Fires of Passion

Hell fire raged. An inferno bearing down speedily and mightily, sucking oxygen from the air, raining hot embers and propagating itself with a wake of terror and death. Carrie screamed at her older sister Mary. “Run! Run for your very life! Get into the lake! We don’t want to die!”

Gold had been discovered. The Canadian wilds of northern Ontario in 1907 were quickly transformed into a feverish rush of prospectors and fortune seekers. Frontier towns erupted with their log-pole store-front mercantiles, slash-siding rooming houses, tar-paper eateries, glittered unmentionable establishments of social need, all lining the dirt main-streets rimmed with plank-boarded sidewalks. A society banding together like spontaneously generated flies on fresh carrion. A branch of the railroad was punched through the boreal so as to maintain an umbilical cord with civilization down south. Box cars being the most practical means to transport heavy supplies snaked in, and hopefully, to haul gold bullion out. The adventuresome and desperate ‘rode the rods’ north to places like Timmons and Porcupine and Golden City. Those stalwart prospectors along with the entourage of parasitic logisticians, all with their irresistible drive for quick riches and rewards and experiences of personal fulfillment, coalesced into a concentrated economy. Two of the 5 Smith sisters from Renfrew, Ontario were smitten and caught up in that frenzy. Already they were experienced in cooking, waitressing, and chambermaiding, so they assimilated easily and quickly into the ambient passions of vocation, avocation and wilderness romance.

Smoke had been in the air for some time. It was beastly hot for that part of the world. It had been months since the last rain. The conifers were tinder-dry and formed an arsenal of nascent explosive torches. There was a fire out there somewhere to the southwest. Actually, several small fires. Even so, the franticness of gold fever suppressed any notion of eminent danger. Wood smoke mixed with main-street dust was the new normal for the villagers of Porcupine. 

Porcupine, a rough town on the northern side of Porcupine Lake, a town in the height of servicing hundreds of prospectors in the surrounding hills. The constant stream of newly arriving optimistics needed to be outfitted, fed, quartered, entertained, soused and loved. Some of the long-timers now had built houses and had imported their families. There were now kids and cats and dogs and horses and men and women and priests and pimps and miners and surveyors and hucksters and traders and swindlers all choreographing a feverish economy of hope eternal. Carrie and Mary were caught up in the ferocity of supporting that logistical mission.

Baptized into the Church of England twenty one years prior, Carrie was now a-religious. It was the here-and-now that was important. Life was vibrant, free, open, and filled with adventure. The neophyte prospectors and miners and surveyors with puffed egos and ambitions of riches and glories, all cast spells of promise and enticement on the giddiness of single girls. In time, Carrie accepted an engagement ring. When that guy’s stake was to be mined, she would be in her heaven on earth. No more the days of tables and dirty dishes and stained sheets and pinches and insults and forcing her exuberance of faux excitement for bristled faces, bourbon breath and puke. Rather, she thought that one of the better ones had snagged her, or was it she had snagged him.

Alas, familiarity breeds contempt. The lover’s quarrel erupted into spiteful hate. Off to the bridge spanning the Porcupine River, jerking the engagement ring from her finger, then mightily throwing it far into the raging tumult below. 

There was not only fire in her heart, there was fire in her wilderness.

Spring had come early to northern Ontario in 1911, and now in July, there had been months of tinder-dry heat-driven drought. On July 11, a hurricane-force wind picked up from the southwest and combined several small fires into a raging conflagration, some 20 miles wide with a horse-shoe shaped frontal assault aimed squarely for the west end of Porcupine Lake. Flames, a hundred feet in the air, were driven fiercely toward the small town of Porcupine on the northwestern shore. By evening, the air was filled with blinding and choking smoke and soot and ash. It burned the eyes and fouled the lungs. Visibility collapsed. The sky was billowing in blackness. Tinder-dry roofs were bursting into flames. The only route of escape was to get into a boat and sail east on Porcupine Lake to the far end, to the village of Golden City.

With no boats of their own, and only a few boats still available anyway, terrified people ran into the water. One boat, significantly overloaded, hit a log and dislodged the propeller. It drifted into the smoke. A big Newfoundland dog with 9 pups had found a floating log and lined up all the pups alongside the log with their paws clinging for security. As baby pups slipped off, the mother dog somehow fetched them back up. They were found the next day. All had survived. 

Mary, 5 years older than Carrie, took charge. Under typical circumstances, both were headstrong, belligerent and dogmatic. They had nothing but the sack-dresses on their backs. They pitched into the tepid water, water warmer than it would otherwise be, except for the prolonged heat. Their granny-shoes sinking into the mud floor of the lake. Pinned-up hair unraveling. Dresses becoming thoroughly soaked, translucent and clingy. 

“Carrie, get down, get your head down,” screamed Mary. The blast-furnace wind raged along the surface of the lake, parching their air. They ducked down into the water, only to be forced up again every few seconds for air. The surrounding area was confusion and panic. Choking. Crying. Praying. Cursing. The hours went on. Porcupine burned. Night fell.

The fire roared up the south flank of the lake. It lit on fire three rail cars parked on a rail siding between Porcupine and Golden City, cars filled with dynamite for Philadelphia Mine. The dynamite exploded, knocking people flat to the ground in a camp 3 miles farther south, and causing a 9 foot tsunami to race across the lake. The steel rails beneath those box cars coalesced into twisted spaghetti.

Early in the morning of July 12, it started to rain. Real rain. Real water. The wind was stilled. Embers were getting soaked, the fire now arrested.

Carrie and Mary crawled out of the lake. They were exhausted. Terrified. And now destitute.

It was never known how many died. The official count was seventy one, perhaps seventy three. Unofficially, it was put in the hundreds. No one knew how many prospectors there were out in the surrounding wilderness.

The rest of Ontario quickly heard about the disaster and shipped bales of clothing and supplies on the train as far as the rail line was passable. 

By and large the people stayed and regained their optimism. One of the numerous dynamite explosions opened up a powerful new spring of fresh water. The log store-front mercantiles were rebuilt. The rooming houses, the eateries, the saloons all mushroomed back into existence.

The Smith sisters did not stay for long. Within months they headed out west. Headed to Port Arthur, Ontario [now named Thunder Bay] at the west terminus of Lake Superior. Port Arthur was another booming frontier town in the height of railroad construction. Manufactured goods had to be moved west. Grain and cattle from the prairies had to be moved east. Port Arthur was the gateway to the vastness of western Canada.

Carrie was hired on as a waitress at the hotel on main street. The bantering with the bartender bubbled. 

The memory of an old fire was squelched with the reality of a new one. Things with Carrie and the bartender progressed. Flames of a new passion. But the stories were sketchy and secretive. A few documents have recently emerged citing names and dates and places and occupations. Circumstantial census evidence has been pieced together although not conclusive in confirmation. 

Perhaps my grandfather was a bartender. For certain, my grandmother Catherine was a survivor of the Great Porcupine Fire of 1911. 

The Refectory Manager