Great-grandfather Tells What Happened

There is this family story of my great-grandfather's death during the Moose Lake, Cloquet, and Duluth Fire of 1918. I have the letters my grandfather's older brothers wrote to the other brothers describing that day. I've often wondered what that day must have been like. Adopting his persona helped me imagine.



I chose to write this prose poem using the persona of my great-grandfather, which was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater's, Poems are Teachers, "Adopt another Persona" p. 75. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.


Great-Grandfather Tells What Happened

Ralph and the boys found my body up there on the hill and even though he told Sophia that I looked "peaceful" and "only a little burned," he wrote to Helge, who had shipped out with the AEF early in the fall, that when they found me a couple days after the fire they barely recognized me: "just a spot of white" amongst the destruction. Yes, sir, we knew that fire was out there to the west all morning; reports of flames and smoke kept arriving by telephone, spread through the party line. And then Floodwood, then Arnold burned. Then Woodland, which was us. So when the winds changed and the smoke and embers poured over the hill, Verner and the others took off through the swamp to find safety in the lower ground with the hope that the lake breeze would keep the fire away. But I turned back to open the barn door so the horses could escape. Their frantic neighs and white-eyed fright, oh my, that was too much for me to take. And it didn't take long before I realized my time was up. The fire jumped the barn and closed off the way downhill. So, I said a prayer for the kids and Sophie. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you'd choose. But by then the only choice left to me was to go up the hill, to outrun the fire, which, as we found out, did not happen. Not even close.

– Steve Peterson