The Miramichi Fire: A History (Volume 13)

by Alan MacEachern

On 7 October 1825, a massive forest fire swept through northeastern New Brunswick, devastating entire communities. When the smoke cleared, it was estimated that the fire had burned across six thousand square miles, one-fifth of the colony. The Miramichi Fire was the largest wildfire ever to occur within the British Empire, one of the largest in North American history, and the largest along the eastern seaboard. Yet despite the international attention and relief efforts it generated, and the ruin it left behind, the fire all but disappeared from public memory by the twentieth century. A masterwork in historical imagination, The Miramichi Fire vividly reconstructs nineteenth-century Canada's greatest natural disaster, meditating on how it was lost to history. First and foremost an environmental history, the book examines the fire in the context of the changing relationships between humans and nature in colonial British North America and New England, while also exploring social memory and the question of how history becomes established, warped, and forgotten. Alan MacEachern explains how the imprecise and conflicting early reports of the fire's range, along with the quick rebound of the forests and economy of New Brunswick, led commentators to believe by the early 1900s that the fire's destruction had been greatly exaggerated. As an exercise in digital history, this book takes advantage of the proliferation of online tools and sources in the twenty-first century to posit an entirely new reading of the past. Resurrecting one of Canada's most famous and yet unexamined natural disasters, The Miramichi Fire traverses a wide range of historical and scientific literatures to bring a more complete story into the light.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published July 23, 2020

About the author

Alan MacEachern is an Associate Professor at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada and Director of Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE).

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Miramichi Fire: A History (2020), MacEachern investigates one of the worst forest fires in North American history, the Miarmichi fire of 1825, one that has received little systematic historical analysis. As such, MacEachern begins by analyzing the context in which the fire took place. The Miramichi region attracted migrants from Britain, particularly the poverty-stricken Irish, and prospectors who founded timber companies. He then covers the destruction of the fire, the relative quickness of the catastrophic event, and the charitable response that helped to aid and rebuild after the fire. The fire certainly changed both the environment and culture of the Miramichi region. MacEachern, in the fourth chapter, demonstrates how migrants were once again drawn to the region despite the fire, helping the population rebound, and how there was a temporary uptick in agricultural endeavours only to be replaced again by the dominant timber industry. In the fifth chapter, he highlights how the fire, in tandem with transnational economic shifts, caused the timber industry to move towards sawmills and finished lumber rather than the export of larger unfinished logs and how the forests began to regrow, although with less diversity than before allowing it to continue to be a source of livelihood for settlers. MacEachern argues, that while the fire changed the environment to some extent, the reaction of the community and settlers demonstrate that, in the long term. the Miramichi Fire lost its gravity due to the degree of economic and cultural continuity, and the lack of legal changes around burning in the fire’s wake. These factors helped to allow the region to “forget” the fire.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what environmental history should be, branching out in a range of directions while maintaining a compelling narrative arc beneath the canopy of inquiry. A massive fire swept through New Brunswick in October of 1825, consuming perhaps 15,500 square kms, a fifth of the colony or an area over three-quarters of the size of South Africa's famed Kruger National Park. The fire has been largely extinguished from history, and MacEachern has done a superb job of raising it from the ashes, and linking it to wider historical events on a global scale, including the Trans-Atlantic timber trade. He notes that New Brunswick today can deceptively seem to be much the same place that it was two centuries ago. This reviewer, who hails from neighbouring Nova Scotia, has had the great privilege of catching Atlantic salmon on fly in the Miramichi River, and on sections one can be lulled into the fantasy that it is an untouched wilderness. But it is not. The caribou are gone and so are the wolves, while the forest has also changed. Yet over 80% of the province is covered in forest, and forestry remains the leading industry. But the forest has changed.
Stay tuned for a longer review in another publication.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The envious academics would say MacEachern sleeps on the job waiting for his cut of the taxes to come, but in reality he goes under his chair where there is a portal to the 19th century.

[Judd Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of fire books. A /lot/ of them. This one is exceptional.

This is, without a doubt, one of the best constructed fire histories I have seen. More than anything else, Maceachern grasps the question of "why history matters" and is able to move past the Achilles heal of most fire histories: the tendency to focus on the wildfire as an isolated event, where all that matters is the climatic action of the burn itself. Instead, Maceachern effectively engages with both a historiography of his own work, and with situating the fire in its overall context.

The Miramichi fire is an intriguing one in many ways. First, there's a fair bit of contestation over how much it actually burned. Relatedly, there's also live question about how many concurrent fires around the NE US and Canada ought to be lumped into its name versus treated as distinct. Second, the fire itself was massive and killed many (indeed, could well be among the highest fatalities of any kind of fire in Canada)... but ultimately had surprisingly little impact on how Canada approaches fire. Third, and not disconnected, it has become something of a surprisingly 'forgotten' fire in the local and national culture.

One of the many nice things about Maceachern's treatment of the fire is his ability to embrace both the heterogeneity of the fire and its uniform ephemerality ("The Miramichi Fire was defined by and experienced in terms of its suddenness, its swiftness, its ubiquity, and its ephemerality." p. 54). It almost exists "outside time," with contemporaneous histories often citing the fire as completing all its destruction in only fifteen minutes (p. 60), despite burning thousands of square kilometres. In the absence of a specific perimeter or orderly progression, the fire becomes something of a shapeshifting force: folks as far as Montréal refer to local fires of that day as being part of The Miramichi fire (which clearly wasn't literally true, p. 82), with the fire taking on a sort of mythological standing, with all sorts of delightful embellishments as stories get told and retold (e.g., of thirteen babies born in rafts; of cows swimming children to safety, p. 64-65).

A core project of the book (p. 76) is explaining the ways that stability or variation in the fire's reported size shift over time. As Maceachern describes, "One might assume that time would bring clarity to the question of hte fire's size... but that did not happen" (p. 74). In the first 25 years post fire, reports of the fire's size were mostly stable (p. 70), with the exception of those attempting to sell a narrative of the stability of the timber industry (p. 76-77). Chapter 5, though, ultimately traces the way that subsequent historians created revisionist accounts of the fires' size, with bizarre weighting of different kinds of input into these processes. It's a wonderful tale of historical revisionism in action, and makes a beautiful contribution on its own.

It also fits into a large story of many different communities wrestling with how to understand a fire. Part was bound up in a project to shift the industry from dirty and undesirable forestry towards more culturally acceptable agrarian practices (p. 126), to which the fire offered a convenient narrative. Another part was the need to create a tidy narrative of the fire's refining power, creating a better community rising from the ashes (p. 130-133). And, part was bound up in the patchiness of the burn, the ability of the industry to continue supplying lumber, and the ebbs and flows of market demand concealing some of these impacts. If a tree burns in a forest, but there's no impact on the lumber supply, does the fire even matter at all?

Ultimately, the outcome was that the Mirimachi fire had much less influence on policy making, even in Canada, even in Atlantic Canada, than the Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin in 1871. That fire would prove to be the inflection point towards major suppression apparatus (especially with the Big Blowup of 1910 thereafter to push even further that direction) (see p. 156-162). What could be more Canadian than that - drawing more influence from an American fire than a home-grown one?

One thing that makes the Miramichi fire particularly poignant these days is the degree to which there was little local fire knowledge (see discussion from p. 30-35, p. 55):

What they knew of forests and fire had in large part been learned elsewhere based on conditions elsewhere. And what knowledge they had of the local climate and fire regimes was gained during uncharacteristically cool years, ill-preparing them for what, as we will see, was an uncharacteristically hot one. (p. 35)

This is salient in a world where one concern re: widlfires is changing climates bringing wildfire to new landscapes. What lessons can be learned of relevance for today's fires?

Look, this isn't your run-of-the-mill fire story, which centres particular individuals and heroic characters in an action tale centred on the fire itself. If you want that, there are dozens of those out there. What this is... it's a genre defining example of what a fire history can and should be. It's a contribution to how we ought to do history about fires past. And it's an illustration of how compellingly written a historical text can be, thanks to layering in reflection on methods, embracing complexity, and having a clear purpose with why one is investigating. It's a fantastic book and one of the best fire histories I've read.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and well-researched take on a topic not often discussed despite its significant historical, social, and ecological impact on New Brunswick and bordering Maine.

Born and raised in New Brunswick, I am surprised that the Miramichi Fire wasn't a subject included in any of our historical studies. (Then again, based on the state of the educational system here perhaps I am not so surprised). MacEachern's work has given me a fresh (re: different) perspective on the geographical areas that I frequently traverse and know well. It's something worth digesting to better understand the history of this province and its people.

After all, the land is as old as the earth itself - who knows what other secrets it holds.

[Javier Ponce · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
A fun and relaxed historical reading about the Miramichi Fire. The author walks with the reader and shows you his thought process and method of reaching out the sources and points of view of the event.

[Jared Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nicely written geographic history of an event

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow