Thick birch forests cover much of south central Canada. Seen from a distance in the moonlight, the thin, straight birch trees, clustered tightly together, look as dense as the plains of elephant grass in northern Guinea, or the bamboo jungles of southern China. By growing close together, the birch, which appears to be a rather fragile tree, easily chokes out other trees and bushes by denying them a chance to get sunlight and grow. They leave no room for interlopers. Occasionally a single tall pine or fir juts up from a birch grove that invaded after it had already grown too tall to shield from the sun. The tall fir stands like a bear rearing up on its haunches, surrounded by baying dogs. The birches cannot kill the tall tree in their midst, but they surround it so densely that none of its seed will ever take root and spring to life.
A grove of birches has unique beauty, for the birches are the whitest of trees. The white bark peels back in spots to reveal mottled gray specks up and down the trunks and branches. Particularly in the winter, when snow hides the fallen birch leaves, the trees lure visitors with the purity of their color and with their diminutive size that does not overwhelm a person the way the large pines and other hardwoods can.
The view from inside a birch grove in the winter contrasts delicately with the vision of the grove from a distance. Once inside the grove, one sees that the white of the flaking paper bark is the same hue as the surrounding snow; it is hard to tell where the tree begins and the ground ends. When it starts to snow in a birch grove, there is no longer any up or down or sideways. An interloper can be overcome with a sensation of floating in a viscous white liquid, and must, like an insect caught in the sap of some mysterious, carnivorous plant, struggle to stay upright.
The birch is a special tree, and the native people of the Great Lakes and across southern Canada learned to live with the birch tree and to use it in constructing their homes and making fires, sewing boxes, and containers—and they used it to build canoes. Today, most of the native communities have disappeared from the birch belt; they have been replaced by small towns and farms. Those Indian communities that survive appear poorer than, but otherwise similar to, the nonnative communities.
Gull Bay is one small community that has survived in the forest, somewhat isolated from the modern city. It sits aside Lake Nipigon in western Ontario. Even though the name conjures images of a peaceful cove on the ocean, the town lies more than a thousand miles inland from either the Atlantic or the Pacific. To reach Gull Bay, one must drive north out of Thunder Bay for about a hundred miles over dirt roads that cut through the heart of some of the thickest forest left in North America.
Gull Bay is a settlement of about 450 Ojibwa who live in small wooden frame houses at the point where the small Gull River flows into Lake Nipigon. The road to the south is the only one that enters Gull Bay. To go east, north, or west, one must travel by snowmobile in the winter or by water in the summer. The people of Gull Bay live too far away to commute to industry and service jobs in Thunder Bay on Lake Superior, and they live too far north for productive agriculture. The people fish, hunt, and gather wild rice, but their frustration shows clearly in a hand-lettered sign in front of one of the houses: “Work, Not Welfare.”
A few hopeful people opened small stores in the front rooms of their homes, where they sell some basic items, but the settlement has too few people to support even one real store. Other homes offer haircutting or auto repair, but the only steady employment comes from the government and from the timber industry. The government has a small police force, a health clinic, a road maintenance crew, and a school that teaches in English. The road maintenance crew has a hard job keeping the road open all winter, when snowfall in a normal year can easily exceed fifteen feet.
Evidence of the timber industry appears all around Lake Nipigon. The loggers carve rough roads into the forest, and then clear sections by cutting all the trees within them. They haul the logs to Thunder Bay, where the world’s largest paper mills spit out millions of pounds of newsprint for the daily newspapers of Canada.
Even today the forests of North America stretch the human powers of understanding. The bristlecone pines of the White Mountains in California reach back through history approximately 4,600 years, making them the oldest living trees on the planet. Approximately 750 species of trees grow wild on the continent, including a few Old World species that have acclimated themselves to the new climate and terrain. The native trees of North America range from the small pawpaw, which usually measures only a few inches in diameter, to the giant redwoods.
At one time forest covered America, and the Indians lived for the most part in or along the edges of forests. Both coasts contained large forests, and the enormous Atlantic Coast forest reached inland to the Mississippi River and as far north as Hudson Bay. The Southern states nourished large forests of magnolia, cypress, persimmon, pecan, hickory, long-leafed pine, live oaks, and the durable palmetto. The lower Missouri River sustained cottonwood, cedar, ash, hickory, oak, walnut, and willow. The Ohio River valley offered giant sycamores, cottonwoods, tulip poplars, and walnut trees. Birch and fir trees covered much of Canada, and large cedars grew on the Pacific Coast north of the redwoods. Pines grew wherever they found sufficient moisture in the Southwest, and some areas sustained large forests of the stately ponderosa pine.
Along with the jungles of Brazil, the Congo, and Indonesia, North America was one of the most wooded places on earth. Elias Pym Fordham, an Englishman who settled in Indiana, wrote a complaint that was common to many newly arrived Europeans:
“There is too much wood; and when on the barren peak of some rocky hill, you catch a distant view, it generally is nothing but an undulating surface of impenetrable forest” (Blakeless).
Except for the Great Plains and the desert areas of the Southwest, forest covered most of North America, and the Indians of all parts of the continent took advantage of the presence of such a plentiful and varied resource. They built homes and temples of wood, and protected their villages from animal predators and human enemies by erecting wooden palisades. They used wood for canoes, spears, bows and arrows, atlatls or spear-throwers, mortars and pestles, spoons, storage boxes, traps, travois, clubs, pipestems, bowls, harpoons, snow goggles, cradles, blowguns, digging sticks or dibbles, and a wide variety of other tools.
The concepts of Stone Age, Iron Age, and Bronze Age seem essentially inapplicable and thus irrelevant to American history. These terms apply neatly to Old World civilization because they represent the historical reality of technological evolution in that part of the world. Even though Indians used stone and metal, they lived in a virtually eternal “wooden age.” They were the true forest people. Anthropologists apply the descriptive label of “Woodland” to the cultures of most of eastern North America between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1700. This includes everyone from the Adena people and the builders of the pyramids during the Mississippian phase until the Iroquois and Cherokee who met the arriving settlers.
In still more recent times, the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other groups of the northern Pacific Coast built large houses and public buildings with planks. The intricate designs of some of these plank houses placed the entry so that a visitor appeared to be walking into the jaws of gigantic animals or human figures. The Navajo built hogans of logs covered with earth, but occasionally built them of stone as well. Eastern tribes made long houses of wood or bark on wooden frames, sometimes chinked with mud or lined with woven mats.
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The modern people of North America do not follow the ways of the old Woodland culture, but lumber continues to be a major industry in the United States and Canada. The exploitation of the forest is seen as the tapping of a “natural resource.” People chop down trees in much the same way that they might dig copper or silver out of the earth, carve salt from a prehistoric lake bed, or scrape up nitrates from an open pit, but unlike minerals, metals, and naturally occurring deposits in the ground, the forests of America were not simply a natural resource that happened to be here waiting for use by anyone who arrived. The Indians had lived in and around the forests for millennia, and had carefully managed and shaped the forests through these years. They consciously followed practices that maximized the growth of trees and plants that they found useful, and minimized those that obstructed them.
The Europeans found large trees in these forests because native forestry practices produced this particular type of forest. In New England the Indians burned the forest every year to destroy the small brush. This allowed hardy trees such as the pines to grow tall, but destroyed the smaller trees and the less fire-resistant varieties such as the firs.
In addition to keeping the forests open, the controlled fires promoted growth of the large trees that the native people preferred for dugout canoes. Throughout North America, native building styles relied on large trees that the people used as primary supports and roof beams in both domestic and communal architecture.
Indians in different areas of North America burned the forest for various local reasons. In California the smoke killed the parasitic mistletoe that grew on the oak and mesquite. Indians from the Gulf Coast to the interior of Alaska used fire to reduce the number of irritating insects and other pests during the summer. In the Southern states, fire drove out the poisonous snakes such as the rattlesnake. What rattlesnakes remained could be seen more easily and thus avoided by the Indians walking through a forest cleared of underbrush.
In time of hostilities or warfare, a cleared forest offered few places for a potential enemy to hide and thus effect an ambush on a traveling group or a sneak attack on a village. Any land that had not been cleared by fire could easily pose a danger to the people living in it, because not only could their enemies hide in it, but their enemies could set fire to it and thus use it as a weapon against the people living there.
The fire encouraged small new growth that then attracted large animals such as deer, which were unimpeded by small trees and bushes. To maximize their hunting, the Indians wanted large, parklike forests of tall trees but open ground underneath. By keeping the forest free of undergrowth, the Indians kept it from becoming a jungle.
The Indians also burned the tall grasses of the prairies and plains. This created new growth and thus controlled the migrations of the buffalo, but the burning of the plains also controlled the spread of forests. In some parts of the Missouri and Mississippi basins, the Indians used fire as a device for limiting the size of the forest and increasing the grazing area of the buffalo. This type of land management lured the buffalo closer to their villages and made the hunt much easier. The hunters could then devote more time to cultivating their crops in the fertile river valleys, rather than making long hunting treks across the open plains.
The work of the Indians in controlling the forests and prairies gradually extended the range of the buffalo ever eastward toward the Atlantic. The Indians kept the Eastern forests so open and so attractive to larger animals that by A.D. 1000, some of the plains buffalo crossed the Mississippi and took up residence in the large woods. They adapted to the new environment to become forest buffalo rather than plains buffalo, and they provided the Indians of the Eastern forest with new sources of food and raw materials.
In their annual burning of the forests, prairies, and plains, the Indians used fire in a controlled and systematic way that minimized the danger from large, uncontrolled fires set by lightning. By regularly destroying the dead lumber and clearing the undergrowth that died each winter, they lessened the chance of uncontrolled fire that might consume their villages and croplands as well as the animals which they hunted.
The Indians knew how to use fire and to control it in ways that the Europeans did not know. The new settlers did not understand even such a simple process as beating a fire with blankets and buffalo robes as a way to smother it. The Indians also taught the settlers the more delicate and paradoxical practice of using backfires in order to control large fires (Pyne).
The annual firings of large segments of the plains kept the forests in check. Through the use of fire, Indians maintained large, grassy corridors through forests such as those of the Shenandoah Valley, which later served as major migration routes for European settlers (Pyne). Ironically, with the arrival of the settlers and the decline in Indian population, the amount of forest in many areas increased because the Indians no longer kept the forests under such careful control.
As the settlers pushed back the Indians and stopped them from their annual light burning of the forest and the prairies, the land that the new settlers did not use for agriculture became a thick and tangled forest that later posed a great danger as a fire hazard. The changes produced disastrous results for the forests. The scars and the human cost of this new pattern can still be seen today in the town of Cloquet, Minnesota, located about two hundred miles south of Gull Bay and twenty miles south of Duluth on Lake Superior.
Cloquet sits on the edge of the Ojibwa reservation known as Fond du Lac. Like Gull Bay, Fond du Lac has a history closely associated with the lumber industry. The people of Cloquet and Fond du Lac live surrounded by the forest and the timber industry that have always been the economic base of the town. Even the small collection of stores between downtown Cloquet and the interstate highway bear the rather inflated name of Lumberjack Mall, and, as if to underscore the town’s association with timber, the weekly newspaper carries the name of The Pine Knot. The industries in Cloquet make paper, matchboxes, wood-pulp tiles for insulation, and even disposable chopsticks for the Japanese fast-food industry.
Cloquet has the usual dual brick churches of Minnesota’s competing Christian sects of Catholicism and Lutheranism, an old city administration building, a rising community college, and acres of railroad tracks. The town straddles the rows of tracks the way other towns might straddle a river or a central park. Often, hundreds of cars sit silently holding their thousands of logs for processing. The most unusual building in Cloquet is the large gas station at the town’s main intersection. The modern design of the cantilevered station seems too new for the old building. It advertises itself as the world’s only gas station designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Abutting it at the rear is the more recent addition of a self-serve laundry that apparently did not share the same architect.
Although Cloquet is over a century old, it appears to be much newer. This is because of what happened there on Columbus Day, Saturday, October 12, 1918. On that day Cloquet was one of the most important lumber towns in North America. It claimed ten thousand citizens, most of whom worked for one of the five sawmills, or the Northwest Paper Company, which made pulp and paper. The town boasted the ability to mill more than a million board feet of lumber a day (Holbrook).
By 1918 the mills had already exhausted most of the lumber around Cloquet itself, and the timber for the mills came from far up the St. Louis River or was shipped in from northern Minnesota and southern Canada by rail. Old logs and discarded timber lay strewn for miles around the town. In the open area left after cutting, weed trees—aspen, jack pine, and balsam—sprang up.
The summer and fall of 1918 had been dry, and as frequently happened in such weather, a spark from one of the trains set off a brushfire that grew into a forest fire. Word of the fire reached Cloquet in the afternoon, when refugees from the town of Brookston arrived on the Great Northern Railway with the terrifying tale that their entire town had been consumed.
By eight o’clock that night, the whistles of the mills screeched a loud wail as a trecherous black cloud darkened the sky and quickly obscured all light from the stars or moon. The fire that followed close behind the thick smoke surpassed the flames of a mere forest fire. The conflagration quickly consumed the scrub forests that had not experienced a fire in decades. Living trees ignited in seemingly spontaneous explosions like Roman candles in the night sky.
As the fire raced across northern Minnesota, it accelerated with a speed and fury that caused a hurricane-force wind to rush before it, ripping up trees, flattening buildings, tossing over cars, and hurling stones. When the fire hit the sawmills of Cloquet, it encountered a hundred million board feet of lumber. The wind hurled the burning boards through the air to make a firestorm of flaming timber. Gases from the fire formed clouds and then exploded in bursts that witnesses described as looking like gigantic burning balloons. These burning balloons catapulted the fire over rivers and cleared areas for a distance up to half a mile.
Refugees fleeing by cart and car from Moose Lake and Kettle River created a traffic jam at Death Curve, where more than a hundred people died as the fire overtook their stalled caravan. Forest animals, cattle, and draft horses trampled people as they too fled the conflagration. Survivors reported that some of the fleeing people and animals burst into flames just like the trees that ignited from the heat of the air rather than from the touch of the flames themselves.
The fire did not spread slowly across Cloquet, but exploded throughout the entire town instantaneously, setting everything in it ablaze. Twenty miles away, in Duluth, on Lake Superior, the weather station recorded the wind from the firestorm at seventy-six miles per hour, one of the strongest in its history.
By the end of the fire, Cloquet and twenty-seven other small communities had been burned to the ground. It will never be known how many other people died in the small communities, Indian villages, and isolated farms of the area. Survivors found suffocated remains at the bottoms of wells, where people had taken a deadly refuge. The documentary evidence places the total number killed at more than five hundred people. Estimates of the size of the burned forest reached a million acres. The land surrounding the town lay covered with up to several feet of ash interspersed with smoldering stumps. The damage in dollars was estimated at $30 million (Holbrook).
The Cloquet firestorm does not rank as the worst fire in American history. It was only one of the approximately sixty major fires and one dozen or so firestorms that cut through the Great Lakes area of North America between 1870 and 1918. Firestorms hit Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871, killing 1,500 people, and Hinckley, Minnesota, in 1894, killing 418 and burning 320,000 acres. These fires reached such magnitude that after the first one in 1871, the word firestorm was invented to describe it.
The great holocausts stopped with a concerted effort by local and national governments to develop better forest-management procedures and firefighting techniques, including a return to some of the native practices. They cleared more land beside the railroads, cut firebreaks through the forests, used controlled replanting, built rural fire stations and lookout towers, trained professional corps of firefighters, and started massive public education projects.
A major impetus for the involvement of the government came from the successful lawsuit filed by the citizens of Cloquet against the federal government, which was found liable because sparks from the train started the fire. Because the federal government operated the railroads under its wartime powers during World War I, Cloquet won a court award of $12 million against the federal government (Pyne).
Similar though less extreme fires plagued other parts of the country, and many different areas invoked some odd innovations. The Southern states imported kudzu from Japan, and quickly saw its land covered with the plant that itself posed a fire hazard when it died after the first frost. California imported hundreds of thousands of Australian eucalyptus, only to find that when cold weather hit them, they died and themselves became fire hazards.
The firestorm that destroyed Cloquet and the other communities resembled the firestorm that engulfed Dresden, Germany, a little more than two decades later. The firestorm of Dresden resulted from saturation bombing by the Allies during World War II, whereas the firestorm of Cloquet seemed to have been a natural catastrophe.
We can classify such firestorms as natural castrophes only in the sense that they started accidentally, but their true causes originated in human usage of the area. The European settlers had harvested the old forest, but they left the land covered in debris that impaired the ability of the land and vegetation to retain moisture. The timber industry had left dried wood scattered throughout the area, and for several generations no one had practiced the Indian tradition of the annual light burning of the forests. The entry onto the scene of the woodburning steam locomotive with its trail of cinders literally provided the sparks for this gigantic tinderbox. The firestorm represented the combined force and fury of decades of small fires that never happened.
The Native Americans developed a unique forest-management system. They controlled the forest and lived from it in such a way that both the forest and the humans thrived. Through thousands of years of living in America, their relationship with the forests and prairies reached a symbiotic equilibrium, but this equilibrium collapsed under the assault of new people arriving from Europe with different ways of using and managing the environment. After upsetting this ancient balance, modern Americans are still searching for a new equilibrium in their relationship to the forest as well as to the remainder of the North American environment.