Legends, lore and lies: BEER BOOM

There is a legend in Cloquet that paints Cloquet Depot Agent Lawrence Fauley as one of the biggest heroes of the 1918 fires.

“No account of the time would have adequate historical value if there were complete omission of the name of one, whose courage and foresight did much to relieve the danger and suffering for the people of Cloquet: Lawrence Fauley, Depot Agent,” Lucille Booker Watkins wrote in 1936, in an introduction to a collection of essays about the fire submitted to the Women’s Friday Club contest.

There is a park named after Fauley in the heart of Cloquet, where a giant steam engine reminds people of the thousands who escaped the city by train that terrible night and historic panels tell visitors about Fauley, Cloquet and the fire.

However, writings by the newspaper editor’s then 14-year-old daughter, Kathryn Elfes, reveal Fauley may not have been the calm, cool and collected depot master that legend made him out to be.

“There were four relief trains to take out most of the 7,000 residents of Cloquet (few went in cars) plus the farm families who came in with teams and unhitched the poor horses to fend for themselves,” Elfes wrote in a manuscript, “Family Facts and Fancies, Also Legends, Lore and Lies” that she penned in 1959, 41 years after the fire.

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By Jana Peterson jpeterson@pinejournal.com

She described how the Gilbert passenger train left first for Duluth, with only women and children allowed on board. Next were two empty ore trains returning from the docks to the Iron Range that had been set out in Cloquet because they couldn’t get through the Brookston area, which had gone up in flames that afternoon.

By the time the Elfes family arrived, one of those ore trains had left for Carlton and the other was nearly full. Her father, Pine Knot editor Orlo Elfes, chose to take the family to the fourth train, made up of a motley assortment of box cars, afraid that one of the flaming boards that filled the air would land in the open ore cars. Her father picked up her mother, then her, then the suitcases and threw them in the box car.

Kathryn recalled sitting in the box car, watching the YMCA and the Cloquet Hotel burn while they waited for the small switch engine to hook up to the train. Meanwhile, the second ore train left and the depot caught fire.

“Our train was pulled down the tracks next to the big storage tanks of gasoline,” she writes. “No more people were getting on now, but one could hear the scream of terrified horses running madly in the street, the wail of the demon wind, the hiss of burning timbers, the roar of flames, the train whistle and bells and the never ceasing siren.”

Here Kathryn’s tale departs from the established legend of the Fauley’s heroism:

“The station agent walked past our box car with a dazed expression on his flame-lit face,” she wrote in her revelatory account of the fire. “Papa, who knew that (the) last two box cars had actually caught fire and the flames had been beaten out with wet coats, asked when we were leaving — it seemed a little too hot for comfort.

“The agent answered like a person in a dream that they couldn’t take passengers out on a passenger track without standard passenger equipment and those were the regulations. Papa snorted, ‘Regulations — hell!’”

Now comes the stuff of real legend: how a newspaper editor and a police chief worked together to overcome one man’s bureaucratic meltdown.

“Then the Chief of Police, John McSweeney, in his big fur coat that was practically a trademark with him, came up and Papa repeated the agent’s unbelievable statement,” she continued in her account. “McSweeney was horrified. Papa asked if he had a gun and in rich Irish brogue McSweeney stated he had two of them. He opened his coat to show the revolvers strapped to his belt. Papa said, “Well, for God’s sake, put one of them at the engineer’s head if you have to, but let’s get out of here!”

According to her story, McSweeney swung into the cab of the locomotive, which began to move slowly toward Carlton, stopping at mill crossings to pick up men (since the lumber and paper companies ran the mills until 9 p.m. that night) and stopping in Scanlon until the cars were full.

Although her stories were written 50 years ago or more, author Curt Brown wrote about her “far less heroic version” in his new book: “Minnesota 1918: When Flu, Fire and War Ravaged the State.”

Brown discovered the less-flattering account of Fauley’s behavior in a box of “the Gray Papers” — Kathryn wrote under the name of Kathryn Elfes Casher and Kathryn Elfes Gray at different times of her life — at the Minnesota History Center. The Pine Journal traveled to the Gale Family Library there to confirm and read more from Kathryn, who wrote a series of columns and history pieces for the Pine Knot newspaper in the 1960s and ’70s. Fellow 1918 writer Francis Carroll remembers reading many of Kathryn Elfes Gray’s columns in newspapers that his uncle would save for him.

The box also included a five-page essay on the 1918 fires written by Kathryn a few years after the family manuscript, on the 50th anniversary of the fire. There are more details in the slightly more dramatic later essay, although the facts of the story remain the same.

“Tradition has it that when the Chief of Police told the engineer to ‘get moving,’ the answer was ‘I can’t, I am waiting for orders,’” she wrote. “In his County Cork brogue, McSweeney answered, ‘Here are your orders!’ showing the loaded guns. The engine started. Two men with lanterns, one of them the station agent, were on the cowcatcher, the iron framework of railroad locomotives of that era.”

In the 1968 essay, she gives much of the credit for anticipating and preparing for the disaster to Cloquet Mayor John Long:

“He had seen the disaster coming all afternoon, had made plans; organized street runners to knock on every door, sent his own car, loaded with family, driven by his teenage son to Duluth, had demanded box cars be emptied of cargo though he was warned not to; and the thousands of people who escaped that flaming night of terror owned their lives to MAYOR JOHN LONG.” u

As people fled from the flames Oct. 12, 1918, others sped toward it, filling their cars with evacuees and driving them to safety.