The Diary of Lizzie Dopps

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Chapter  IX
PRAIRIE FIRES

Prairie fires were not uncommon.  In fact, we lived in constant fear of them during the hot dry season--these monstrous infernos raging and leaping towards us like a thing imbued with life, a demon gone into a wild frenzy.

To avoid a prairie fire, we plowed many furrows around our fields and homes, leaving them bare, so that no dried vegetation would feed these furies, but sometimes this did not stop them and we had to fight these demons.

One such time I shall always remember.  It was just a little while before our Jennie was born.  One evening after darkness fell there was a rosy glow in the sky.  We felt sure it was a prairie fire in the distance.  If it was what we thought it was, we knew we were in for a long night of fire-fighting.

Eli said, "I’ll go to bed and try to get some sleep and rest (he had had a long hard day) and try to be ready for it if it comes.  Will you sit up and watch, and if it comes up over yonder hill, call me?"  

After anxiously watching and waiting, there it came in all its fierce, red fury, making a direct line for our home,

"Eli, it's coming," I called.  

He arose immediately and neighbors came to help.  On and on it came like a wild hungry animal let loose, greedy little red tongues darting out, licking up and devouring everything in its way.

We had just harvested our grain and it was stacked in the barn, full to the top.  Oh, was all our labor of sowing and harvesting, our little home and all we had, perhaps even our lives, to be consumed by this mad, wild thing?

The men tore up blankets and wet them in pails and tubs of water and went at it with a vengeance.  On and on it came, over the fields of stubble.  Now it was licking up the loose straw around the straw stack!  

In the house it was light as day, a red glare coming through the window, although it was in the dead of night.  Even if we escaped with our lives, I had another fear.  Would it effect my baby I was expecting?

The men were near exhaustion and when they saw it so near the straw stack they thought they were licked and about gave up to flee to safety.

One of them gasped out, "Eli, I can't fight any longer."

At that Eli went at it all the harder.  It was like a whip if he had to do it all alone.  However, when the others saw his determination, it seemed to give them new strength and spurred them on to fight all the harder, to fight this demon.

Miracles of miracles, at the very edge of the straw stack and round about, the wet blankets had snapped the life out of this wild thing.  It flickered a while and finally died.

They had conquered a prairie fire once more and saved the home and perhaps the lives of courageous prairie settlers again.

In time our Jennie was born and was alright.  It seemed to me to be an irony of fate that after I, having passed through this fright of fire, she was to be born during the deluge of a rainstorm, the edge of a cloudburst I have previously told about.