Alice Rebecca was a petite and refined woman. Born to Scottish immigrants in New York City, she’d graduated from a finishing school in Washington, D.C. But there she was, standing outside a sod house a little ways northeast of Boone, watching a cloud of smoke billow across the sky.

Her husband was away. And the children were too small to help. So she did the only thing she could do — she harnessed up the horses and started plowing a firebreak.

The wildfires a few weeks ago came within a mile of where that little homestead once stood. And the only reason the fire didn’t get that far was because of the efforts of farmers with discs and firefighters from surrounding towns. But Alice had no one to help her back in the 1870s.

Prairie fires were common back then. One of the earliest accounts from this area is by a traveler who was passing through on horseback. He found himself in a race against a wildfire, desperately trying to reach the banks of the Beaver where he hoped to find safety. On his way he came upon an Indian running as fast as he could. Knowing the Indian stood no chance of outrunning the flames, the white man reached down and without stopping hoisted the Indian onto the horse.

He was afraid, though, that this added weight would doom them both. They made it to safety, but the backside of the Indian and the rump of the horse were singed from the flames.

Some early settlers started fires to clear land, and these often got out of control. Maybe that’s what started the fire that threatened the little homestead on the banks of the Voorhees Creek all those years ago – no one ever knew. But fires were so common, including controlled burns that got out of hand that one of the first community activities the pioneers undertook was to form fire brigades. And farmers who started fires were soundly rebuked for this practice in the newspapers of the day.

As the recent wildfires have reminded us, fire is as much a part of nature on the prairie as drought and storms and blizzards. Already the blackened grasslands are greening up, and will in many ways benefit from what happened.

But ecological considerations would have been the farthest things from Alice’s mind. How many furrows would it take to make the farmstead safe? And could she plow that many before the flames overtook them?

Using every ounce of strength she had, Alice plowed until she and the horses had to retreat from the flames. She huddled with the children in the little sod house, praying that the thick dirt walls would protect them, wondering what her husband William would do if he came home to find them burned to death. But her plowing, shallow and wavering as it had been, had been enough. No lives or property were lost, though Alice, exhausted both physically and emotionally, didn’t get out of bed for the next five days.

Alice Rebecca Hosford was my great-great grandmother, and she and her family faced so many perils settling here that their stories are etched into our DNA. But none of those perils had the force and immediacy of that long-ago fire, and I’d like to thank everyone who fights these fires today, whether fireman or farmer, for making sure that no one will ever again have to face such a thing alone.