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. A masterwork in historical imagination, The
Miramichi Fire vividly reconstructs nineteenth-century Canada's greatest
natural disaster, meditating on how it was lost to history. First and
foremost an environmental history, the book examines the fire in the
context of the changing relationships between humans and nature in
colonial British North America and New England, while also exploring
social memory and the question of how history becomes established,
warped, and forgotten. Alan MacEachern explains how the imprecise and
conflicting early reports of the fire's range, along with the quick
rebound of the forests and economy of New Brunswick, led commentators to
believe by the early 1900s that the fire's destruction had been greatly
exaggerated. As an exercise in digital history, this book takes
advantage of the proliferation of online tools and sources in the
twenty-first century to posit an entirely new reading of the past.
Resurrecting one of Canada's most famous and yet unexamined natural
disasters, The Miramichi Fire traverses a wide range of historical and
scientific literatures to bring a more complete story into the light.
