" At times, it seemed that the whole West was aflame. Later that summer, superheated air ignited the litter left by Minnesota loggers. It was a repetition of the firestorm that had enveloped Peshtigo twenty-three years earlier, when the Ingallses saw smoke from their little house in the Big Woods. This time, the Great Hinckley Fire consumed another entire town—burning more than 250,000 acres, killing between four hundred and eight hundred people, melting nails, and fusing the wheels of railcars to the tracks. "

― Caroline Fraser , Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder