire. Becler tried to use the promise of returning the money as an example of his character. It was not cash that he needed, but a job.14

In his forthcoming book about the history of Holland, Robert P. Swierenga has collected more material on the fire, including the human aspects and impacts of the fire (such as the insurance debate, for example), more even than can be found in “The 1871 Holland Fire.”15

E. Nyenhuis, Suzanne M. Sinke, and Robert P. Swierenga, eds. (Holland, MI: Van Raalte Press, 2010), 179-92.

13 Leonard Herweijer, “Pioneer Days in Clam Union Township,” in The Waterfront (September 1981), part 1, 1-4. The article was published in a number of newspapers, but the precise year of Herweijer’s remarks is not known. The original may be in private possession.

14 Michael Douma, “The Evolution of Dutch American Identities, 1847-2011,” PhD diss., Florida State University, 2011. Based on materials from Dutch National Archives in The Hague, NL, 2.0.5.13, and letters by F. P. A. Becler (Danforth, IL) to General Consul, 8 and 13 March, 1872.

15 Jacobson, Bruins, and Wagenaar, Dutch Leader, 180-93.

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Weather and short-term climate in 1871

The data supplied by HK and Compo, et al. are used here to piece together the weather and short-term climate of 1871. To start with the latter, figure 3 shows the soil moisture deficits (dark) or surpluses (light) relative to a modern “normal” amount over many years, from 1968 to 1996 to be precise. These days a measurement of soil moisture from one to two meters’ depth is considered an effective measurable (or calculable) parameter in diagnosing the notion “drought.” Almost the entire nation is dark in tonality, indicating widespread drought in the United States by October 1871. Only the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard show surpluses of moisture in the soil. Deficits in soil moisture are almost always built up slowly (more from increased precipitation rather than evaporation), so what we see is a lack of sufficient precipitation for four or five months (maybe more) prior to October 1871. Looking at the same product for 1 June 1871 (not shown) one can see that drought was prevalent in much of the United States already by late spring 1871, albeit with exceptions, such as in the Dakotas, Iowa, and western Minnesota, which were at least normal in moisture at the end of spring. On the other hand, figure 3 indicates drought in the Great Lakes area, although not extreme. The same is true for 1 June. The drought problem was worse in two separate areas, one in the Southeast, the other in the border area of Colorado, Nevada, and Kansas.

A summary of an advancing weather system is shown in figure 4.16 Low pressure moved from the west-southwest to the east-northeast

Fig. 8.3. Distribution of deficits (dark) or surpluses (light) of soil

moisture in the United States on 8 October 1871, based on a

2011 reanalysis

16 Every day a few mid-latitude cyclones affect the weather in the US, so what we describe here is absolutely not unusual at all.

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in a couple of days. A cold front is often associated with significant weather (showers, severe weather, a cool down, and a wind shift); this cold front’s position is marked from seven o’clock a.m. on the ninth through two o’clock p.m. on the tenth of October 1871. Ahead of a cold front one has a typically strong south-southwest wind, bringing in warm and humid air, but after passage of a cold front, the winds typically veer to the west-northwest. Pressure rises, and the air becomes much cooler and drier. The wind strength in a low pressure system is proportional to the difference between the lowest pressure and the pressure in the large scale environment (never far from 1010-1020mb). The author was disappointed to see central pressures only like 995mbar in the system of October 1871, because this is not even close to being extreme. Recently, in the fall of 2010, on 26 October, a storm system with pressure of 954mb moved through Minnesota. By comparison, therefore, the weather conditions in 1871 could have been a lot worse. Compo et al. and HK agree that the lowest pressure was not extreme, and the storm intensity was quite benign.

Timing of the firestorms and the low-level jet

The manual for fire weather nowadays states: “Low-level jets are of primary concern to fire weather because they can cause rapid fire spread if they drop to the surface.” Or to quote HK: “The major question is: With relatively light winds reported in much of the fire area the evening of the 8th, what caused the rapid high-burning phenomena in most places?” Although this is speculative, the author can think of no phenomenon other than the low-level jet as the cause of the firestorms which erupted at about the same local time in geographically distant places such as Chicago, Peshtigo, and others across Michigan.

The low-level jet (or nocturnal jet) is usually a benign component of the diurnal cycle. It can be explained as follows: Let’s say we have a ten meters per second (m/s) wind from the south through a deep layer in the atmosphere. Near the surface the speed is always less, due to friction. During the day, heat causes warm thermals to rise from the surface, causing some mixing in the lowest several hundreds of meters. Therefore the (horizontal) winds are decelerated at a height of say five hundred meters, because the friction from the surface is felt, perhaps slowing winds down to seven m/s. At sundown, or somewhat before, the heat of the day disappears, and the mixing disappears as well. Suddenly, the wind at five hundred meters height no longer feels the retarding force of friction at the surface. This creates an unbalanced wind of three m/s from the north at five hundred meters. Unbalanced winds

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slowly turn like a Foucault pendulum (because of the earth’s rotation), so some specific number of hours after sunset, the unbalanced wind in this example would turn to the point where it created a total wind of thirteen m/s from the south. This is the moment of maximum “jet” at low levels in the atmosphere. It is a layer of air, not far above our heads, moving faster than the pre-assumed ambient large-scale wind reaching a maximum speed a fixed number of hours after sunset. If wind-strength-change with height surpasses some critical level, turbulence can bring fresh winds back to the earth’s surface (where winds have died down since sundown).

This is what may have happened on the evening of 8 October 1871. To the surprise of everybody, the small fires that were everywhere (and thought to be under control more or less) were suddenly whipped up by new winds appearing out of nowhere, and in certain places, the small fires consolidated into fires large enough to feed on their own as in a firestorm. A low level jet was not anticipated, nor was it understood or explained until the 1950s. Generally the low level jet does not set off showers or severe weather; in fact, to the dismay of firefighters, most

Fig. 8.4. Summary of an advancing weather system

(Copyright 1970 from “When the Midwest Burned” by

Donald A. Haines and Earl L. Kuehnast. Reproduced by

permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., http://www.

taylorandfrancis.com)17

17 The central value of the low pressure system is shown in successive positions in crossed-out open circles (from 997 millibar in Kansas to 989 millibar by the time it moved into Canada), the position of the cold front (black line with black filled triangles indicating the direction of the movement of the front). For instance, the cold front swept through Holland, Michigan, on Tuesday morning. In the shaded areas the rainfall was greater than one inch during 8-10 October. Smaller amounts are noted near stations. For example, Grand Rapids (GRR) received 0.20 of an inch. From HK.

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often showers (if any are around), are suppressed when the jet descends.

How extreme?

We have discussed several factors that contributed or may have contributed to the 1871 fires. It is obvious that the outcome was extreme since this was the biggest natural disaster in United States history involving fire. But while we must conclude that the weather in early October 1871 contributed to the intensity of the fire, and the build-up of drought during much of 1871 was conducive for fire, yet neither were extreme. It is the availability of manmade fuel in the logging business that created an extreme situation. Ignition was not a critical factor because small fires were all around, an unbelievable but tolerated hazard. The situation regarding the effectiveness of the low level jet in developing the firestorm requires further analysis to make this determination. Even the Compo et al. data may not suffice for that aspect.

The unlikely causes

The terrible events of 1871 have attracted various explanations that are unlikely to be correct, but they live on, almost as entertainment. The press attributed the ignition of the Chicago fire to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. Although the great fire erupted near the O’Leary farm, the journalist who had spiced up the story admitted to its fabrication. Some ten years after 1871, somebody suggested that the comet Biela broke up into pieces and caused the ignition of the fires in so many places. To add insult to injury, in 1985 a book appeared entitled Mrs. O’Leary’s Comet.18 Curiously, these unlikely causes all address “ignition.”

The author himself thought briefly that “dry lightning” might have done the job of ignition. Dry lightning is lightning from a thunderstorm with a very high base (common in the southwestern United States where the air is almost always very dry). In that case precipitation that falls from the shower may evaporate before reaching the ground. Reports of the winds turning to the west and growing stronger on Sunday evening in Holland, Michigan, gave the erroneous impression that the cold front came through that night with quite possibly showers of the dry lightning type. But the cold front came only on Tuesday morning. Again, lightning is ignition. But it was

18 Laura Knight-Jadczyk, “Comet Biela and Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.” Sott.net, Sunday, 3 February, 2008.

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fuel that was the main problem. The eyewitness accounts from this community are very specific. They knew that if any of the fires pushing in from Graafschap, Michigan, reached a large cache of loggers’ debris at Tannery Creek, the city would be lost. That’s exactly what happened.