PRAIRIE FIRES:

(Presented by Marion Naylor)


(This is copied verbatim from my mother’s memoirs, (Homestead Days, 1906). Her name was Christina Graham (Wilson) Morrison. )
A very real menace in the early days were the numerous prairie fires that swept through parts of the country every year. Once started, by a spark, by lightning, or more often by man’s carelessness, and if fanned by a wind, it could travel with the speed of a fast-running horse. To protect buildings and haystacks, the settlers surrounded them with a fireguard, which was formed by plowing two furrows about 15 feet apart and burning off the grass between them, thus leaving the fire with nothing on which to feed. On quiet days of little or no wind this was sufficient to stop the fire, but on blustery windy days it was a different story.
On such a morning of a day in spring, on looking out we were appalled to see a large column of black smoke which seemed to be no great distance away, headed in our direction, and being driven by a strong north wind. The men hurriedly gathered gunny sacks, soaked them thoroughly in water, and took up positions to beat out any spark which might be blown across the fireguard. My brother Tom and I, eager for excitement, went along with them.
Soon we could see the flames come racing down a long hillside. Then one of the men shouted to us, “Run for the slough, it’s jumped the fireguard!” We ran pell-mell to a nearby slough in whose center there still remained a large snowdrift. We plunged in up to our waists and stood with our faces buried in our arms to ward off the smoke. The fire went racing past around the slough and was gone in a few minutes, leaving behind it the blackened ashes of the recently thick prairie wool grass. The cows, which had been feeding close by, had the ends of their tails and their heels singed. The fire raced on in the direction of the Cairns’ buildings, but no damage as the grass was trampled short there. That night, when the wind died down, we could still see the light from the flames away to the south, as the fire continued on to harass the settlers in its path.
There were other occasions when a fire would start up unexpectedly, and there was a rush to hitch the oxen to the plow and make a furrow around the buildings and haystacks. Two of our neighbors were one day talking by the roadside. One of them lit a cigarette and carelessly threw down the match. Almost at once, there was a puff of smoke at their feet, a burst of flames, and a fire was on its way again. Fortunately, there was little wind, and with the help of neighbors, it was soon brought under control; and as the years passed the fires gradually lessened, the settler’s plow putting the land under cultivation, and his cattle and horses keeping the grass eaten down.