Today’s Oxygen-Deprived Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Here’s another excerpt from Minnesota 1918:When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State, about the Cloquet fire that devastated much of Northern Minnesota.
A Minnesota Forest Fires Relief Commission later estimated that at least half of the 453 lives lost in the fires on October 12, 1918, died in the Moose Lake and Kettle River area. Among them were at least 15 volunteer firefighters west of Kettle River, 75 to 100 people at Dead Man’s Curve, 67 near what was called Eckman’s Corner, 37 in root cellars at the Niemi, Soderberg, and Williams farms, and countless others in various buildings, wells, streams, fields, and woods.
The disaster at the Niemi farm – about five miles west of Moose Lake – might be the most heartrending of all the numbing tales of loss. Hulda Portinen Koivisto, who lost seven of her eight children on October 12, 1918, shared her memories with Edwin Manni fifty-seven years later for a story that ran in the Moose Lake Star Gazette in 1975.
“The forenoon was beautiful,” Hulda said. With eight kids ranging from age one to thirteen, she and her family tackled the Saturday chores and washed clothes. They knew fires were burning a couple miles south at Tomczak’s mill. When they realized the danger was approaching, they wrapped valuables in a bedspread and buried them in a half-acre potato field. A child’s bike, some furniture, a buggy, and wagon would somehow remain unburned on a nearby rock pile. The family planned to escape to the south because they didn’t see any more smoke coming from the direction of Tomczak’s mill. “Suddenly, the wind shifted and increased in velocity and it was obvious disaster was upon us,” said Hulda, who was thirty-six at the time. “Despite the shock, confusion and fear, survival was a decision to be made in seconds.”
Her dad, Henry Portinen, ran over and encouraged the children to join him at his home nearby. Only seven-year-old Arnold ran through the swampy area with his grandfather. They made it to the gate, where his grandfather’s burned body was later discovered. An uncle, Urho (Corny) Porinen, tossed Arnold and another nephew in a Model T. A huge gust of wind lifted the car, throwing it on a stone fence. The three survived in a low spot in a nearby field.
By 7:00 PM on that day of horror, one of the Koivisto’s neighbors, Ida Niemi, had hustled the children to her root cellar for what she believed would be safety. With winter coming on, the cellar was jammed with potatoes, but fifteen people managed to squirm inside: seven Koivisto kids – Leonard (twelve), Ellen (eleven), Ester (nine), Ethel (nine), Elsie (five), Wilbert (three), and Evelyn (one); Ida Niemi (fifty) and four of her children, Helmi (fourteen), Alexander (twelve), Bernhardt (ten), and Martha (five); and three members of the neighboring Berkio family, Christina (fifty-seven), Clara (sixteen), and Reino (seven).
Hulda, her husband, Nick, and one of the Niemi boys, John, stayed outside, wrapped themselves in blankets, and tossed bucket after bucket of water on the root cellar door. “With the terrific wind, dust, smoke, and burning debris landing on the root cellar roof, it was a constant battle to keep the fire out,” Hulda said.
Every root cellar had an air vent. “Finally in all the confusion, it dawned on us to call down this vent to inquire about the welfare of the people inside,” she said. They received no answer, so they opened the door. “You can imagine the horror when we discovered all of the people we had desperately tried to save were dead – suffocated from lack of oxygen. Even some of the potatoes were baked. There was nothing more to be done for them.”
The fatal root cellar.
Hulda and Nick pulled the bodies from the cellar, arranged them in a long row, and placed their arms across their children’s bodies – “hoping and praying for some sign of life, with no success.” They remained with the bodies until Sunday afternoon, when guardsmen stopped at the farm after retrieving bodies from roadsides. All the bodies were brought to the new Elm Tree Hotel, which had avoided the flames in Moose Lake.
When Hulda heard her children would be buried in the mass grave, she threw a fit. She was a devout Christian and told three officers that her children would be buried in the family plot at St. Peter’s Lutheran Cemetery in Moose Lake “even if she had to push them there in a wheelbarrow.” The guardsmen yielded to her request. Coffins were furnished, and army trucks had to stop at each stream crossing to unload because the bridges were burned. But Hulda’s children were buried in the family plot at St Peter’s, as were the three Berkios. The Niemis were buried in the mass grave.
Lowering the bodies into the mass grave.
Hulda’s father was never seen alive again after Arnold lost sight of him at the farm gate. Presumably his body went in the mass grave. Hulda’s mother, Lydia, badly burned, died three weeks later at St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth. And eighteen-year-old John Niemi, who tossed the buckets of water on the cellar door, died from influenza and smoke inhalation that November.
Culled from: Minnesota 1918:When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State
Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!
Myrtle Corbin came from Texas. She was one of several similar freaks on the circuit at the end of the century. Francisco Lentini, “The Human Tripod,” had three legs, while the Indian freak Laloo had a diminutive second body growing from his chest. All were abnormal Siamese twins in which one member of the pair had not only failed to separate but had also suffered imperfect development. The result was a parasite-autosite pairing in which the host twin (autosite) bore the burden of consciousness and nurture for both. Although the publicity accompanying Laloo’s appearances attempted to add further kinkiness to the arrangement by maintaining this parasite was female, such twins are always of the same sex. In Myrtle’s case both her lower body and that of her twin were said to be fully functional. Consequently, after she married she bore children from both vaginas, two from one and three from the other.
Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age