The People Versus the Government: The 1918 Cloquet Fire and the Struggle for Compensation

T he 1918 Cloquet fire was perhaps the greatest disaster ever to befall any group of people in the state of Minnesota. Although not as well known as the 1894 Hinckley fire or as large as the 1931 Red Lake fire, it was clearly the most devastating. Known also as the Moose Lake fire or more generally as the northeastern Minnesota fire, this catastrophe was actually many fires, some of which joined together, causing extraordinary damage, death, and injury on Saturday, 12 October 1918. Stephen J. Pyne has pointed out in his book Fire in America that these sorts of autumn fires in the cutover regions of the upper midwest were fairly commonplace. In fact, fires of one kind or another were usual during the summer and autumn as a result of farmers clearing land, lumbermen disposing of slash, untended railroad fires, smoldering bogs and swamps, and fires started by lightning. The dynamic factor in converting this general condition into a dangerous conflagration was a precipitous change in the atmospheric conditions. Of course a dry season and high temperatures helped, but a dramatic fall in the humidity could almost overnight create fire conditions that were beyond the resources of fire-fighting facilities of the day. This is what happened in northern Minnesota on 12 October. Fires along railroad rights of way, some started as recently as 10 October, flared up out of control and joined with fires smoldering in bogs and in the bush, which then generated great heat that in turn strengthened the westerly winds driving the fire on to speeds measured in Duluth at seventy-six miles per hour.1 The main Cloquet fire began along the Great Northern Railway tracks west of Brookston on the south bank of the St. Louis River at mileposts 62 and 67. These fires burned east and south through Brookston, through the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation, and on into Cloquet. Most of the