The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-08-11
ONTARIO'S TRAGEDY
The Terrible Forest Fire Which Has Consumed Hundreds Unable
 to Escape
(Boston Herald)

1 (BOSIOn f1erdIQD
 As the count of deaths in the wild Hire that has blackened northern On,
 tario increases day by day-its tota
 has already reached 425-many are lasking under what extraordinary cir icumstances so large a number Of per sons, familiar with the region and
 ways of fire in grass, brush and forest
 could have met the tortures of theil
 sudden death. The answer is not hard
 to find, now that the few survivors
 have told their stories.
 Picture wide sweep of country
 as large as Massachusetts east o1
 Worcester, not crowded with cities and netted close with every means o1 communication, but still in the days of its first settlement, dotted with scattered clearings, lonely camps, lit- tie villages; and for the rest, either covered with forests or choked with tindery overgrowth of weeds and grass, drying among stumps and slash o or the fall trees killed in older fires, like the Porcupine burn that killed B persons five years ago last month. Picture a single railroad, with sin gle branch, cutting this territory from corner to corner, ties and trestles II. stream or muddy bottomed lake. No tice the narrow trails and woodroads, with hardly anywhere a we'll travelled highway Now let the sun, over all the region, redden with the drifting smoke from trivial bushfires, harm lessly eating at the undergrowth here and there, unfeared-and you have the quiet scene of the impending tragedy. Down on these istless fires and their endless fuel, suddenly there swept a gale, without warning from weather map or look from the sky In a moment, everywhere, the wind was driving flame through grass and brush, across clearings and waste land, into village and camp and tall timber, hv leap and leap; In catching ahead and yet ahead, the first con- tinually multiplied it's fury, until from hundreds of square miles, all blazing together, the gale drove the smoke and burning gases across the country as if turned itself to fire. As one wo- man described it, the air itself seemed to burn. This onrush the gale sweut against woods and farms and settle merts as a caneweaver's blowtorch drives its flame against the vanishing fuzz of his weaving.
 According to those who saved them selves in lake and mudnoIe, or who owe their lives to some freak of the flames. whole villages seemed to kim .dle at the same instant. Of 300 in- habitants at Nuska, only are known to be alive, Flames reached across 3C0 feet of water without noticing the gap; they twisted forward 200 feet high above the tree-tops, pools and smaller streams of water they sucked bare Swinging free from their fuel the flaming gases burned flocks and herds and people huddling in the cen- ter of open fields; they suffocated the refugees in root-houses underground Between the clay sides of one rail- road cut lay 57 men, women and chil- dren singed and charred.
 When fire comes in such a whirl- wind, it's cruelty in detail is hard to believe. A mother snatches up in her arms her three little children and stumbling runs for the creek; not strong enough to carry all three so far, she lets one slip in a sheltered spot, hurries the other two into the water, dashes back into the smoke filled woods-to find that the racing flames have swept past with her ba- by's life. Against the havoc of na- tural energies so ruthless, not even the herosims of brave men and wo- men bring any relieving offset. Fer haps Ontario settlers needed lesson in the danger of outdoor fire, how ever, harmless when w-nGs are st1l' but such a lesson as they received. the whole country cannot take to heart too deeply.