Weather: Our weather has returned to its normal pattern. It may get cold in the morning, and it did during the descent of the polar vortex in the east, but the afternoons are warm. The thaw is afoot - and underfoot. The ground gives when one walks on it, the melting snow and ice puddle on half-melted ground that can absorb no more.
Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 12 degrees F. Week’s high: 60 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26 remains in a few places.
What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon. Many arborvitae have turned brown.
What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves
What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters
What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows
Animal sightings: Still little evidence animals are entering the yard
Weekly update: Lumbermen always have an answer for the problem with forest fires: let them cut and thin. People shudder because they remember the last time they were given a free hand. While they acknowledge large corporations maintain sustainable forest programs, they also know those aren’t the companies who win contracts awarded to lowest bidders.
Roy Dodge published photographs of Michigan Ghost Towns in 1970. [1] Time and again the captions referred to towns, like Averill in 1877 [2] and Nahma in 1921, [3] that were destroyed by fires. He also had pictures of fires in process, including Shelldrake in 1910 [4] and Metz in 1908. [5] The latter was so severe "the red-hot rails of the tracks melted." [6]
His three volumes documented the ways dried wood was everywhere. Near Alger, a photograph showed the Rifle River filled with cut logs floating down to Bay City and Saginaw. Above the river, trains crossed on wooden trestles. [7]
When the logs arrived at a saw mill they accumulated in the area. After they were cut, the wood or finished products were stacked in yards waiting for ships to haul them away. [8] In the Great Lakes area, work occurred in winter or all year, depending on location, but shipping was limited by ice in winter.
Loggers left debris, the twigs and branches that weren’t usable, along with the cut underbrush in piles where they may have burned them or let them dry. Railroads were essential to opening woodlands and temporary crews left piles of waste that had been cut to lay tracks. The slash later could be ignited by anything, especially sparks if it were near tracks. [9]
Everywhere there was sawdust: in the woods where trees were cut and in the saw mills and finishing plants. It, too, was left in the woods where it could ignite. In more industrial areas, it might be burned. Dodge showed a sawdust burner on the Sturgeon River that resembled a tall farm silo. [10]
Loggers and pioneer farmers living near forests grew accustomed to fire. In Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1871 fires in the west had been continuous. The summer had been unusually dry and, in the fall, farmers burned their stubble and burned woodlands to open new fields.
Then the winds started. Fires blew toward the city. The local employer, who made wooden products like barrels from wood that was too small for construction, [11] sent his men out to clear anything combustible and stockpiled water in barrels around the town. [12]
These winds weren’t the ordinary ones of fall, but part of a great cyclonic storm system that reached from Arizona to Michigan’s upper peninsula. [13] As the winds intensified, the small fires merged. In the woods, ground fires became crown fires. Chicago was in its path, as were parts of western Michigan and the Thumb in the east. Peshtigo was destroyed in hours. [14]
William Ogden, who owned the Peshtigo factory, was one of the more responsible lumbermen. But, when wind and drought combine human efforts only magnify their destructive force. Half the population of Peshtigo died that night, [15] and many more deaths are suspected on farmsteads where nothing remained but ashes. [16]
Notes on photographs: All taken 2 February 2019.
1. Melting snow in path on west side of house.
2. Peach (Prunus persica) buds at northern end of path where snow disappeared a while ago.
3. Revived vinca(Vinca minor)leaves under the peach.
End notes:
1. Roy L. Dodge. Michigan Ghost Towns. Sterling Heights, Michigan: Glendon Publishing, volume 1, 1970; volume 2, 1971; volume 3, 1973. This is still available on Amazon.
2. Dodge. 2:67.
3. Dodge. 3:88.
4. Dodge. 3:62.
5. Dodge. 2:164.
6. Dodge. 2:163.
7. Dodge. 1:33.
8. Dodge. 2:170.
9. Wikipedia. "Great Michigan Fire."
10. Dodge. 3:87.
11. William Converse Haygood. Notes to Peter Pernin. "The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account." Wisconsin Magazine of History 54:246–272:1971. 246.
12. Pernin. 251.
13. Eric R. Miller reconstructed the storm system from "observations made by the observers of the Signal Service, U. S. Army, at 5:35 P.M. Central Standard time, October 8, 1871." His map has been reprinted many times, including in Pernin, 100.
14. Joseph Schafer. "Great Fires of Seventy-one." Wisconsin Magazine of History 11:96–106:1927. 96–97. Miller’s map is on page 100.
15. Wikipedia gives the official death toll as around 1,500 in "Peshtigo Fire."
16. Haygood. 271.
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