70th anniversary of Dance Fire being rememembered Friday

Editor's Note: The 70th Anniversary of the Dance Fire is being remembered formally this Friday (see ad on page four for more details).

Submitted by Bob Locking
(Bob Locking, Dixie Badiuk, Audrey Meunier and Myrna Armstrong are grandchildren of Rose (LaBelle) Willis; sister of Frank, Bill & Noah Labelle.

By Beatrice Fines
Winnipeg Free Press

Thanksgiving Day, 1938, in the Rainy River District of Ontario will be remembered as a tragic day. Sixty homes were destroyed and 17 people died in a fire that swept through the small rural community of Dance, some 30 kilometers from Fort Frances. What made it even more tragic was the fact that the fire rangers had told the people there to leave their homes days before.
The summer and fall of 1938 were exceptionally dry. For weeks prior to Thanksgiving, there had been no rain and the humidity was extremely low. Fires were burning in the bush and muskegs from the vicinity of Sprague in southeastern Manitoba to Rainy Lake and into Minnesota. A heavy pall of smoke hung over the entire Rainy River District, day after day.
Dance was a community of small farms, mostly covered with bush, with outcroppings of rock and stretches of muskeg. A farmer might have a small clearing where he grazed a few cattle, grew some hay and oats and kept a few chickens and hogs. His chief source of income was from cutting pulpwood for the paper mill at Fort Frances. As he trimmed his logs, he piled the slash and burned it. In 1938 those fires became impossible to control, and on Thanksgiving Day the odds were all in favour of a major fire storm. The morning was clear and unexpectedly warm with a fresh breeze blowing. In the afternoon the wind quickened to gale force and the fires began to roar through the trees with incredible speed.
The three LaBelle brothers, Frank, Bill and Noah, lived on adjoining farms in Dance. That morning, Bill took his two older daughters and went to town, leaving his wife Violetta and five younger children at home. Frank and Noah were in the bush with three other men fighting the spreading slash fires, as they had been for several days. Suddenly, they heard a roar "like a dozen freight trains" and realized that a major conflagration was bearing down on them.
They decided to head for Frank's farm because it had the largest clearing. Violetta and her children and Noah's wife and family also ran to Frank's farm. By the time the little group had gathered, fire surrounded the clearing. They tried desperately to keep it from the buildings, but first the outer ones, then the house caught fire. Next they decided to try to get on the road to safety. Tortured by the smoke and the searing heat the children screamed and scattered and it was impossible for the men to keep the little band together. Violetta LaBelle and the five children with her, Mrs. Noah LaBelle with some of her children and some of Frank LaBelle's children perished. Some were found huddled in the ditches; some on the gravel road. Babies were covered by their mother's bodies.
When young Mrs. Sam Fyle realized the danger she decided to take her baby and her sister Mabel and try to warn her husband who was cutting wood about a mile and a half from their home. Suddenly the three found themselves cut off by fire, and fled toward the nearby home of Ben Fults. It was soon ringed with flames. James Robinson, an elderly musician who lived next to the Fults heard their screams, but his own cabin was surrounded and dense smoke hung over his tiny clearing. He lay on the ground in the garden and miraculously managed to survive. The bodies of Mr. Fults, Mr. and Mrs. Fyle, Mabel and the baby were discovered a short distance away.
Norman Croome, then Crown counsel for the district of Rainy River, and Howard Nelson had been hunting in the area all day. They did not realize how bad the fires had become until they were heading home and saw flames northwest of where they had packed their car. The flames were 200 feet high. Leaping from tree top to tree top. They headed out in a hurry. Soon flames were licking across the road in front of them as Croome pushed the car to its utmost. They came upon Frank LaBelle, Don Patterson and three of the children who had fled the LaBelle farm and picked them up. All were suffering burns.
When they got to the bridge over Lost Creek they found it afire, but the only safety lay on the other side. Croome, his eyes streaming with smoke, put the gas pedal to the floor and got across, but halfway up the hill on the other side the car stalled. He tried repeatedly to get it started, and suffered burns to his hands and face in the process, but finally they abandoned the car and went down into the dry creek bed.
Then the wind shifted momentarily, the smoke cleared and they saw a burned over area of about 30 acres in extent nearby. They hurried over to this clear patch, and lay on the ground, covering themselves with coats and blankets from the car. Ironically, it was Bill LaBelle, returning home from Fort Frances, who rescued them some hours later. Maxine, Frank's eleven-year daughter died later in the Fort Frances Hospital, but the others survived the ordeal.
By now the fire had swept the area, burning a swath across the countryside to the lakeshore. The flames had been capricious. The brand new Dance school was razed but the old one right next door remained standing. A store and service station burned to the ground while a few feet away, the gas pumps, still full of gasoline were untouched. On one farm, house, barn, chicken coop, pig sty and fences were wiped out, but a birdhouse on a pole near the front door of the house still stood.
Fires continued to burn throughout the district all through the week, but on Saturday, October 15, a soaking rain fell and the terrible toll ended. In Dance, bricks from the chimneys and the twisted iron from cook stoves and bedsteads marked the sites of the two LaBelle homes. The trees around them were tall, blackened poles, stripped clean of their branches by the swift-moving flames. The ground was as bare as any desert, leaf mould had been completely burned away and the grass along the roadsides was reduced to ashes. Everywhere there was a funeral of silence. No birds sang, no insects hummed, no leaves stirred in the breeze.