SIX HUNDRED ARE DEAD

Latest Reports From the Fire Stricken Northwest.

A NUMBER OF TOWNS SWEPT AWAY.

Every Report From the Devastated District Adds to the Horror---The Greater Part of the Dead are Women and Children---Ninety Persons Take Refuge in a Creek and Sixty of Them Perish---The Property Loss Is Many Millions---General News.

HINCKLEY, Minn., Sept. 4---The special train sent out by citizens of Minneapolis, bearing supplies to the suffering people of Hinckley and vicinity, carried eleven physicians with a full supply of drugs and fifty cots. Pine City was the first place reached. Instead of 200 wounded to be cared for there, as reported, only twenty were found. It seems that the people either escaped comparatively uninjured, or perished entirely. Many were dead, but only a small number needed the assistance of the relief train. The patients that were cared for were a sight to weaken the strongest man. Faces were blackened and blistered; eyes were sightless and lips were parched and swollen. The moaning is heart rendering.

Leaving Pine City a reporter went to Hinckley, thirteen miles distant, on a handoar. Words fail to describe the desolation. Not only was every green and living thing licked up by the flames, but the earth was blackened and burned. Not a vestige of the town is left standing. Three hundred charred corpses were seen by the reporter lying on the ground. They were piled in heaps containing ninety-seven bodies.

The number of dead in this vicinity will fall little short of five hundred.

THE DEATH ROLL.

Every Late Report Increases the Number Killed in the Forest Fires.

DULUTH, Minn., Sept. 4.---The death roll resulting from the forest fires is increasing and now over 650 are known to be lost. The greater part are women and children. Early this morning thirty experienced woodmen left on a special train to scour the woods for bodies of settlers in out of the way cabins and clearings. They are expected to bring back appalling reports.

At Brookdale, a little town south of Hinckley, ninety persons took refuge in the water of a small creek. Sixty of this number were burned to death and the remainder were rescued alive.

Aspen Weekly Times, Aspen, CO 8 Sept 1894