The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

by Timothy Egan

  Their other mates included floaters from hiring halls, a handful of miners, and some men who had homesteaded on level ground inside the national forest. One of the homesteaders, Joe Beauchamp, had built a cabin and cleared two acres. He was middle-aged and had worked himself raw trying to scratch out his place in the woods. Beauchamp wasn't on the payroll of a timber company or a speculator looking to defraud the Forest Service; he wanted only to get his section in shape and be left alone. He joined the crew as a volunteer, fighting fire to save his home. But his little clearing also figured into the exit plan. If the fires on the ridge merged and leapt over the lines, the order was to retreat to Joe Beauchamp's. The ground was level, with big stumps and some fencing around his tiny cabin. A small creek ran nearby, bordered by towering trees, some nearly two hundred feet tall.

  Pulaski was riding his horse hard all over the spine of the mountains, up and down, trying to keep the crews on task. Over the past two weeks, he had dutifully reported to Weigle new fires on either side of the divide, including a troubling blaze along the only trail leading to the beer-sodden tent town of Grand Forks on the Avery side of the ridge. These reports were forwarded along with others to regional headquarters in Missoula. Glacier Park was still burning. So was Yellowstone. The big Indian reservation in western Montana, home of the Flatheads, was on fire. Near Spokane, the woods of eastern Washington were ablaze, and the authorities had requested an additional thousand men. That was impossible; there were no firefighters in reserve. Throughout three states, ten thousand people were now on wildfire duty in almost two dozen national forests, spread out over an area nearly the size of New England. The frenzy and fear of planning the next stage of battle on a ridge above Wallace was duplicated all over the northern Rockies, each forest supervisor trying to craft something to protect the woods from flame and to project a confidence beyond their tender age or their inadequate knowledge of fire.

  Pulaski's men were often short of energy during the long, draining days, and certainly short of outdoor skills. They had to be taught, like little kids, how to hold an ax, where to stand, to keep drinking water. A general in the woods, Pulaski strode on horseback along the lines of his crew, pistol strapped to his side. A big chore was simply keeping track of everybody. When head counts were taken, men were always missing or presumed lost. Some had walked away, without explanation or pay. The smoke was like a stale dream that hangs on through awakening into the bright hours of day. By August 19, it was clear to Pulaski that he needed to retreat to Wallace for more supplies. The men would go hungry if he could not bring fresh food. It was one thing to hold back a paycheck, but without a regular infusion of high-calorie stews, the Pulaski battalions could not fight another day.

  He headed for Wallace that Friday night, the nineteenth. As he was coming into town, Pulaski couldn't help but notice the confusion and chaos. Neighbors he had known for years were straggling out, weighted down by their belongings. Others were in hurried retreat, carrying little but a suitcase or knapsack. Who could fault them? Survival was stronger than any altruistic impulse. Pulaski checked in with Weigle, then had dinner with his family. He looked like a beaten man, face blackened and coated, hair matted, eyes sunken. He did not mince words with Emma and Elsie: the town was going to burn. They had to take refuge. The family discussed the train evacuation, just like everyone in Wallace. The Pulaskis decided that mother and daughter would go to the mine tailings at the reservoir—essentially a berm, like a levee above a river that served as a buffer. The tailings would not burn; they were mine waste, set against impounded water, and a better risk than trains headed into flaming forests. The next morning, Elsie and Emma joined Ed in a buckboard ride, eight miles to road's end at the trailhead to Placer Creek. There Pulaski met his mule packer, loaded with fresh supplies. Ed turned to his wife, and as she remembered, he spoke but one sentence at their departure.

  "I may never see you again."

  Returning to Wallace, bumping along the dry road, dust kicking up and smoke heavy on the town, Emma Pulaski held back her tears. Glancing back, up at the mountains, she saw fire where her husband was headed, a snarl of uncertainty. When the sun was visible it was horrid—a feverish red ball. A black bear dashed across the road, frightening the horses, almost plunging the carriage into a ditch. The bear disappeared into the woods as quickly as it appeared. Mother and daughter rode in silence for a while.

  "That was a black bear," said Elsie, who was eight.

  "No," her mother said, "it was a big black dog." But back at their house, she changed her story. Better not to lie. Eighteen-inch-long embers, like flaming arrows fired from invading soldiers, landed on the Pulaski front lawn. The burning bark lit the grass, and had to be put out by hose. Their porch was covered with ash, warm to the touch when held in the palm of the hand.

  "Mama, that was a bear—not a dog," Elsie said.

  "It was a bear. I didn't want to frighten you, so I called it a dog."

  "You look scared, Mama."

  In the mountains, Pulaski rode seventeen miles that Saturday, following the steep trail that miners had hacked along the upper reaches of Placer Creek. On the way, he passed a couple of deep holes dug in the earth and supported by timbers—the burrowing of fortune seekers. Pulaski himself had spent some time prospecting in the upper reaches of the forest, always coming up empty. He recognized some of the mines, the claims of lucky bastards who hit a vein.

  Now his doubt followed him up the path. Maybe he should have stayed behind to protect Emma and Elsie. How could he leave them? Yes, he was in charge of all these directionless lives in burning woods, these men from distant shores speaking languages he could not comprehend, but wasn't his first duty to his family? If he abandoned the crews now, and went back to Wallace to be with his wife and daughter, would anyone hold it against him? Up, up, up the trail he went with his fresh supplies, the horses balking at times in the stifling air and the swarm of smoke, the packers quiet and brooding. The relative stillness of the woods was broken by the crash of a flame-engulfed tree falling somewhere in the distance. And then came voices through the haze; it was unnerving. That Saturday morning had been calm, with winds standing down, quiet enough for Pulaski to believe, if only for a moment, they might get the best of this thing yet. His doubts he had to keep to himself. As he started to meet stragglers, people who had pulled back from the fire lines, he was given status reports: two miles of trench dug, men missing in the sea of smoke. He also saw something that nearly made him laugh: a man who had just been hired as a cook, wearing a white chef's hat and matching apron, ready to serve a midday meal for hungry firefighters. A chef's hat—up here!

  On the Montana side of the Bitterroots, the biggest concern of Elers Koch was the string of upstart towns inside the forest—Taft, DeBorgia, Saltese. These settlements along the rail line needed evacuation plans, just like Wallace and Avery. Taft was clearly in harm's way, and as fire moved toward town, Koch dispatched nearly 150 men to the rescue. They were worn and disgusted by now, as soldiers are late in a losing campaign, "moving in to the front line, and listening to the artillery and shell bursts ahead," as Koch recalled. "Fire fighting is perhaps the nearest thing there is to war, and always requires extreme physical exertion, long hours, lack of sleep, and constant nervous attention."

  For guidance, Koch turned to Frank Haun, the older ranger who had helped him from his first days as a forest supervisor. A man of clear vision and no sentimentality, Haun came up with a novel strategy to get the attention of people in Taft. Instead of starting a typical backfire that burned outward and cleared ground away from town, he considered lighting one that would burn inward, toward town. It sounded like madness. But with Taft as besotted as ever, in self-indulgent lethargy as fire closed in, the rangers needed some way to jolt townsfolk into awareness of the peril they faced. It was a joke at first, but the foresters gave it serious consideration when they arrived at Taft on Saturday, August 20. Ranger Haun went from saloon to saloon, house to house, trying to find someone—
anyone—from this town to volunteer. He also had to goad his own men, the flotsam from Front Street in Missoula, who were instantly drawn to Taft's seedy diversions.

  "You hired out to be a tough man, didn't you?" said Haun, taunting his crew. "Who the hell wants to be a quitter?"

  Most of the town, as it turned out. Haun was furious. Burn it down, he groused to fellow rangers— screw 'em. Truly, that was the only way to get their attention. Instead of readying for retreat or defense, instead of digging fire lines or packing clothes and belongings, instead of watering down roofs or gathering shovels and picks, the people of Taft went to work hoarding and then consuming their entire whiskey supply. As Supervisor Koch reported to his superiors, the Taft denizens decided that if they were going to be burned to death in an inferno that engulfed the Bitterroots, they would go down drunk.

  10. Blowup

  A WIND OUT OF the American West that tumbles in roller-coaster fashion is known as a Palouser, a Sahaptin Indian word that sounds poetic, named for the lilt of hills at the far eastern edge of Washington State, one of the most productive wheat-growing regions in the world. The skin of that land is lovely, stroked by easy breezes and nourished by soft rains in the spring. But the Palouse is one of those curious places in the West where a weather system can form benign and transform into something ferocious long after it has left the cradle of its creation. On one side is a desert, a high plateau that gets less rain than Phoenix in some years. On the other side are the well-watered forests of Idaho and Montana, with cooler air and steady moisture. When caught between the two extremes, the air over the Palouse can be volatile, or violent. So it was on the Saturday afternoon of August 20, when atmospheric conditions gave birth to a Palouser that lifted the red dirt of the hills and slammed into the forests—not as a gust or an episodic blow, but as a battering ram of forced air.

  Stirring to life in midday, the wind rustled the tawny heads of wheat and tall grass before jumping over the Snake River into Idaho and barreling north into the Nez Perce National Forest, the longtime home of Indians who had saved Lewis and Clark from starvation. The Nez Perce country was open and park-like, with birches, cottonwoods, and big pines, room enough for the wind to bounce around, fresh spring in its step after every impact. In the canyons of the Clearwater National Forest, the air climbed swiftly through the mountains. The big river that gave the forest its name, flat and glassy in the lazy part of the day, became white-capped and shaggy as the Palouser raked over it. When it ran into walls of ancient rock, the wind compacted and accelerated. Forcing its way upward, following the contours of the land, the racing wind hit the first fires in a mix of pines at lower elevations. These fires had been ignored by the Forest Service, left to burn out once the underbrush was consumed. The wind took the hot floor of the simmering forest and threw it into the air, where it lit the boughs of bigger ponderosas and white pines, which snapped off and also rode the force of upward acceleration. Pine sap heated quickly and hissed as it reached a boiling point. Every headwall, every dead end of a canyon, every narrow valley served as a chimney, compressing the fire-laden air into funnels of flame.

  The chain reaction of a wildfire had begun. Heated plant matter released hydrogen and carbon while drawing in oxygen, and the whole of it was on the run, a weather system of its own. Thus, three small blazes in grass met six bigger ones in the lower forest and then merged with a dozen others before joining twenty or thirty more, until the mass was bundled into a single wall of yellow and orange moving upward at fifty miles an hour into the crowded zone of Douglas fir, spruce, and larch, into groves of wizened hardwoods and withered cedars next to dried-up streams, moving faster than a horse could run. All at once, it burned at the scrub and limbs of the lower tier of the forest, it burned at thick midheight, it burned large boughs, which broke away in the storm, huge cones popping in fireballs, and it burned at the crowns, the highest tips of the trees exploding into the air, flying off to light the crowns of other tall trees. The densest part of the forest, between three and five thousand feet above sea level, was ready-to-burn fiber when the flames moved through it. In pops and cracks and snaps and gulps, in gasps and whistles, the fire metastasized—more clamorous with every fresh intake, charging ahead. Any leftover little fire that might have smoldered and smoked in a last gasp was given new life by the wind, yanked from the ground, pitched into the river of flame, into the current of the now unrecognizable Palouser.

  Midway through the Clearwater, the wall of flame took over the forest, hundreds of feet high, at least thirty miles wide in some parts, and still gaining strength, still fanning out, consuming oxygen in heaves, and picking up intensity as its core temperature rose. The fire was a classic convection engine now: heat rising, pulling the hottest elements upward, a gyro of spark and flame. After racing through the Clearwater and Nez Perce forests, leveling nearly all living things in the Kelly Creek region, the fire swept up trees at the highest elevations. At this altitude, along the spine of the Bitterroots, the wind moved without obstruction, and the fire itself threw brands ten miles or more ahead of the flame front. The storm found the Montana border and spit flames down into the heavily settled Bitterroot Valley. It found the Lolo forest and crossed over the pass and along the summits, jumping ridgeline to ridgeline. At the peak of its power, it found the Coeur d'Alene forest, leading with a punch of wind that knocked down thousands of trees before the flames took out the rest of the woods. By now, the conscripted air was no longer a Palouser but a firestorm of hurricane-force winds, in excess of eighty miles an hour. What had been nearly three thousand small fires throughout a three-state region of the northern Rockies had grown to a single large burn.

  The advance force of the firestorm, just ahead of the flame wall, was so strong it uprooted bark-armored trees that had held to a piece of ground for three centuries or more. Entire sections of the forest were mowed down as if they were blades of grass. Deer were trapped by falling timbers; some were crushed, others suffocated. Smaller animals emerged from shelter in the hollows of trees, driven out by heat and smoke, only to die in the collapsing forest. Funnels, columns, and whirlwinds formed within the storm, each breaking out in a separate dance of gas and flames. Explosions and the charge of the wind brought a sound that shook any leaf or limb not consumed by flame.

  Through the Coeur d'Alene that night, the burn picked up every fire along the ridge separating Wallace from Avery, every fire in the upper reaches of the St. Joe, and every fire downriver. Its only imperative was to find more fuel. It moved west, downstream, toward the towns of St. Maries and Coeur d'Alene and close to Spokane, and it moved east, up the Bitterroots, toward Grand Forks and Taft, over the divide, toward Missoula. It moved northeast, into the Cabinet and Pend Oreille forests, across the Canadian border into British Columbia, and farther still to Glacier Park and the Blackfeet and Flathead forests. Firebrands were tossed ten miles or more, torching the ground ahead of the incendiary waves. As the storm approached a piece of untouched ground, it announced itself with a roar and a light on the horizon and finished with a sea of flames, suffocating the woods. If there was a river in the way, the fire leapt over water. If there was a lake in the way, it rode its own wind to the other side and alighted on fresh timber. If there was a town in the way, it engulfed it without blinking, exploding a barrel of kerosene or a tank of oil, taking tents and timber, taking shellacked houses and plank sidewalks and cedar-shake churches, all ready for the burn.

  The aftermath, in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, of what historians have called the largest wildfire in American history. US. Forest Service

  A 1910 photo of Ed Pulaski, whose actions saved many lives. Badly wounded by the fire, he retired a bitter man. U.S. Forest Service

  This tunnel above Wallace, Idaho, is where Ranger Pulaski and his crew took refuge on the night the forest blew up under hurricane-force winds, August 20, 1910. U.S. Forest Service

  Ranger Joe Halm (right) after the fire. Halm was hired just out of college, and like Ranger Pulask
i, he helped save many lives. U.S. Forest Service

  A forest in ruins. Winds knocked down trees that had held to the ground for two centuries or more, and fire left others standing, but stripped of all green. U.S. Forest Service

  Men standing amid downed timber after the Big Burn of 1910. The fire covered an area the size of Connecticut. U.S. Forest Service

  On horseback, a forest ranger patrolled the blackened and still forest in the first days after the fire. Smoke from the Big Burn drifted as far east as Chicago. U.S. Forest Service

  Burned, bandaged, and dazed, two firefighters posed for a studio photo in Wallace, Idaho, just days after the Big Burn. Many of the men who fought the blaze were immigrants or out-of-work city dwellers who knew nothing of fighting wildfires. Barnard-Stockbridge Studio Collection, University of Idaho Library