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Chapter Two RED TORCH OVER OUR LAND Sunday, July 8, 860, dawned especially hot on the dusty prairies and rolling hills of northern and eastern Texas. By noon the temperature already stood at the century mark in many communities. Perhaps the hottest spot in the state was Marshall, where before the sun would spend itself the mercury would reach 5½ degrees in the shade. The Marshall Texas Republican later charted the high temperatures for July, and its records indicate that July 8 was easily the hottest day of that torrid month.1 In Camden, Arkansas, northeast of Marshall, a planter noted in his diary that day that the temperature there had risen to 09 degrees and declared that it had been the “hottest day ever known in this country.”2 Farther west, in Dallas, the early afternoon reading was variously reported at between 06 and 0. One pioneer Dallasite, who did not know the high temperature for that date, still believed many years later that the July 8 was “the hottest day we have ever had in this latitude.” By midday, most of the 678 residents of the young Trinity River town had taken refuge in their houses. After finishing Sunday dinner, many of them reclined in various states of dishabille in an effort to reduce their discomfort from the sweltering heat. At about :30 p.m. the shrill cry of “Fire!” pierced the air, and the sleepy village bolted from its Sabbath siesta. The townspeople, some of them only half-clothed, rushed into the streets looking for the smoke that would pinpoint the danger. What they saw filled them with horror, for down on Commerce Street, near the town . Marshall Texas Republican, August , 860. 2. Robert F. Kellan Diary, July 8, 860, microfilm copy of original, General Microfilm Collection , Arkansas Historical Commission, Little Rock, Arkansas. 29 30 texas terror square, great billows of smoke rolled skyward from Wallace Peak’s new drugstore . Flames had already enveloped the two-story frame structure and had spread northward, first to Smith’s warehouse, then on to the office of the Dallas Herald. Within minutes the whole business section was an inferno. There was little question of extinguishing the blaze. The drought had rendered the predominantly wooden structures tinder dry, and they burned with astonishing speed. Town officials had not yet made provision for combating fires—the community had only incorporated four years earlier—but even had they done so, the rapid spread of the conflagration probably would have rendered futile even the most determined efforts to save the business houses that lay in the path of the blaze. Fanned by the high winds, the flames seemed to leap from building to building, said the editor of the Dallas Herald, in some cases igniting structures that “were almost one hundred yards in advance of the main blaze.”3 Echoing the Herald’s description, Mrs. Addie K. McDermett later recalled that the fire spread so rapidly that it seemed to break out simultaneously in a dozen places.4 Most of the able-bodied citizens nevertheless worked desperately to salvage merchandise from doomed stores and personal belongings from threatened homes. Even in these efforts many were frustrated, since blowing sparks from the advancing flames in several instances set fire to property that had been dragged to apparent safety in the streets.5 The intense heat also took a heavy toll on the salvagers, many of whom succumbed to heat prostration.6 Emma Baird Brown was a young girl at the time of the fire, but she remembered vividly the heat, fear, and excitement that all Dallasites felt that day. With her mother and young brothers and sisters she watched anxiously from the porch of her home on the northwest corner of Houston and Elm streets and later recalled seeing “a heavy pall that cut off the rays of the sun, a licking flame that mounted high and destroyed all within its grasp.”7 In less than two hours the fire in Dallas had run its course, leaving every building on the western and northern sides of the square, and half of those on the eastern side, in charred ruins. The town’s hotels, shops, stores, warehouses , lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, and the newspaper office—some eighteen 3. Dallas Herald, “Extra,” July , 860. Pryor may have borrowed the use of another journal’s press to produce his “extra,” which was more like a flyer than a...

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