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BURNING AN EMPIRE by Stewart H. Holbrook

BURNING AN EMPIRE

By

Pub Date: Oct. 26th, 1943
Publisher: Macmillan

The story of the forest fires which have ""burned an empire"" in the usual vigorous, virile style with which Holbrook attacks his subjects. He shows them as an ""integral part of American pioneering"", the result of carelessness, vindictiveness, indifference. Based on contemporary records, on reports of survivors and descendants of survivors, here are the epic disasters:-Hinckley, Minnesota, where the town eyesore, a gravel pit, saved a hundred lives, but in which the fire cost 400 lives; Cloquet, the sawdust town, which burned to the ground; Canada's Miramichi fires from 1825 on; the Wisconsin fires of '94, with widespread destruction of forest; the Milestone Blase, the first of national importance to arouse public indignation; Tillamook Burn, when 400 square miles of timber were destroyed in one day; fires in the South, in Oregon, in Washington, in Michigan, all with records of irreparable waste in human, animal and vegetable life.