When two forest fires converged on one small town

"Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894"
by Daniel James Brown
The Lyons Press, 244 pp., $22.95

Angus Hay, editor of the Hinckley Enterprise in 1894, never wrote about what it had been like to live through the firestorm that destroyed that Minnesota town, saying the truth would seem unreal to anyone "fortunate as to have never had the experience."

Redmond author Daniel James Brown concedes that Hay was probably correct, that "you had to be there to fully comprehend it."

Still, Brown's book, "Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894," is a valiant attempt to record the horror and chaos that resulted when two forest fires converged on Hinckley. Brown succeeds well enough that any reader of this book will come away with a new respect for the power of fire.

The problem in telling the story is that there are scores of stories to tell. Two thousand people were in the land burned by the fire on Sept. 1, 1894, and about 1,500 of them survived.

In the end, it is probably not important to keep all the stories straight. It is enough to know that people rushed about as the firestorm hit, some diving down wells and into root cellars; others attempting to escape on a burning train that took them to Skunk Lake where they squatted in its mud and slime while the fire roared overhead — an image straight out of Dante's "Inferno."

Brown attempts to impose order on the chaos by concentrating on a few of the stories, especially on the family of Evan Hansen, who was his great grandfather. From these stories, Brown conveys the horror of being separated from loved ones during a disaster, and the grief of loss in the aftermath.