Published on: July 31, 2007
The men who heroically fought the wildfire ripping through 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana, late in August 1910, were up against a formidable enemy. "The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust," wrote local historian Betty Goodwin Spencer. "Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from 1 to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground."
The speed of the inferno was both breathtaking and deadly. "You can't outrun wind and fire that are traveling 70 miles an hour," Spencer wrote. "You can't hide when you are entirely surrounded by red-hot color. You can't see when it's pitch black in the afternoon."
In contrast, summer that year seemed to drag on forever, slow-cooking the upper Rocky Mountains until they were dry as a desert. Along the Bitterroot Range that divides Montana and Idaho, the temperature in April was the highest on record. May was even hotter and drier. Barely an inch of rain fell on the forests in June, and none fell in July — this for an area that received up to 60 in. of rainfall a year on some mountains. As the hot, waterless stretch grew in length and intensity, the pine-green forests turned parched and brown.
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In the arid understory, lightning strikes and sparks from the railroad found perfect tinder. By the end of July, more than 90 major fires blazed on or near Idaho's Coeur d'Alene National Forest and Lolo National Forest in western Montana. As many as 4000 newly recruited firefighters camped in the woods, struggling to put them out. Hundreds more minor fires were simply left to burn. The situation was so desperate by Aug. 8 that federal foresters asked for military assistance. Troops were deployed to the front lines of the fire and to towns such as Wallace, Idaho, that lay in its path. Wallace became so dry that town officials decided to ignite dynamite for 60 straight hours, hoping that the thunderous explosions would jolt rain from the sky.
It didn't work, but by the 17th things nonetheless were looking better. Swaths of land continued to burn, but the fire seemed to be contained.
Then, on Aug. 20, the forest exploded. A bizarre cold front with 75-mph winds came howling out of the west, feeding oxygen to hundreds of fires and merging them into one great inferno. Joe Halm's firefighting crew was positioned near the headwaters of the St. Joe River in Idaho when the forest around him combusted. "As if by magic, sparks were fanned to flames, which licked the trees into one great conflagration," recalled Halm, a 1909 graduate of the Washington State College forestry school, in a 1944 history compiled by the U.S. Forest Service. "A slight wind now stirred the treetops overhead; a faint, distant roar was wafted to my ears. The men heard it — a sound as of heavy wind or a distant waterfall."
What they heard was the wall of fire rushing headlong toward them. As the heat grew unbearable, Halm and his crew retreated into a gravelly creek. Armed with nothing but buckets of water, they fought to maintain their haven. Around them, trees crashed to the ground and firebrands whipped through the air. One man tried to sprint away to certain death; Halm reeled him back in.
"A few yards below, a great logjam, an acre or more in extent, the deposit of a cloudburst in years gone by, became a roaring furnace, a threatening hell," Halm wrote. "If the wind changed, a single blast from this inferno would wipe us out. Our drenched clothing steamed and smoked; still the men fought." Halm's crew persevered for hours until, eventually, the fire turned and marched northwards.
Elsewhere, firefighters were not so lucky. Twenty-eight men died trying to outrun the flames, at a place called Setzer Creek, 6 miles outside of Avery, Idaho. Others fled into old mine shafts, where they were charred when the tunnels became blast furnaces.
"A crew of 19 spilled off the ridge overlooking Big Creek [in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest] and sought refuge in the Dittman cabin," recounts Stephen Pyne, the event's pre-eminent historian and author of Year of the Fires. "When the roof caught fire, they ran out. The first 18 died where they fell, in a heap along with five horses and two bears; the 19th twisted his ankle in crossing the threshold and collapsed to the ground, where he found a sheath of fresh air. Two days later, Peter Kinsley crawled, alive, out of a creek."
A 50-person crew near the Middle Fork of Big Creek, led by ranger John Bell, dove facedown into a stream as the flames leapt across the tree crowns, burning the skin on the backs of their necks. A falling tree crushed three of them, according to Stan Cohen and Don Miller in The Big Burn, by Jeanette Ingold; seven others were roasted to death after fleeing into a hole dug out by a homesteader.
But the story that would come to define the Big Blowup of 1910 — becoming part of Western mythology and helping to cement federal firefighting policy for the following 90 years — was that of 40-year-old Edward Pulaski.
The forest ranger was leading 35 to 40 firefighters in a retreat from a wall of flames descending upon their position at Placer Creek, 10 miles southwest of Wallace. Unbeknownst to the crew, some townspeople had set a backfire — a last-ditch attempt to clear out fuel and save Wallace from the approaching blaze. As the two fires raced toward them, Pulaski ordered his men into an abandoned mining tunnel and told them all to lie facedown in the mud. As heat and flames lapped at the tunnel's entrance, Pulaski covered it with blankets and fought the fire with his bare hands, until he blacked out from smoke inhalation like the rest of his crew.
Around midnight, according to Pyne's account, one firefighter awoke and made his way to Wallace, where a search party was organized. When the rescuers reached the tunnel, five men had died — but the others survived. Pulaski was temporarily blind, and his lungs were so damaged that he breathed with great difficulty, but he lived to develop the firefighting tool that now bears his name.
When the sun rose on the morning of Aug. 21, 1910, Wallace had lost a third of its town to the fire. Nearby Grand Forks was completely incinerated. On the other side of the range, in Montana, the towns of Taft, DeBorgia, Henderson and Haugan were all destroyed. Smoke filled the sky as far south as Denver and east as far as New York state. Sailors on the Pacific Ocean claimed they couldn't see the stars that night. Two days later, a cold front swept over the Bitterroots, releasing a steady rain, and the great fire was finally extinguished. But not before seven civilians and 78 firefighters had died.
The Aftermath
Though the U.S. Forest Service came into existence in 1905, it was the "Big Burn" of 1910 that defined its mission. By the time the first flame leapt from the forest that year, the debate over whether or not to fight wildfires was already being hotly debated across the West. Some people argued that fires were part of a forest's natural evolution. But Teddy Roosevelt conservationists, who staffed the new agency, were eager to protect forests from danger — and fire, they believed, was as perilous as any clear-cut.
The utter destruction caused by the fires of 1910, along with the heroic stand of Edward Pulaski, helped cement an antifire ideology in the Forest Service. Congress poured money into the effort and, by 1935, the head of the service — a veteran of the Big Blowup, Gus Silcox — declared that all forest fires should be extinguished by 10 am the following day. The service created its own army to fight fires, replete with ground troops to dig trenches and set backfires, elite smoke jumpers to parachute into remote areas and an air force of tankers, reconnaissance planes and helicopters.
Even as Silcox was declaring war on wildfires, some foresters and conservationists began to question whether the policy was actually healthy for the ecosystem. Fire, it soon became clear, was an integral part of forest ecology. Yet as waves of people moved into forested areas, it became even more imperative to hold fire back.
Because fire has not been allowed to thin forests naturally, land that has historically had 30 trees per acre now has 300 to 3000 per acre — resulting in plenty of fuel for the next lightning strike. In fact, the area of forestland that burned between 1994 and 2002 more than tripled from 2.5 million to 7 million acres.
The observation that aggressively fighting all fires can lead to bigger, more frequent blowups is an irony that's finally begun to be appreciated institutionally. Today, land managers in both the National Park Service and Forest Service are at work developing fire management plans that will clarify which fires should be fought, which should be allowed to burn, and which, even, should be set intentionally.
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