A Region’S Baptism Of Fire Devastating Fires Of 1910 Killed 85 And Embarrassed The Fledgling Forest Service

Spring rains failed, and summer winds sucked away what little moisture remained in the mountains.

When lightning struck, forest fires burned from the Canadian border to Yellowstone National Park.

Demand for fire crews sapped the Inland Northwest’s labor pool. The president called in the military.

Sound like a recent newscast? The president was William Howard Taft.

It was 1910, a summer that would become legendary in firefighting circles and shape national fire policy for decades.

Three million acres burned in the northern Rockies that year. Eighty-five people - most of them firefighters - died. Wallace was evacuated, and a third of the town was reduced to ashes.

The fires were among the largest in U.S. history, and they helped make firefighting a U.S. Forest Service mission. Years would pass before fire would be reintroduced in the forests for its beneficial role to the ecosystem.

Though fires burned all summer, the “Big Blowup” came Aug. 20. Dozens of small lightning fires burned together into a blaze that swept through Shoshone County into Montana, launching fireballs on galeforce winds.

The sky was black at 4 p.m. Witnesses reported firebrands that looked like falling stars. Trees exploded into flame, and the thud of falling timber was deafening.

Firefighters caught in the inferno’s path hunkered down in stream beds, covering themselves with wet blankets. A train carried 1,000 refugees from Avery, Idaho, to safety by racing over a blazing trestle and taking shelter in a tunnel.

Forest Service ranger Ed Pulaski became a national folk hero for quick thinking that saved his crew.

When fires blocked their path to Wallace, Pulaski led 42 men and two horses into the opening of the War Eagle Mine. All of the men lost consciousness from heavy smoke during the night, but most survived.

The long-awaited rains didn’t come until 10 days later, finally bringing an end to the fire season.

More than 5 million acres burned across the nation that year, compared to 5.2 million acres so far this year. Four of the next five Forest Service chiefs wrote long treatises about the need to improve fire control.

The drama of the 1910 fires also built lasting public support for funding fire suppression. When the Forest Service budget ran $1.1 million in the red that year from hiring firefighters, Congress passed supplemental legislation to cover it.

The early 20th century marked a significant shift in how Americans viewed wildfires, said Wendall Hahn of the Forest Service’s Washington, D.C., Office of Fire Management.

Native Americans, early farmers and prospectors often set fires to improve forage for game and livestock, or to clear ground. When fires burned out of control, people simply moved out of the way, Hahn said.

However, most of the West had been settled by 1910. Wildfires became a threat to cities and towns, lives and property.

Estimated damage to Wallace, then a thriving mining center of 6,000 residents, was $1 million. The railroad towns of Taft, Saltese, DeBorgia and Haugan in Montana also burned. Newspapers carried accounts of women and children making perilous treks over the mountains to escape the flames.

The 1910 fires also came during a time of an emerging national conservation ethic. National parks and national forests had been created to protect lands from the excesses of logging.

The fires were an embarrassment to the Forest Service. Two decades of drought followed the 1910 fires, contributing to major re-burns through the 1930s. Forest rangers saw vast areas they were charged with protecting go up in smoke every year.

“The conviction burned into me that fire prevention is the No. 1 job of American foresters - both to keep trees on the land and to put faith in the men who own it,” wrote William Greeley, who was appointed Forest Service chief in 1920.

For more than 50 years, that attitude prevailed in the agency. Aggressive strategies were developed to fight fires. Early detection and attack was seen as the key, said Stephen Pyne in his book, “Fire in America.”

In 1935, top Forest Service officials met in Spokane to announce a new national fire policy. The “10 a.m. rule” deemed that fires should be put out by 10 a.m. the day after they were spotted.

The reasoning was based on weather. If fires weren’t stopped during the night or early morning when temperatures were cooler and humidity high, they would flare up again the next day.

Roads were built to give firefighters access to remote areas prone to lightning strike fires. Fire lookouts were constructed and staffed. Firefighting became more sophisticated as engines, radios and aircraft replaced mule teams.

The numbers of acres burned dropped dramatically, Pyne said.

Drought leading up to the summer of 1967 sparked worries of a repeat of the 1910 fire season. But fewer than 100,000 acres burned in the Northern Rockies that year. The toll included the fast-moving, 56,000-acre Sundance Fire, also the stuff of Idaho legends.

“Through the 1970s, if you said you were a forester, people associated you with fighting fires and planting trees,” said John Bassman, a Washington State University forestry professor.

Forest Service policies toward fire began to shift in the 1980s. Decades of fire suppression had left the forests crowded, unhealthy and more flammable. Forest fires burned longer and hotter, with more destruction. Controlled burns were introduced to bring fire back into the forest.

“We’re getting away from knee-jerk fire exclusion,” said Art Zack, ecologist on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. “It’s an ongoing process. It takes a lot of dialogue with the public about what the public is willing to accept.”

In many respects, public sentiment toward forest fires hasn’t changed much since 1910, Hahn said.

“There’s still a negative attitude toward the use of fire,” he said. “I think as subdivisions and ranchettes get more embedded into wildlands, it makes it even more difficult to use fire in its natural role.”

The Forest Service has worked for about 20 years to educate the public about the benefits of using light burns to clear out underbrush, Bassman said.

However, those efforts suffered a setback in 1988, when nearly 1.6 million acres burned during the Yellowstone fires. People didn’t like the idea of a national park burning, Bassman said.

The use of fire took another public opinion hit this year, when a deliberately set fire at the Bandelier National Monument burned out of control, forcing 20,000 people in Los Alamos, N.M., to evacuate.

“It launched the fire season in a major way this year, and it threatened a nuclear weapons facility,” Bassman said. “I think it’s going to lead toward a more protectionist attitude in the public.”

This sidebar appeared with the story:

TOP FIRES

Historically significant wildfires:

1825 - Miramichi and Maine Fires burned 3 million acres in New Brunswick and Maine.

1871 - Peshtigo Fire burned 3.8 million acres in Wisconsin and Michigan.

1902 - Yacoult Fire burned 1 million-plus acres in Oregon and Washington.

1910 - Great Idaho Fires burned 3 million acres in Idaho and Montana.

1988 - Yellowstone Fires burned 1.6 million acres in Montana and Idaho

Source: National Interagency Fire Center

See also related article under headline “‘Many grown men in the crew were absolutely helpless’”