This year the forest fires have been more extensive and more destructive
than usual, especially in Michigan, where not a drop of rain had fallen
for nearly eighty days. The fire, when once started, rushed on through
green trees and dry trees, through corn fields and clover fields, at the
rate of twenty miles an hour. Swamps full of stagnant water were dried
up in a flash. Horses galloped wildly before the flame, but were
overtaken by it, and left roasting on the ground. Trees two miles
distant from the flames had their leaves withered by the heat. Some
sailors who were out on the lake found the heat uncomfortable when they
were seven miles from shore. Of course, wherever the lake was near,
people tried to reach it. One farmer put all his family into his wagon,
and started off. The fire was so close that the sparks burned holes in
the children's dresses. Just then the tire came off one of the wheels.
Usually, when this accident happens, the wagon has to stop, for the best
of wheels generally fall to pieces in a few rods when they have lost
their tires; but this wheel stood seven miles of jolting and bumping, up
hill and down, over roots and ruts, while the frightened horses were
galloping like mad creatures. Another farmer had gathered his neighbors
about him to assist him in threshing his wheat. While the great machine
was doing its work, the alarm was given that the woods were on fire.
Hastily putting horses to the machine and to a wagon, the farmer and his
friends abandoned homestead and newly gathered crop, and made an effort
to save the valuable threshing-machine, even if all else must go. Before
they gained the road a mare with a colt at her heels came madly
galloping toward them, and becoming entangled among the horses attached
to the machine, blocked their progress. The fire was almost upon them.
The men cut the traces and let the horses go, but the great
threshing-machine, to whose very existence fire was a necessity, had to
be abandoned to the fury of the devouring element.
[Illustration]
In the lake, people waded into the water up to the neck; then they were
safe indeed from the flame, but almost choked by the smoke, while the
sparks fell on them like snow-flakes in a heavy storm. Thousands of
land-birds were suffocated as they flew before the flames, or were
drowned in the lake. Bears and deer in their terror sought the company
of man. A man and a bear stood together up to their necks in water all
night, and the man said that the bear was as quiet as a dog. Two other
bears came and stood close to a well from which a farmer was flinging
water over his house. Our artist saw a very pathetic scene: the flames
had swept away the homestead, and when the wave of fire had passed, no
living thing remained but the faithful house-dog, which had crouched
down in a ditch. It went again to its old place, and neither hunger nor
solitude could persuade it to quit the ruins where its master had
perished. It stood at its post, faithfully guarding the charred timbers
of what a short time before had been a happy home.