On October 12, 1918, a forest fire of unprecedented size and ferocity devoured the lumber towns of Cloquet and Moose Lake, Minnesota and most of the surrounding countryside and farmland. 450 people died, but thousands more were rushed to safety by freight trains—the same trains that had started the fire in the first place. At your table, events inspired by the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire make a terrific complication. The party travels somewhere rural for a straightforward reason. But when the PCs arrive, a fire forces them to escape, and to help as many people along the way as they feel comfortable risking their lives for.
cw: lots of graphic fire death stuff
Also, I’m very excited to be able to publicly announce that Ballad Hunters—my forthcoming RPG about singing and fighting magical folk ballads in 1813 England and Scotland—will be published by Pelgrane Press, the people behind 13th Age and GUMSHOE games like Trail of Cthulhu, Swords of the Serpentine, and The Yellow King. You can sign up to be notified when it’s available for purchase by putting yourself on my mailing list.
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If you’ve ever visited the magnificent north woods of Minnesota, the forest you saw was not original. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, almost every inch of Minnesota forestland was logged at some point. Improperly-logged forests are particularly vulnerable to wildfires. It’s unavoidable in logging that the forest floor becomes covered in wood. Each tree that falls needs to have its branches removed, as usually only the trunks are useful for lumber. And every time you drop a large, profitable tree it usually takes down some little trees as it falls. All the branches and smaller logs that litter the ground are called “slash.” If left there, they dry out and become very flammable. Small wildfires were an almost constant presence in the Minnesota timberlands.
The summer of 1918 in Minnesota was the driest in almost fifty years. The timber companies were supposed to do controlled burns of logged areas to clear out the slash, but conditions were so dry that couldn’t happen. Not that it would have been easy anyway. World War One was still ongoing, and having so many Minnesotans of working age fighting in Europe meant labor shortages back home.
Then there were the railroads. Lumber reached the port of Duluth and the rest of the American market via train. The same lines took the lumberjacks and their families into Duluth to do their shopping. These trains had coal-powered locomotives, and the smoke from the firebox often carried embers and live coals along with it. The stacks were supposed to have screens on them to catch any fiery chunks, but the screens often warped in the heat of the exhaust, creating a hassle for the engineers who often just removed them. The railroads were also supposed to send fire monitors to walk the tracks, but those same war-induced labor shortages meant those checks didn’t happen.
On October 10th, an engine caught a patch of grass alight near a giant pile of lumber that was waiting for a buyer. Neighbors spent a full day trying to extinguish the blaze, but to no avail. The weather worsened. The wind picked up, making it easier for embers to travel. The humidity nosedived, making it easier for fires to start. Other, smaller train-sparked fires caught and joined the first one. By the time people realized what was happening on October 12th, it was too late to do anything but flee.
Image credit: Missvain. Released under a CC BY 4.0 license.
The word went out across the countryside: get to the train stations at Cloquet and Moose Lake. Lines of boxcars there could transport people to safety, but only if families could reach the trains ahead of the fire. The sky turned orange, except right by the fires where it was black.
Farming families that owned cars raced to the railway stations. But a Ford Model T handles poorly under good conditions, let alone driven at speed without visibility. Parts of the cars were flammable and ignited as debris landed inside. Charles and Ida Eckman wound up in a ditch. Ida was thrown from the vehicle, and Charles was struck by another car while he was exiting his. Neighbor Ole Swanson picked them up in his car, but he wound up in a ditch too a quarter-mile down the road. Another refugee, Augusta Odberg, wound up in a ditch, then had to leap back into it to avoid another car—but that car wound up in the ditch too, striking her and crushing both her legs.
The worst was a sharp turn on a narrow road leading into Moose Lake, known thereafter as Dead Man’s Curve. The smoke was too thick for cars to see they were approaching the curve. Some fifteen cars flew off the road at Dead Man’s Curve, many flipping as they landed amid the rocks and burning brush. Some were trapped in their wrecks and burned alive. Estimates of those who perished at Dead Man’s Curve range from 75 to 100—almost a quarter of those killed in the Cloquet-Moose Lake fire.
Not everybody had a car. Car-less families with more small children than they could carry, or who wanted to bring possessions with them, had to travel to the train station by horse-drawn wagon. That came with its own perils. The Soderberg family’s wagon caught fire in the middle of the road and burned its occupants to death, Emma Soderberg clutching a baby in her arms. The horse managed to break free, but expired a few steps away. Something similar happened to the Honkalas family when its horse, blinded by the smoke, led the wagon into a ditch, but all the family managed to escape, even though young Esther and Helen passed out from the smoke.
The wind was already high before the fire spread, but wildfires make their own wind. The gale lifted debris and sent them sailing. Many eyewitness reported flaming planks from any of the area’s lumber yards flying through the sky to come down on haystacks, houses, and people. Hurricane-force winds uprooted trees. A burning piece of timber landed in the Lofalds family’s wagon, right atop their blankets and quilts. The whole load burst into flames and had to be pitched overboard, even as the children had to use water from a pail to extinguish the sparks that were lighting the horses’ manes.
Many families sought safety in their root cellars. That proved unwise. The fires above turned the Homicz family’s cellar into an oven, roasting them alive in their place of refuge. When they were found, the clothing on some of the children had burned away, but the metal buttons were left in a row on their chests and stomachs. Reports differ on whether it got hot enough to kill in the Soderberg family’s cellar (a different Soderberg family from above), but the fire still consumed all the oxygen within. Some reports describe finding the family asphyxiated without a mark on their bodies.
Wells killed some and saved others. Five people from a sawmill—co-owners Hjalmer and William Jankala, cook Aina Rajala, and workers Emil Korpi and Hugo Luusua—sought safety in a well. The one on the bottom had his foot in the well bucket, and the other four stacked up on top of him. When the rope holding the bucket burned, they all drowned. Five members of the Gaustad family and their neighbor Agnes Peterson sought safety in a well, but roasted to death. Yet the Jubola and Sobleski families found safety in a dry well. They dropped in a wooden ladder so there’d be room for all fourteen adults and children to stand in the vertical space. Then they nailed a canvas in place over the well’s mouth. It was harrowing, but all fourteen survived.
Those who escaped the fire made for the trains waiting for them at Cloquet and Moose Lake. Most who made it came not in cars or wagons, but on foot. Invalids arrived in wheelbarrows pushed by friends, family, and neighbors. The refugees packed into long lines of boxcars. When a train couldn’t fit any more refugees, it chuffed slowly out of the station. In Cloquet alone, four trains carried seven thousand refugees to safety.
Cloquet’s last train departed at 10:30 pm. By that point the fire hadn’t just reached the town, it was inside the town. The timing of this departure has proven controversial. Railway agent Lawrence Fauley is remembered as the hero of the moment, helping the mayor organize the evacuation and sitting on the cow-catcher of the last locomotive out of town, holding a lantern aloft to light the way through the smoke. There’s even a city park in Cloquet named for him.
But fifty years later, a by-then-elderly eyewitness published an account that claimed Fauley almost got everyone killed, and that the town leaders covered up his incompetence so everyone could have a feel-good story. Kathryn Gray published her recollections in 1968 that Fauley refused to let the last train leave Cloquet. All the refugees were stuffed into boxcars, and it was railroad policy that passengers not be permitted to ride in boxcars without authorization from higher in the company. No authorization had come (likely the telegraph lines were down), so Fauley couldn’t release the train. Gray says the Cloquet police chief threatened the train’s engineer (not Fauley) with a gun and ordered him to get the train rolling. She agrees that Fauley really did ride on the cow-catcher, lantern aloft, though.
As the trains left town, they had to stop at every bridge and trestle so the crew could disembark and check that the structure hadn’t been too damaged by the fire to support the train—even as flames crept up to the very tracks upon which the cars full of refugees were waiting.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the density of Nordic names in the above, but Finns, Swedes, and Norwegians weren’t the only ones in the area. Ojibwes had been living there for centuries, and the Fond du Lac Reservation was in the worst of the fire. Yet not a single Ojibwe perished in the fire. Some of that was surely luck, but not all of it. Ojibwe folkways about surviving wildfires—not in general, but specifically here, on this land—saved the Fond du Lac nation. Refugees paddled boats into the middles of lakes. Where there were no boats to be had, they dunked blankets in the river and wrapped them about one another, swapping the blankets for freshly-dunked ones as they dried. Betty Gurno reported hearing voices screaming in Ojibwemowin from a cemetery, “Help us, we’re burning,” but there was no one there. Gurno later recounted, “My grandmother always said that the dead were hollering. They were burning too.”
After the fire, those who escaped were moved into refugee centers in Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin—armories, schools, hotels, and Masonic lodges—then into shacks back in their annihilated hometowns, hastily built before winter arrived. But the horror was not over, for the Spanish flu (depending on your metric, the deadliest epidemic in human history) had arrived in Minnesota only the month before. Refugee shacks made terrific breeding grounds for the disease. The famous Ojibwe jingle dress and its accompanying, now-widespread jingle dance came out of this epidemic as a way to care for the sick.
Conspiracy theories arose almost immediately. People were already blaming Germany for the Spanish flu, falsely claiming that U-boats were smuggling the pathogen into American cities. Now they blamed their enemy for starting the fire. This was a particularly pernicious rumor, as Germans were (and remain) Minnesota’s largest ethnic group, and faced persecution by the state government for perceived wartime disloyalty. Minnesota today is full of Scandinavian pride, but has little visible German culture. State police beat it out of them during the Great War.
At your table, the horrors of the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire make a terrific template for a complication to a straightforward trip to the countryside. RPG parties in the picaresque mode are forever going on minor errands. If your PCs need to go somewhere rural, like to get a piece of information or a McGuffin from someone on a farm or logging camp or whatever, you could greet them with threatening clouds of smoke when they arrive. Once the PCs have the information they seek, the fire becomes a serious problem. They have to flee for the train station.
But as the party races for the station, they encounter obstacle after obstacle, based on the above incidents. Traffic accidents and falling fiery debris block their way. People cry out for help. How much do the PCs prioritize their own safety, and how much are they willing to linger to help others escape too? More than rescuing people already in peril, are the PCs willing to delay to prevent others from becoming endangered, like setting up signage warning of Dead Man’s Curve ahead, or pulling people out of wells and cellars? It’s an opportunity for the PCs to show who they are under stress.
This can also become a slog, though. Only keep throwing obstacles at your players for as long as they seem to enjoy it. Should their enthusiasm flag, they encounter no more obstacles on their way to the train station.
Of course at the station, the train is refusing to budge. The party has to find the cause of the delay (your equivalent of Lawrence Fauley) and sort it out. Then the train has to pause at every bridge to check if it’s been damaged. The PCs can help—though don’t dwell on that, just have a couple people roll a few dice and keep the action moving.
If your setting doesn’t have trains, you don’t strictly speaking need them. As long as there’s a method of evacuation from a central location that can be held up by bureaucracy, you can use that, whether it’s dropships or magic portals or the gate into the dwarven warrens or whatever. In real life, there’s a wonderful symmetry that the trains also started the fires, but you can have the fires be started by any old thing.
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Sing and fight magical folk ballads in 1813 England and Scotland! This free early-access edition has everything you need to play a Ballad Hunters one-shot about the traditional song Barbara Allen.
The game has:
– Investigative adventures centered around the lyrics of traditional British ballads
– Simple, story-driven rules inspired by the GUMSHOE engine
– A historical setting that is grim but hopeful
– Magic where characters make ballad verses come to life
Ballad Hunters is the sequel to Shanty Hunters, winner of a 2022 Ennie Award (Judge’s Choice) and nominee at the Indie Groundbreaker Awards for Most Innovative and Game of the Year.
You can download the free early-access version of the game from DriveThruRPG or Google Drive.
The final game will be published by Pelgrane Press, the people behind 13th Age and GUMSHOE games like Trail of Cthulhu, Swords of the Serpentine, and The Yellow King. You can sign up to be notified when it’s available for purchase by putting yourself on my mailing list.
Source: Minnesota 1918: When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the Stateby Curt Brown (2018)