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

by Timothy Egan

  One man died on the spot, his lungs seared; nearly everyone else was burned. The skin had melted off Sullivan's hands and arms, and he needed extensive care. He cried for something to ease the pain—whiskey, opium, anything to give a few moments' relief. After surface-dressing Sullivan's wounds, though, doctors and nurses would no longer treat him. They did not have authorization, they said; there was no contingency money for the injured. When word of this reached Pulaski, he was infuriated. Couldn't they see the man had nearly died for his country? How was this different from a soldier wounded on the battlefield? Hell, he would pay the man's doctor bills out of his own pocket, Pulaski said, if it came to that.

  So once again the rangers felt obligated to cover the cost of what had been placed in their stewardship, the human and the natural world. A hollowed-out Forest Service had lived with daily humiliations, but this was a new low. Hospital bills mounted, upward of $5,000 for the injured in Wallace alone. The Red Cross raised $1,000, leaving the rest of the debt to the Little G.P.s. Just as congressmen had shortchanged the rangers of shovels, axes, and trail-building funds, charging them for the cost of horses and mules, and, in the case of Lolo National Forest, essentially forcing them to pay firefighters out of their own pockets, they stiffed the rangers again on medical costs. All these men, their fingernails melted off, skin raised and infected, lungs permanently compromised by smoke, joints strained and bones broken, muscles torn and hair lost, were left to fend for themselves. Give the enemies of the Forest Service credit, a few rangers noted—their antipathy was consistent.

  16. The Living and the Dead

  AT DAY'S END, there on the horizon, a surprise: puffy clouds without the smear of smoke, fresh formations all, crowding tighter as they moved. Clouds of dreams and serenity. Clouds of security and hope, familiar. As with most weather systems in that part of the world, this column of clouds came from the west, birthed in the cold Pacific in the last days of August, hurdling the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades in Washington before regrouping in the Bitterroots. Water, the master architect of the Pacific Northwest, was here again from the sky, here to the rescue of people who thought their world was at an end. Rising over the blackened, still-burning Rockies, the clouds bunched, cooled, and opened up, the bottoms shredded. It was what people had wished for all summer, what artillery from ships at sea and cannons from the ground had tried to induce — rain.

  People had endured a summer without moisture, the driest in a generation, and a firestorm that produced winds like those along the Gulf Coast at the height of the hurricane season. For forty-eight hours, no one knew whether they would see another day or recognize their homes again. Now the most ordinary of occurrences, a steady downpour, arrived on angels' wings. It was enough to pockmark the land with water bubbles, enough to start trickles that found gullies that carried ash and debris and the flaky crusts of a once mighty forest downhill, rivulets of black, scouring the ground.

  Dawn, first day of September, the rain broke off some to showers, the clouds opening and closing, and in between the gaps, a peak or a ridge could been seen from below, in bright sunlight. Mostly the air was clean, breathable, the killing smoke gone after a month-long siege, pushed to the east. Up high, the miracle was white and early — the first snow of the year, not a dusting but several inches or more in the alpine reaches. What ten thousand men from more than three dozen countries could not do, an early-season gully-washer had done. In Denver, on a day when sixty-four-year-old Buffalo Bill Cody took out an advertisement announcing his "absolutely last" show, a layer of smoke three thousand feet thick settled over the city, the caboose of the Big Burn, nearly a thousand miles from where it started.

  On the ground in the northern Rockies, there were bodies to bury and bodies still to find. How many had died? The reports were inconsistent. At the low end, a hundred people, most of them firefighters. At the high end, twice that amount. The problem was discerning a human in a heap of crisp carbon. "The dead bodies where fire has swept directly over them seem to be turned to charcoal. Fingers, ears and even arms drop off when the bodies are touched," a reporter from Seattle wrote. Several men had been crushed in the way that George Cameron from Nova Scotia was. He was hit by a falling tree on Big Creek. It was only by deduction that rangers figured out that the half-melted boots protruding from beneath the massive hulk of a tree belonged to the young man from the east of Canada.

  The soldiers of the 25th Infantry put other bodies in canvas and hauled them down the mountain. But then what to do? The body bags were placed in the shade by the railroad depots of Avery and Wallace. For a time, a half-built apartment was converted to a morgue. These bodies awaited funds to ship them to loved ones—a disgrace, as many families said, and an insult from the government. Complicating the kind of casualty count that field commanders do after a battle was the number of missing. The fog of truth was no less opaque in this wildfire than it was in combat. After Joe Halm had been found and all his men accounted for, the tally came down somewhat. But looking out over all of Region One, and fielding a stack of telegrams and phone messages from families searching for certainty, Bill Greeley could not tell how many people remained missing. His best estimate, he said, was about 125.

  Pinkie Adair had not been seen for some time. Her father, the doctor and homesteader who taught her how to ride, shoot, and think smartly for herself, had not given up on her, though it had been a month since he had heard from her. When the fires broke out in early August, before the blowup, he had tried to get into the St. Joe country to rescue his daughter. But he had been refused entry; the trail was blocked. After the blowup, he went to Avery, following rumors, and interviewed countless firefighters. They had stories to tell about the radish-haired young woman with the pistol strapped to her hip, "that gal" who had announced in the middle of the firestorm that she was going to leave, and walked right out of the creek and into the flames. Gutsy. And in town, some remembered seeing her, or someone like her, smudged and exhausted, limping. Had she not got on the train out of Avery? The doctor had checked, and there was no record of her boarding on the night when Avery looked sure to fall. Nor could anyone in the 25th Infantry remember seeing her.

  Back in Moscow, Idaho, where the Adairs lived in a big house, came the sound of hobnailed boots on wooden sidewalks, an uneven gait, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the boot spikes worn. This was how she announced herself, the signature walk, still with a bit of pride. She looked frightful, hair burned, eyebrows nipped away and patchy, skin boiled in places and red. For all of that, there was no mistaking that Pinkie Adair had found her way home, and another name was removed from the list of the missing.

  ***

  Though suffering from his burns, Supervisor Weigle tried to get out and have a look at the scope of the destruction. Coeur d'Alene National Forest was hit harder than any other. Had this firestorm been an earthquake, his turf would have been the epicenter. The earthquake that knocked down San Francisco in 1906 and led to the city's immolation by fire came to mind for one survivor of the Big Burn. Elbert Dow had been on the scene for both disasters; the wildfire was worse, he said.

  Nothing in Weigle's training—pictures, histories, or case studies—prepared him for what he now saw in the forest he was charged with protecting. He told reporters to imagine that an entire eastern state—New Jersey came to mind, or Connecticut—had burned, border to border, every acre. There was at least one fire on record of nearly equal size, the Miramichi blaze in Maine and New Brunswick in 1825. But no fire had consumed so much timber and brush in so little time. The bare facts were that the blowup covered 2.6 million acres of national forest land, and another 521,184 acres of private or state timber, for a total of just under 3.2 million acres. Greeley estimated, at first blush, that a billion dollars of timber was caught by flame.

  "The United States has just ended its latest war, the fiercest forest fire in the history of the country," declared Collier's. The woods were a graveyard, random clumps of fried and half-burned trunks, a forest
no more. The blowdown, millions of trees stripped of limbs and needles and tossed to the ground, made it difficult for horse or man to find a way up a mountainside. Trees stacked crosswise, a weave of horizontal timber, confronted Weigle as he poked his way amid the damage. He was astonished that even the greenest of trees, cedars with their moisture-resistant resin and thick bark, had burned through. Along Big Creek, just up the hill from Wallace, he found thousands of dead trout in a shallow, dirty creek. They died, he surmised, from suffocation, unable to find enough oxygen in water clogged by ashes and the fallout of burning trees.

  The strain, the lack of sleep, and his own painful burns were taking a toll on Weigle. He was distressed by the caliber of men hired to help his rangers; many were worthless, didn't know a thing about the woods, and did not have to die. And he was mad at his government, feeling betrayed. If his national forest had been given just enough money to build a decent trail or two, the blowup may have been contained, for it would have been much easier to put people on a line, he said. He had always believed, like Pinchot, that fire could be overcome. If the Big Burn changed his mind, he did not let on.

  Back in town, as Weigle stewed, one of the men who had survived the disaster at Big Creek, where eighteen firefighters were incinerated inside a small cabin after the roof fell in, showed up at the forest supervisor's two-story office in Wallace. He was roaring drunk, screaming at the rangers. This man was already hated because he had helped himself to food supplies that he was supposed to take to the injured. When he was found, drunk, after having stolen the precious food, a cry went up to lynch him. Now, face-to-face with Weigle, he challenged the forest supervisor to a fight. Weigle wasn't man enough, the drifter said. Weigle listened for a few minutes, then decided he had heard enough. He reached for the man's chest, pulled him in tight, then tossed him down a flight of stairs. Other rangers applauded and whistled; many of them had wanted to do the same thing.

  For every blithering drunk, someone else rose to the occasion. To Weigle's surprise, Joe Halm was eager for fresh duty. He took a bath, had himself a big meal, got a good night's sleep, and informed Weigle that he was ready to go to work. Weigle told him to fetch his glass-plate camera, the one Halm had used to record homestead fraud, and sent him off to some of the places he had just seen. People would not believe this—not in Washington, not the president or the Congress, not the newspapers—without pictures. Halm returned to the woods where he had nearly died and did his job.

  He shot pictures of the caves and pits where men had fallen, of streams where people had saved their own lives, buried in water but for their beaks. His camera captured the tunnel where Pulaski and his fifty or so men made their last stand, an unreal photograph. A few scarred sticks poked up from the rubble of downed timber, in a sea of grey and brown, the denuded hills already starting to slide around that tiny entrance where the wood frames burned, where Pulaski ordered a panicked crew to stay put or he would shoot them. Another day, following the rail line, he recorded those great trestles built by armies of shiftless men, now burned, broken, collapsed in colorless ravines. And here and there temporary graves, simple rock cairns marking places where bodies that looked nothing like human beings had been hastily shoved under a few scoops of still-warm dirt. From these scenes came pictures also of the few personal items left behind by the dead—glass melted inside timepieces, coins warped, a picture or two of a mother or a girlfriend, curled, burned at the edge, pressed behind the face of a watch fob, and on its other side, the clock stopped on the evening of Saturday, August 20.

  Most of those who had lived through it did not spring back as well as Joe Halm. In Missoula, and up in the mountains that held the Clearwater and Lochsa rivers of Idaho, rangers told the story of a young firefighter, a small German immigrant named Heinrich, but known now as the Lullaby Boy. When waves of flame rolled into their camp in the rugged upper reaches of the Bitterroots, the boy started to sing and dance. He sang while in the creek, even after two rangers covered his head with a wet blanket and tried to hold him down. He sang in the midst of the firestorm. And he sang as stiff-limbed men crawled out of the stream. His eyes would not make contact, and he did not answer simple questions. The singing was a way to deny what he had seen, what he had feared. Days later, in Missoula, he continued to sing. "The Lullaby Boy was still crazy," Ranger Ed Thenon recalled around a campfire years later. "When they finally got him out to the Bitterroot Valley they sent him to the asylum in Deer Lodge."

  ***

  As snow and rain muffled what was left of the fire, a partial list of those who were injured fighting the blaze appeared:

  Danielson—Totally blind.

  Varish—Totally blind, body badly burned.

  Rickey—Hands, face and feet badly burned.

  Blitten — Right arm burned, will have to be amputated.

  Gayers—Face terribly burned.

  Christianson—Mass of burns around the face and neck. Will probably die.

  Darrick—Totally blind, burned about face and neck. Will probably die.

  Carrigan—Feet burned; will be crippled for life.

  Hickman—Face terribly burned and nose completely burned off.

  Sullivan—Will probably lose both hands.

  The last entry, Patrick Sullivan, was the man who moaned in agony just a few beds from Pulaski in the hospital in Wallace, denied further medical care because there was no way to pay for it. Making good on his promise, Pulaski agreed to cover the young man's hospital expenses—for a few more days. Sullivan could not move his hands; the skin was gone, the burns deep. He coughed constantly, trying to shake the mountain smoke embedded in his lungs. Sullivan had worked only that single day, which would do nothing for his financial situation at home. His mother had been abandoned by her husband seven years earlier, and had two girls in the house. She lived off her boy's meager earnings as a miner, $3.50 a day during good times. After getting his wounds cleaned and freshly dressed, Sullivan was checked out of the hospital, Pulaski's help having expired. What about the cough? He complained that it would not go away. Probably from cigarettes, a doctor told him. Most likely it will disappear in a few weeks. At home with his mother and two sisters, Sullivan was never the same. He could not split wood or swing a hammer or retrieve water. He was useless, because working with his hands was all Sullivan knew how to do. When he tried to curl his fingers around an ax handle, blood and pus oozed out. Sleep was impossible without excessive drink. The cough never left him. On Christmas Eve he died—twenty-nine years old. His death was never listed in the formal tally of those killed in the Big Burn.

  Pulaski remained much longer in the hospital than did Sullivan, his care paid for in part by the Red Cross and in part by donations from other rangers. Early on, he took a turn for the worse, coming down with pneumonia. It was a persistent killer in 1910, the dread of so many families. His breathing was labored, his cough ragged. It hurt to walk, and sleep was inconsistent. Nurses put new bandages over his badly burned eye every day and gave him steam for his ravaged lungs. The eyeball itself had been seared by flame, and Pulaski was told he might never see again from that side. The other eye remained sensitive to light. Smoke inhalation had damaged his lungs, and the burns on his skin were infected. He received visitors, including many reporters, and his story soon became the most heroic note of this epic disaster. He was called, erroneously and repeatedly, a descendant of the Pulaski family of the Revolutionary War, but his story needed no varnish.

  Those whose lives he had saved in the tunnel—the Texas Ranger given Pulaski's horse, the men he forced at gunpoint to lie in fetid water, others who considered mutiny—were treated and drifted away, after collecting a few days' pay. Pulaski had not just lost his energy; his very life force seemed to have ebbed. If he was ever to regain sight in one eye, the doctors said, he would need surgery. But it would be expensive, and Pulaski had no extra money after helping Sullivan with his doctor bills. The Forest Service could not cover him. The rangers took up a collection among themselves,
again, and passed the hat around Wallace. They were indignant, to say the least, that the government "has even refused to pay their hospital fees," as Ranger Will Morris noted in his diary. "So we are going to each subscribe something ourselves." But among them, they failed to come up with enough money for Pulaski to get the surgery he needed. He went home to Emma and Elsie. "I take care of him," his wife wrote. "The experience cost him a weak throat, lungs and eyes, but that is better than being blind always."

  Months passed before news arrived in the foothills of the Italian Alps that Rivara Canavese had lost two of its native sons to a big American wildfire. Domenico Bruno was twenty-four. Giacomo Viettone was twenty-seven. At first no one was able to identify them, burned in that heap of other bodies in the half-built cellar at the homestead of Joe Beauchamp. Simple deduction, a reconstruction of the eyewitness accounts, and time books found at the site eventually determined the names. Their families were owed back pay from the U.S. government. Each man had labored nearly three weeks, days of twelve to sixteen hours. Cables passed between the American consulate in Italy and the mayor of Rivara Canavese. The families were interviewed. "I was formerly a farm laborer," Domenico's father said. "And on account of our age, neither I nor my wife have been able to earn a living by labor for some years. I was wholly dependent upon him for support." The other Italian came from a family of seven children—all girls but for Giacomo. The father was old, broken by physical labor, unable to work; the mother was blind. They pleaded with the American investigators for compensation, a little sum for the loss of their boy.