The Fire Stops at the Border! (or, Hellooooo what is going on here???) – Alan MacEachern Guest Blog

Devastating wildfires continue to scorch Western United States, an unprecedented and alarming addition to an already intense year of social, medical, and economic instability. We asked historian and MQUP author Alan MacEachern to reflect on the current disaster in the context of his book, The Miramichi Fire: A History.

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.

As wildfires torched the American West earlier this month, one of the wilder online rumours that flared up with them was that they were all stopping at the Canadian border. Just look at the fire maps! “Canada with less than 5 fires while USA burns to the ground …… Helloooooo what is going on here???” was one tweet. Conspiracists – some mistaking the presence of Bureau of Land Management officials with Black Lives Matter – took it as evidence the American fires were being set by leftist agitators. Others wondered if it meant Canadians were dealing better with climate change. But, of course, it was simply a matter of the US maps only showing US fires. Western Canada had fires of its own. To fire, the national border is immaterial.

Or is it?

Twitter being all Twitter.

My book The Miramichi Fire: A History tells of the massive wildfire complex that swept across northeastern North America on 7 October 1825, the largest ever recorded along the Eastern seaboard. It burned an estimated 3400 square kilometres in central Maine (more than 800,000 acres), making this still the most extensive forest fire in the state. But it was even larger in neighbouring New Brunswick, scorching an estimated 15,500 square kilometres (almost 4 million acres). It also destroyed communities along the Miramichi River in the northeast of the colony and killed at least a couple hundred people.

That the New Brunswick side of the border experienced the worst of the fire’s devastation would dictate responses to it, from the international relief effort that arose immediately afterward to the historical understanding of the fire right down to the present day. It meant, most importantly, that the blaze on both sides of the border would become known as the Miramichi Fire – a fact that in itself convinced Americans the fire was primarily a Canadian one. In the short term, this meant American ships bearing emergency supplies that fall sailed past Maine on their way to New Brunswick. In the long term, it meant that American historians dismissed the fire as of largely Canadian interest. Writers in both nations tended to treat as just a curiosity the fact that two neighbouring jurisdictions each experienced their most devastating wildfires ever on the exact same day.

Forest fires across the Northeast, 1825. Map by Eric Leinberger.

In my book, I map the complex of fires that burned throughout New England and British North America that fall. Unsurprisingly, reports of fire required reporters: witnesses who could document the disaster to newspapers, magazines, and the wider world. The settled parts of central Maine and northeastern New Brunswick provided such witnesses, such accounts. The sparsely populated 200 kilometres between these regions – with much the same forests facing much the same climatic conditions – did not. But does that mean they did not burn, or that there were not the communities, the newspapers to document their burn?

One thing this sparsely populated area did possess, of course, was the international border – although a fuzzy one, very much in dispute between the United States and British North America at the time. But it was real enough to serve as something of a cultural firebreak, defining how the fire(s) of 7 October 1825 would be remembered on both sides of it. The Miramichi Fire: A History spans the international divide, in the belief that understanding either side of the Canada-U.S. border requires understanding both.

Alan MacEachern is professor of history at the University of Western Ontario and has written widely on Canadian environmental history. More details on his latest book, The Miramichi Fire: A History, can be found here >