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

by Timothy Egan

  Later, at nightfall, most of those who had been arguing on the platform took blankets and went to the river, sloshing upstream—a decision of sorts, made by default after other options had been exhausted.

  "All hope of saving anything was given up," Lieutenant Lewis wrote of the collective sense of defeat. They might save their lives, but nothing in town.

  The bedraggled survivors walked perhaps half a mile, the way slow in the knee-deep water of the St. Joe. But it became clear that this plan was not going to work, Lewis wrote. For one thing, the water was too shallow, not enough of a protective cover. And, more important, the valley cut by the river was far too narrow. If big cedars came down, they would slam into the river and dam its course. Death by drowning, death by a fatal body blow from a tree that weighed as much as a train car—those were likely outcomes. The lieutenant, in accord with the rangers, reversed course—everyone back to town and the waiting train.

  The men climbed into three units: an engine, a flatcar, and a boxcar. This train could only follow the tracks east, a route rumored to lead to certain death. Various reports had it that a tunnel had caved in, that a trestle and several bridges had burned to the ground, that the tracks stopped dead in midair over a ravine several hundred feet deep. For good reason, the Milwaukee Road was the most costly stretch of rail line ever built in the United States to that point. It had required Herculean feats of engineering and construction to overcome the Bitterroots' swales and hard rock, its high rises and deep forests. The plan that prevailed was to take the train a few miles out of town, to an area cleared by a burn years earlier. They could try to creep along the tracks, to come just short of a flaming edge or downed bridge, feeling their way to the clearing—a task for nimble feet, not iron wheels. Fire was directly ahead, though, which meant that to reach the clearing would require them to go through flames.

  "We succeeded in breaking through the first fire wave, but we could not get through the second and we were caught between the two fires," Lieutenant Lewis wrote. "The scenes of the fires, the dense, stifling smoke, the intense, blinding heat and the roaring and crackling of the flames were indescribable. The flames seemed to be over a mile and a half high." The heat was so intense it burned the paint off the cars and blistered the varnish. That was on the outside; inside, with the windows sealed, the men felt as if they were broiling. The Buffalo Soldiers, their honor won on battlefields in the Civil War, in the high plateaus of West Texas, and in the Philippine jungles, now faced death in the wilderness West, not even heroic.

  "We travelled back and forth attempting to get through at one end or another, but it was impossible," Lieutenant Lewis wrote. "Progress was constantly impeded by landslides or rocks, burned logs, etc. One fireman was killed while picking rocks off the track."

  The men on board this train did not know it, but the other locomotive, the one that hauled out of Grand Forks to go to Avery, was also engaged in a stop-and-go dodge of the Big Burn. The engineer had finally taken refuge in a tunnel, parking his train to wait out the fire—a successful move, as it turned out.

  For the infantrymen, the hesitancy on the track lasted through Sunday night, the soldiers frustrated by their inability to do anything. Passivity in the grip of a force that defies engagement may be the worst condition for a warrior. The men of the 25 th tasted breath stale and hot; they felt their throats tighten with thirst and their leg muscles knot and cramp. They put up with the moans and whines of the men on the train whose town they were charged with saving, and some of them resigned themselves to dying with this group. When they looked out the window, they saw fire on either side of the St. Joe.

  For a long time, the little train didn't move, was stopped in time, just like the men inside it. Then, in reverse, the engineer guided the two cars and his locomotive the other way, a retreat toward Avery. He stopped two miles from town, waiting for the fire to play itself out. First light came around 5 A.M., when it looked as if the winds had calmed, a reprieve before another roar. Avery remained standing, though it was empty of people.

  Lieutenant Lewis picked up the narrative, the 25 th Infantry against the blowup: "As it was seen that there was no escape through both the fires, preparations were made for a last stand at Avery. As day came on, the wind came up and the fires again started full." It was better, perhaps, to be free of the iron oven. At least in Avery the men could make a stand. On wobbly legs in the dawn of Monday morning, the men disembarked from the train and got to work on a new plan—the final strategy, they agreed.

  Backfire, which had failed to get anywhere in Taft, was all they had. To the riverbank they went, just across the St. Joe from Avery, and started a fire. With the river at one side, the intentionally set fire had nowhere to go but uphill, into the scrub brush and downed trees, moving to greet the onset of the main blaze, so close to Avery they could see it a few hundred yards away. Other men were dispatched in front of houses and shops with buckets again, told to toss water at the first sign of firebrands from the big blaze. They lit the ground, waited, and watched. Their backfire took off up the hill, orderly at first, then scampering to one side, toward Spike Kelley's empty manse. It pawed at the place for an instant, like a newly awakened bear examining fresh prey, and then took the big house and its enormous living room full of antiques from Europe and China, the Gilded Age ornaments that Kelley had brought to this forest in the Bitterroots as a way to show what it meant to have a man of his standing in Gifford Pinchot's frontier. The two-story home, so large some people mistook it for a hotel when they stepped off the train in Avery, was destroyed in a great crackling burst, its combustibles reduced to snuff. And after taking Spike Kelley's log palace, the set fire moved upward ever more quickly, wind-aided now, to join the greater fire.

  Lewis: "Both fires seemed to unite as they struck the back fire. About the same time the wind suddenly died out, and if it had not died out about that time, and if there had been no back fire, nothing could have saved the town or people. The flames sank rapidly and in about an hour it was evident that the danger was over and all that remained to do was to watch the fires which were burning out."

  After successfully evacuating the town, after enduring a harrowing night inside a hot train, after hauling water buckets and setting backfires, the Buffalo Soldiers had saved Avery. Over the ridge, their comrades had helped get the women and children of Wallace out of town. Two towns, two missions accomplished. Whatever else people in the Coeur d'Alenes thought of the soldiers when they first arrived, by Sunday evening of the Big Burn, some minds had been changed.

  "They stuck to their posts like men," said Debitt, who had strayed from his own post during crucial moments.

  "There were no better firefighters picked up anywhere than the negroes," said a civilian crew leader, Con Faircloth. "They worked willingly during the day and at night they made the mountain echo with their songs. I never heard such singing in all my life."

  "The negro soldiers of the 25th Regiment," one paper reported in a dispatch carried across the country, "have done heroic service and saved many lives and much property."

  It was said by fair-minded people that their swift action had redeemed the 25th from the humiliating dismissal after Brownsville and their earlier role as enforcers for mining bosses during the martial law repression in the Coeur d'Alenes. "When the negro troops were last in the Coeur d'Alenes, they were cursed, reviled and sneered at," Collier's reported. "Early laws on the books in Idaho even excluded blacks from prospecting. Now they are hailed as angels of mercy, rather dusky, perspiring angels, but angels at that." In the northern Rockies, people came around to the conclusion, the magazine noted, that "they were white clear through, even if their skins were dark."

  And the Seattle papers seemed equally stunned that the Buffalo Soldiers could perform so heroically. "I want to say something about those negroes now," they quoted a man from Avery who helped organize the exodus and backfire. "They were black, but I never knew a whiter set of men to breathe. Not a man in the lot knew what a y
ellow streak was ... They never complained. They were never afraid. They worked, worked, worked, like Trojans, and they worked every minute. I can't say too much about them, but I will say that my attitude toward the black race has undergone a wonderful change since I knew those twelve heroes."

  Although the 25th Infantry had not lost a man, four soldiers were still missing among their ranks, soldiers who had strayed near Placer Creek when the fires moved on Wallace. The troops pressed the rangers to organize a search party for their lost comrades over the divide, four among hundreds of people as yet unaccounted for. Ranger Joe Halm and his crew at the headwaters of the St. Joe had not been heard from since winds kicked up on Saturday afternoon. Nor had some of the rescue trains reached their destinations. Many train cars had gone into tunnels to wait out the storm, but had they made it? The Milwaukee Road estimated that at least a dozen of its bridges had burned, including one that was 725 feet long. On Sunday and Monday, crews were sent out to find the missing, including the soldiers. At the same time, the 25th was given another assignment: hike up the creek to the place where twenty-eight men had been crushed and burned, and over to the hole in the ground where Domenico Bruno, Giacomo Viettone, and five others had died in a half-dug root cellar. These bodies were so badly disfigured that only a soldier, it was explained, would be able to pry them from the places where they had taken their final breaths and give them proper burials.

  15. The Missing

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, with the firestorm yet to ebb and communication down throughout much of the northern Rockies, Bill Weigle had tried to put together a party to search for Ed Pulaski and his crew. The Big Burn had swept over the Coeur d'Alene and Lolo forests, the Nez Perce and the Clearwater, and now moved north toward Canada and east into the forested half of Montana.

  In Wallace, volunteers were hard to come by. Those who had stayed in town and battled the blaze through the night with hoses, buckets, and shovels were battered and worn, retreating to the remains of their own homes in a town reduced to a heap. Having lived through Saturday night, they feared the still-flaming forest. "This was the hardest task of all," said Weigle. "The men were afraid to go into the woods." What Weigle knew from a messenger at dawn on Sunday was that Pulaski and about fifty men were inside a tunnel up in the Place Creek drainage. Later that morning, two other stragglers arrived in Wallace with an update: five men were dead in the mineshaft. Another had burned to death in the race for shelter. But almost everyone else was alive. And the dead—did that include Pulaski? No. He was alive, but might not make it down. He was in terrible shape. Up in the mountains, in what had been a fresh-scented crowd of cedars, pines, and larches shading the cool waters of Placer Creek, Pulaski was indeed having trouble finding his way downhill. The forest was gone, but more than that, the heap of the woods continued to smoke and burn in places, which meant that every footstep might land on a hot coal or sink into a pit of ashes. The bottoms of Pulaski's shoes were burned through, as was the case for most of his men. The path along the creek, which he knew so well, was hard to find, covered by downed timber or knocked out by the crush of the storm. It was an obstacle course. As the sun's rays pierced the smoke, Pulaski shielded his face. The only eye that worked was light sensitive to the point of pain. He thought on this Sunday morning that he would have preferred to burn to death rather than go blind. His men were in equally bad shape. What had been described a few days earlier as an army of firefighters marching briskly off to war was now a pathetic ragtag collection of humans thrown against the mountains—men broken, lost, wailing.

  Holding her daughter, Emma Pulaski had spent the night in the bunker of mine waste, the impoundment where she had fled rather than get on a train. Emma and Elsie had watched the flames come down the mountains and burn through Wallace. They saw smoke columns and spires of fire rising from the town, heard whistles as the trains moved women and children away, the not-so-distant cacophony of fleeing residents, and all the while held their position in the crushed rock. Around 5 A.M., Sunday, mother and daughter rose and started to walk back to town.

  The Pulaski house, to Emma's surprise, was still standing. News of her husband came in a progression of rumors and half-truths, from worst case to better, throughout the morning. First a neighbor greeted her with a hug and sad face: Ed Pulaski had died, she said, killed with all his men. Just after 9 A.M., another story: her husband was alive, but horribly disfigured by flame—"his eyes burned out and that he probably would not live," as she recalled. Less than an hour later, on the road to her house, she saw a tall man, a swirl of smudged cloth around his face, hands wrapped, walking slowly, guided by other men. Ed Pulaski looked crumbled and spent. "He was staggering," she wrote, "his eyes bandaged, he was blind and terribly burned, his hands and hair were burned and he was suffering from the fire gas." Pulaski and his men had been greeted with coffee and whiskey at the trailhead of Placer Creek by a party of women who had volunteered to do what Weigle could not find men to do—walk up the smoke-clouded, tree-cluttered road in search of the men who had tried to keep the fire from town.

  "The world was black to my eyes," Pulaski said, but it lightened enough to find the arms of his wife and daughter.

  What he could not see of Wallace was this: chimneys, sticks, open-faced basements, roofless buildings, and entire streets devoid of their houses and stores. One of two train depots was completely gutted. The Pacific Hotel was burned to a shell. The main bridge across the river was gone. The Coeur d'Alene Hardware Store was a pile of rubbish. The brewery was destroyed, as was the newspaper office. Trees at street level and on the first couple of terraces above the valley floor were gone, though a few black poles stood against grey carpet.

  Hundreds of other men were still missing, and perhaps an equal number dead. Weigle had not heard from several of his crew chiefs, and he doubted that they had survived the blowup. He knew from his own struggle to get out of a collapsing mine tunnel, from his crawl along the hot forest floor, from the way the fire caught his hands and head, that the storm had a power that could take the strongest of rangers.

  300 FIRE FIGHTERS DEAD

  So read the headline in the Seattle Times two days after the weekend blowup. The casualty figure may have been high, the number a rough estimate, at a time when it was difficult for the Forest Service to get reliable information on its crews. The rangers and fire fighters were, with one exception, only a day or two's hike from towns and roads, but in their isolation they could have been in the far, roadless Alaska wilderness. The paper reported other losses as well, and these they could name, for the most part. Among them were a mother and a year-old baby, said to have drowned in a well where they jumped to avoid the flames; the Wallace fire captain's father, who had gone back to his smoking house to save his parrot; a "well-dressed Finn," found with a gold pocket watch; the suicide, Oscar Weigert; the man whose friend accidentally set him afire in the boxcar; the twenty-eight men who decided, along with the Irish cook Patrick Grogan, to stay put in the creek above Avery rather than retreat; the ten who packed into the small cabin only to have its roof collapse on them; the Italians, Viettone and Bruno, and five others jammed into the cellar in Beauchamp's clearing; the homesteader himself, and another; a boy of seventeen caught in the Bullion Mine along with several Englishmen; a man from Persia; six of Pulaski's men, all but one in the tunnel; a prospector on the St. Joe River; homesteaders in northeastern Washington; assorted firefighters in remote pockets of Montana. Those were the known dead in the count taken just two days after the blowup. Many bodies could not be identified; what was at first taken for a charred log was found to be a firefighter, for example.

  "Never in my life have I seen conditions so appalling," Weigle told a few of the reporters who had stayed behind. Since grown men refused to help, he enlisted teenagers, some as young as thirteen, to run up into the smoking woods in search of survivors. With Pulaski in the hospital in Wallace, his main concern was the kid who'd been hired out of Washington State College to learn the ways of the wood
s under Pulaski—Joe Halm, the ex—football player. Of all the crews fighting fire in Weigle's Coeur d'Alene, none were deeper in the woods than the men under Halm's direction. They were seventy-five miles up the St. Joe River from Avery, near the headwaters and high in subalpine timber. Greeley sent in help from the Montana side to look for Halm's men, but found nothing. News spread quickly.

  JOE HALM AND CREW FEARED LOST

  ST. JOE FIRE HEMS IN 180 MEN WHO

  MAY NEVER ESCAPE

  That last headline, from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, was accurate in that it conveyed the concern of Weigle, Koch, Greeley, and other Little G.P.s for a missing ranger, but it overstated the number of men in Halm's crew. Weigle sent out his young search party. They made it farther up the St. Joe than the scouts who had gone earlier, but came back with the same report: no hint of Joe Halm and his crew. A day later, this headline appeared in the Idaho Press:

  NO CHANCE FOR HALM AND CREW

  IN ST. JOE WILDERNESS

  Three days after the firestorm erupted, about three hundred men were missing, including Halm's crew. The fire had gone north to British Columbia and east to the far reaches of the Rockies and then to the plains. In the wilderness of the narrowest part of the Idaho panhandle and some of the most rugged sections of northwestern Montana, the fire chased men to high ground and watery shelters. A crew of twenty-five working in the Cabinet National Forest raced up a creek, trying to outrun the storm. The fire was swifter and caught the men on a hill of loose, sliding rock. Those who stayed in the talus, clutching rock, lived. But four others took off in a downhill sprint and were burned to death. In a neighboring forest, the Pend Oreille, a similar drama came to a similar end. Two members of a crew who'd been told to take shelter under wet blankets threw off their flimsy shields to make an escape attempt. They had gone only a few strides before flames lit them up, killing both men. And over in the northeastern part of Washington State, in the green country defined by the big Pend Oreille River, three homesteaders burned to death, caught in the fire while trying to save all that they had labored on.