THE DEAD LIE IN HEAPS AT HINCKLEY
Communication Has at Last Been Established with the Burned Minnesota Town.
PEOPLE DRIVEN INTO THE SWAMPS TO PERISH.
Survivors Not Able to Identify Many of the Corpses Recovered—Mourners Visit the Cemetery in Quest of Their Dead—Every House in the Village Destroyed—The People Eating Eagerly Loaves of Bread Sent to Them from Outside—Fires Raging in the Michigan Peninsula, in the Pennsylvania Oil Fields, and in New-York State.
HINCKLEY, Minn., Sept. 3.—A United Press Reporter boarded the first train out of Pine City for Hinckley at 7 o’clock this morning. It was a work train, but carried many members of the different committees appointed at Pine City last evening.
As the train neared Mission Creek the first evidences of the great fire became apparent. The whole country was singed. The telegraph wires were down, and the scene was one of desolation.
At Mission Creek a small shanty was the only house left standing. The station buildings and the mill were a mass of smoking ruins. The train proceeded slowly three miles further to Hinckley. The roundhouse and coal sheds of the Eastern Minnesota Road only remained. West on this line was a long line of smoking ruins of freight cars.
At Hinckley the gaunt skeleton of the public school alone remained standing in the centre of the village. Alongside the railroad track were twoscore of boxes filled with the bloated and disfigured remains of victims of the fire. Some of the inscriptions on the coffins read as follows:
“Supposed remains of Mrs. Blanchard, horribly distorted.”
“Girl. Ten years old, no clothing.”
“Three children of Mrs. Martinson.”
In the next box lay Mrs. Martinson herself. Then came John Wendlund and child and a number more unidentified.
“If you want to see a painful sight,” saint a resident of the village, “go out to the cemetery.”
The reporter picked his way through the deserted avenues of the village, encountering the remains of horses, cows, cats, chickens, and dogs. He overtook Hans Paulson, an employee in the Brennan Mill.
“I am going out to the cemetery to see if I can find my wife and four children,” he said. “I lost them all.”
The rain was coming down in sheets. At the cemetery, a mile and a half from town, a half-dozen men were digging a trench. A heap of bodies lay on a knoll in the middle of the cemetery. There were ninety-six naked bodies—men, women, and children—scorched, blackened, distorted, bowels and brains protruding, hands clutched in their final agonies, hair singed from heads, old, young, middle-aged, male, and female, all in a promiscuous heap.
In another corner of the cemetery were forty-five more bodies, covered with quilts. All were interred late this afternoon. Hans Paulson, the man who had accompanied the reporter, delved in the pile of bodies, 5 feet high, and finally pulled out the remains of a little female child, with only slight shreds of white clothing remaining on her body. He scanned the face, examined the clothing, and then broke out in lamentations. He kept up the quest for the others in the driving storm, a silhouette of human agony lined against the horizon.
Among the ruins of Hinckley a beautiful girl was making a vain search for her trunk. She was dressed in a light-colored calico dress which some good Samaritan in Pine City had given her. Here experience was a dramatic one.
“My name is Mollie McNeill,” she said “and I lived with my mother and sister in Hinckley the past sixteen years. I noticed the fire coming at 3:30 Saturday afternoon, and rushed out of the house and started up the railroad tracks. On both sides and in front of me was a wall of fire and smoke. How I ever got through I do not know, for people were falling on every side of me.
“Twice my dress caught fire. A mile north of Hinckley I saw an engine. The engineer helped me on, and a newsagent carried me back to the baggage car. All the cars got on fire, and I saw men, crazy with fear, jump right through the windows into the flames. The train backed up to Skunk Creek, where I remained in the swamp all night. I put my face in the mud to cool it, and some one plastered mud all over my hair. Of course, I thought my mother and sister were lost, and you may imagine my joy when I found them safe and sound in Pine City yesterday at noon.”
A local searching party this morning found the body of Thomas Dunne, aged twenty-two, late operator at the St. Paul and Duluth station. When the fire started he remained at his post, and it was only when the flames drove him from the station that he left his key. He hurried over to the river, and perished there with numerous others. His brother was among the searching party that found his body, and he secured his watch and ring, which was the only means of identification.
Robert Dowling, baggage agent at the Hinckley station of the St. Paul and Duluth, was going about the street with a badly-scorched hand and face. He says that there was a large crowd of people at the station waiting for the Duluth limited, due at 4:20 P. M., when the fire came down upon the town. Dowling started for his home, but could not get near the house. He ran up the track, and fortunately got on the limited a mile north of town. In trying to save a lad from jumping from the train he burned his hand. The boy jumped into the flames alongside the track and perished.
Dowling says that among the intending passengers at Hinckley with whom he talked were a woman and two children for Wyoming and two women and two children for St. Croix Falls, Wis. A girl named Fitzgerald was going to the latter place.
This evening there are twenty-one caskets containing charred and blackened remains alongside the track at Hinckley. Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 were unidentified absolutely. No. 12, Mrs. Sherman; No. 13, two Sherman children; No. 14, Mrs. Hathen and youngest child; No. 15, two children of Mrs. Hathen; No. 16, supposed to be children of Mrs. Hanson; No. 17, Mrs. Costigan and boy; No. 18, two children, supposed to be Costigan’s boy of seven and girl of five years old; No. 19, unknown; No. 20, Ole Nelson; No. 21, boy, twelve years old, supposed to be young Currie. These are in addition to the bodies already deposited and awaiting burial in cemetery trenches.
John Blanchard, a St. Paul and Duluth car repairer, who came up from Pine City this morning, after escaping to that town Saturday, was looking for the remains of his wife and children. He found them in caskets at the cemetery, and had them removed for shipment to Pine City for burial.
Lee Webster, President of the Village Council, reports that his wife is still missing. He was at the cemetery this morning, but failed to identify his wife’s remains among the dead.It is now the generally-accepted belief that many more people would have been saved at Hinckley had they gone to the river or stayed in the gravel pits, but every one was panicstricken. Many who started for the gravel pits lost heart when they got there and pressed onward to the river, and then many of the latter pressed on beyond the river to a neighboring swamp. All these latter lost their lives.
Nelson Anderson and family of six are mission. John Anderson, brother of Nelson, perished, together with his wife, daughter, and son.
At 1 o’clock this afternoon a car came up from Pine City loaded with provisions, bread, canned beef, &c. The car was guarded by soldiers of the First Regiment. The men who had been working since yesterday in the cemetery without food were first attended to. Then the crowd of homeless refugees who surged around the car were fed.
The caboose which came up on the train was started back to Pine City, and it was crowded with refugees. Among them were Ira Smalling, his wife, and infant.
Saturday morning last these people started for Grindstone on a fishing excursion. The fire overtook them and they pout out into the lake and floated around nearly all Saturday night, and finally landed in North Shore. But the fire followed them up, and they went to an Indian camp and walked fourteen miles to Hinckley this morning. Of course, their home was destroyed.
Wells Delone and wife who lived two miles east of the Great Northern track, were driven from home by the fire. They ran down the bank from their house and took to the creek. When they arrived at the creek there was a great number of bears, wolves, and skunks at the water’s edge, but all were so frightened that they did not attack the fugitives.
The caboose going back to Pine City was crowded. Many were uncertain as to loved relatives, and others knew but too well that all they loved on earth had perished. It was a pitiable scene. These people had loaves of dry bread which they had got from the supply car, and they ate ravenously. Many of them had not eaten since noon last Saturday.
It is difficult to portray the situation at Hinckley. A few refugees, a half score of searchers, a team or two transporting boxes containing dead bodies, the place where a town had been—that is the picture. The brick veneer, which constituted the outer covering of some of the buildings, has fallen into the cellars. It is like looking over the track of a cyclone. A few curious relic hunters delve among the ruined household goods, but their quest receives little reward.
A large majority of those lost were Scandinavians, and many of those distrusting the banks since last year’s panic, carried their savings in their pockets, and where it was in paper money; it was, of course, destroyed; but the mind reverts to that dreadful scene in the cemetery, and one insensibly reflects that, money or no money, it makes no sort of difference now to those scorched and naked cadavers piled in that gruesome heap in every conceivable position, like so many dried sticks.
Reports continue to come in from the vicinity of Skunk Creek of added discoveries of burned victims. Most of the homeless people of Skunk Creek proper have been taken to Duluth. Fifty-eight dead were found lying in the streets and in the immediate vicinity of this village. The total in the vicinity will reach fully 400 dead when all the returns are in. Identification is an exceedingly difficult manner, and most of the so-called identifications of a dead body are mere guesses. It will be fully ten days, perhaps longer, before all the missing are positively located. The Registration Committee, of which H. H. Hart is Chairman, is busily engaged trying to locate people, ascertaining the condition and necessities of all applicants for relief, and this means nearly every survivor from the burned district. J. D. Markham of Rush City says that the population of Pokegama aggregated 118 souls last Saturday. Of this number 16 are known to be burned.
SANDSTONE, Minn., Sept. 3—This Town is in complete ruins, there being but a single building standing, a shack used by the quarry company. Crowded into this building and the ferry the relief party found over 200 people who had lost their homes and everything they possessed except the clothing they wore. All those saved at Sandstone were in the river while the cyclone of flames passed, and they only managed to escape by wading in the water as far as possible and throwing water over each others’ heads. The coming of the flames sounded like thunder, and with such rapidity did they come that people who waited to save property or neglected to seek safety in the river perished in the flames. As far as can be learned between forty and fifty people are dead. The relief committee has thus far paid little attention to the bodies, as the living require immediate attention.
