Date of Award
5-2020
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Degree Name
History: M.A.
Department
History
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
Jason Eden
Second Advisor
Robert Galler
Third Advisor
Debra Gold
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Minnesota, Disaster Response, Forest Fire, Fire Wardens
Abstract
Between 1870 and 1920 Minnesota business culture focused on depleting the land of its resources with little regulation while the ecological landscape was influenced by a hot and dry climatic cycle. As these two forces collide, Minnesota experiences its four “great fires” (1894, 1908, 1910, and 1918). Each of these fires provide substantive documentation on emergency response and relief illustrating Minnesota’s development of a disaster response program. With several localized fires, the learning gained from fire to fire can be assessed. After evaluating the responses to each of these fires, one can conclude that although technological advancements and complex relief organizations developed between fires, the business culture of Minnesota stymied any real learning on behalf of Minnesota settlers. The stymied learning of the settlers led to a similar death count for the first and fourth fires.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Blake M., "Trial by Fire: Cultural Complacency, Institutional Learning, and the Development of the Fire Warden System in Minnesota, 1870-1920" (2020). Culminating Projects in History. 17.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/hist_etds/17
