MAP PREPARED BY MR. BRACKLIN TO ILLUSTRATE HIS NARRATIVE
We all sat down and rested for about half an hour; then Wirth and I took a boat and rowed back to camp, a distance of about two miles. When we reached there, about midnight, the rain set in and it rained until noon the following day. Miller and Peterson were still unable to move around much, as their faces and hands were badly blistered and their
eyes pained them terribly. As for myself, aside from being unable to speak above a whisper, I was in pretty good shape, and knowing it would only be a couple of days until father, as soon as he could reach us, would be there to look the situation over—plans for the coming winter of logging would have to be changed to include all the timber that had been burned, for in that country a tree though slightly burned would be worm-eaten inside of a year unless cut—I started out with Wirth the next morning to find, if we could, just how far the fire had extended east and west and to look up a site for a camp to replace the Mulvaney Camp which had burned. We found that the fire had taken a course similar to that of a cyclone, about three miles in width and about twenty miles in length, extending from a point four miles south and west of Cedar Lake Dam, crossing the narrows between Cedar Lake and Hemlock up the east shore of Cedar Lake to a point about opposite Stout’s Island, and then north to the shores of Big Chetak just west of the Aronson Camp in Section 4—in all an area of about seventeen miles in length and two to four miles in width.
Father and L. S. Tainter arrived the next day and after looking over the site for the new camp we came back to the scene of our experience of a few days before. We had about reached the point when father turned to me saying, “John, did I understand you to say you were here during this fire?” I answered “Yes.” He looked at me for a moment with, you will remember, that peculiar squint of his and then he said, “John, you lie, for no man could have been here when this fire passed and lived to tell the tale.” Nevertheless we were there, and are still living.
[1] The author of this narrative is a native of Rice Lake, Wisconsin. His father, James Bracklin, was for over thirty years superintendent of logging and log-driving for the Knapp, Stout, and Company lumbering corporation. Under his tutelage the son received his training for his life-calling of woodsman and lumberman. The present narrative was prepared in the form of a letter to Mr. Henry E. Knapp of Menomonie, to whom we are indebted for the opportunity to put it into print.
BANKERS’ AID IN 1861-62[2]
By Louise P. Kellogg