Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  The difference between thirteen crosses and 245 or 246 markers (they are hard to count) made it a small Custer Hill, with some advantages. It had helicopters, air patrol, and lawsuits. It had instant newspaper coverage and so could heighten the headlines and suspense as the injury list changed from three uninjured survivors, two men badly burned, and the rest of the crew missing, to the final list on which the only survivors were the first three. The headlines flamed higher as all the burned and all the missing proved dead.

  The Forest Service knew right away it was in for big trouble. By August 7 chief forester Lyle F. Watts in Washington appointed an initial committee to investigate the tragedy and to report to him immediately, and on August 9 the committee flew over the area several times, went back to Mann Gulch by boat, and spent three hours there. Like General Custer himself, who liked to have reporters along, the investigating committee took with them a crew of reporters and photographers from Life magazine. The lead article of Life’s August 22, 1949, issue, “Smokejumpers Suffer Ordeal by Fire,” runs to five pages and includes a map and photographs of the fire, the funeral, and a deer burned to death, probably the deer that Rumsey and Sallee saw come out of the flames and collapse while they were ducking from one side of their rock slide to the other.

  Accompanying the Smokejumpers on their August 5 flight was a Forest Service photographer named Elmer Bloom, who had been commissioned to make a training film for young jumpers; Bloom took shots of the crew suiting up and loading, of the Mann Gulch fire as it was first seen from the plane, and of what was to be the last jump for most of the crew. There are five frames from his documentary reproduced in Life, and for all my efforts to find the film, this is all I have ever seen of it. I did find an August 1949 letter from the regional forester in Missoula to the chief forester in Washington saying in effect that the film was too hot to handle at home so he was sending it along. Nobody in Washington can find it for me. I’m always told it must have been “misfiled,” and it may well have been, since there is no better way in this world to lose something forever than to misfile it in a big library.

  It is hard to believe the film could be anything other than an odd little memento, but very early the threats of lawsuits from parents sounded in the distance and the Forest Service reversed its early policy of accommodating Life’s photographers to one of burying the photographs they already had.

  The leader of the public outcry against the Forest Service was Henry Thol, the grief-unbalanced father of Henry, Jr., whose cross is closest to the top of the Mann Gulch ridge. Not only was the father’s grief almost beyond restraint, but he, more than any other relative of the dead, should have known what he was talking about. He was a retired Forest Service ranger of the old school, and soon after the fire he was in Mann Gulch studying and pacing the tragedy. Harvey Jenson, the man in charge of the excursion boat taking tourists downriver from Hilger Landing to the mouth of Mann Gulch, became concerned about Thol’s conduct and the effect it was having on his tourist trade. His mildest statement: “Thol has been very unreasonable about his remarks and has expressed his ideas very forcefully to boatloads of people going and coming from Mann Gulch as he rides back and forth on the passenger boat.”

  The Forest Service moved quickly, probably too quickly, to make its official report and get its story of the fire to the public. It appointed a formal Board of Review, all from the Forest Service and none ranked below assistant regional forester, who assembled in Missoula on September 26, the next morning flew several loops around and across Mann Gulch, spent that afternoon going over the ground on foot, and during the next two days heard “all key witnesses” to the fire. The Report of Board of Review is dated September 29, 1949, three days after the committee members arrived in Missoula, and it is hard to see how in such a short time and so close to the event and in the intense heat of the public atmosphere a convincing analysis could be made of a small Custer Hill. In four days they assembled all the relevant facts, reviewed them, passed judgment on them, and wrote what they hoped was a closed book on the biggest tragedy the Smokejumpers had ever had.

  In this narrative the Report and the testimony on which it was based have been referred to or quoted from a good many times, and an ending to this story has to involve an examination of the Report’s chief findings. But the immediate effect of the Forest Service’s official story of the fire was to add to its fuel.

  By October 14, Michael (“Mike”) Mansfield, then a member of the House of Representatives and later to be the distinguished leader of the Democratic senators, pushed through Congress an amendment to the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act raising the burial allowance from two hundred dollars to four hundred dollars and making the amendment retroactive so it would apply to the dead of Mann Gulch.

  The extra two hundred dollars per body for burial expenses did little to diminish the anger or personal grief. By 1951, eight damage suits had been brought by parents of those who had died in the fire, or by representatives of their estates, “alleging negligence on the part of Forest Service officials and praying damages on account of the ‘loss of the comfort, society, and companionship’ of a son.” To keep things in their proper size, however, it should be added that the eight suits were filed by representatives of only four of the dead, each plaintiff bringing two suits, one on the plaintiff’s own behalf for loss of the son’s companionship and support, and the other on behalf of the dead son for the suffering the son had endured.

  Henry Thol was the leader of this group and was to carry his own case to the court of appeals, so a good way to get a wide-angle view of the arguments and evidence these cases were to be built on is to examine Thol’s testimony before the Board of Review, at which he was the concluding witness.

  Thol had become the main figure behind the lawsuits not just because he alone of all the parents of the dead was a lifelong woodsman and could meet the Forest Service on its own grounds. Geography increased his intensity: he lived in Kalispell, not far from the Missoula headquarters of Region One and the Smokejumper base. In addition, Kalispell was the town which had been Hellman’s home. Thol knew Hellman’s wife, and his grief for her in her pregnancy and bewildered financial condition only intensified his rage. There is also probably some truth in what Jansson told Dodge in a sympathetic letter written after the fire: Jansson says that Thol, like many old-time rangers, felt he had been pushed around by the college graduates who had taken over the Forest Service, so he was predisposed to find everything the modern Forest Service did wrong and in a way designed to make him suffer. In his testimony every major order the Forest Service gave the crew of Smokejumpers is denounced as an unpardonable error in woodsmanship—from jumping the crew on a fire in such rough and worthless country and in such abnormal heat and wind, to Dodge’s escape fire. The crew should not have been jumped but should have been returned to Missoula; as soon as Dodge saw the fire he should have led the crew straight uphill out of Mann Gulch instead of down it and so dangerously paralleling the explosive fire; Dodge should not have wasted time going back to the cargo area with Harrison to have lunch; when Dodge saw that the fire had jumped the gulch and that the crew might soon be trapped by it, he should have headed straight for the top of the ridge instead of angling toward it; and so on to Dodge’s “escape” fire, which was the tragic trap, the trap from which his boy and none of the other twelve could escape.

  The charge that weighed heaviest with both Thol and the Forest Service from the outset was the charge that Dodge’s fire, instead of being an escape fire, had cut off the crew’s escape and was the killer itself.

  While the fire was still burning, the Forest Service was alarmed by the possibility that the Smokejumpers were burned by their own foreman. The initial committee of investigation appointed by the chief forester in Washington was headed by the Forest Service’s chief of fire control, C. A. Gustafson, who testified later that he had not wanted to talk to any of the survivors before seeing the fire himself because of certain fears about it which he wante
d to face alone. In his words, this is what brought him into Mann Gulch on August 9. “The thing I was worried about was the effect of the escape fire on the possible escape of the men themselves.”

  Jenson, the boatman who took tourists downriver to Mann Gulch, makes probably the most accurate recording of Thol’s opinion of Dodge’s fire. He said he had heard Thol say, “There is no question about it—Dodge’s fire burned the boys.” And the father didn’t blur his words before the Board of Review. “Indications on the ground show quite plainly that [Dodge’s] own fire caught up with some of the boys up there above him. His own fire prevented those below him from going to the top. The poor boys were caught—they had no escape.”

  The Forest Service’s reply to this and other charges can be found in the conclusions of the Report of Board of Review. The twelfth and final conclusion of the Report is merely a summary of the conclusions that go before it: “It is the overall conclusion of the Board that there is no evidence of disregard by those responsible for the jumper crew of the elements of risk which they are expected to take into account in placing jumper crews on fires.”

  The Board also added a countercharge: the men would all have been saved if they had “heeded Dodge’s efforts to get them to go into the escape fire area” with him. Throughout the questioning there are more than hints that the Board of Review was trying to establish that a kind of insurrection occurred at Dodge’s fire led by someone believed to have said, as Dodge hollered at them to lie down in his fire, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” As we have seen, there were even suggestions that the someone believed to have said this was Hellman and that, therefore, the race for the ridge was triggered by the second-in-command in defiance of his commander’s orders.

  Rumors still circulate among old-time jumpers that there was bad feeling between Dodge, the foreman, and his second-in-command, Hellman, although I have never found any direct evidence to support such rumors. There seems somehow to be a linkage in our minds between the annihilation near the top of a hill of our finest troops and the charge that the second-in-command didn’t obey his leader because there had long been “bad blood between them.” Custer’s supporters explain Custer’s disaster by the charge that his second-in-command, Major Reno, hated the general and in the battle failed to support him, and it is easy to understand psychologically how a narrative device like this can become a fixed piece of history. It relieves “our” leader and all “our” men from the responsibility of having caused a national catastrophe, all except one of the favorite scapegoats in history, the “second guy.”

  Back in the world where things can be determined, if not proved, the suit of Henry Thol reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where Warren E. Burger, later chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was one of the lawyers arguing against the retired United States Forest Service ranger’s charge that his son would have made the remaining sixty or seventy yards to the top of the ridge except for the negligence of the United States Forest Service. Despite the number of times “United States” occurs in that sentence, nothing much happens because of it.

  The court of appeals in 1954 upheld the decision of the district court for the district of Montana. Both courts therefore ruled that the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act could constitutionally exclude nondependent parents from receiving damages from the federal government beyond the burial allowance. The decision was also upheld that Mansfield’s amendment was constitutional in making itself retroactive so that it would apply to the dead of Mann Gulch. Therefore, after the parents had buried their boys, they received another two hundred dollars.

  FOR A TIME IT LOOKED AS IF the four hundred dollars would put an end to the story. A court decision built on two hundred dollars plus two hundred dollars per body silenced the parents; they could not pursue their charge of negligence unless the decision of the court of appeals was reversed by our highest court. To the average citizen the government holds nearly all the cards and will play them when the government is both the alleged guilty party and judge of its own guilt.

  For instance, late in 1951 (December 12) in Lewiston, Idaho, Robert Sallee made a second statement about the Mann Gulch fire to “an investigator for the United States Forest Service,” and less than a month later (January 1, 1952) Walter Rumsey in Garfield, Kansas, made his second statement to the same official investigator. The Forest Service was preparing its two key witnesses just in case, going so far as to bring them back to Mann Gulch for a refresher course. Their second statements follow closely their first, which were taken only a few days after their return to Missoula from the fire (both dated August 10, 1949). In fact, their later statements follow their first statements word for word a good part of the way, so the alterations stick out like sore thumbs, which is still a good figure of speech at times. Two assurances were drawn from Rumsey and Sallee: they now protested at length that if those who died had followed Dodge’s appeals to lie down with him in his own fire (as they themselves hadn’t), they, like Dodge, would have been saved. Moreover, they now insisted at length that in escaping over the hill they had followed the up-gulch edge of Dodge’s fire “straight” to the top of the ridge and so Dodge’s fire could not have pursued those who were burned toward the head of the gulch, since they and his fire would have been going roughly at right angles to each other.

  Some official documents about the fire, then, were retouched and given the right shading. More of them probably were just buried—some were even marked “Confidential” and were held from the public as if these fire reports endangered national security. Still others were scattered among different Forest Service offices from the headquarters of Region One in Missoula to the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Mann Gulch fire was so scattered that about a quarter of a century later the first mystery I had to solve about it was to find out where it had disappeared. It was like a burial at sea—it was hard afterwards to find the bodies in the wash, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of men and women of the Forest Service who felt the burial had been indecent. It’s a different world now anyway from what it was before the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, but I lived most of my life before that date and I can remember it being a loud laugh at Regional Headquarters in Missoula when an energetic, outspoken journalist tried persistently to get access to the documents there on the Mann Gulch fire. With eight lawsuits in the docket brought against the Forest Service for negligence in the deaths of thirteen of the West’s finest, the Forest Service was not opening its heart or its files for all to see. As far as the files marked “Mann Gulch Fire” were concerned, mum was the word.

  The reasons why parents, relatives, and close friends hoped for silence are naturally very different from the government’s. The Forest Service sought silence; the parents were reduced to it, although in sad ways they may also have sought it. On the whole, they were not people of means and could not afford to appeal their case to the Supreme Court, even if they had wished, and, except for Thol, they must have had small understanding of their own case and therefore an underlying reluctance to pursue it. Most important of all probably is the secrecy of the grief and moral bewilderment suffered at the death of one of ourselves who was young, had a special flair, a special daring, a special disregard for death, who seemed, both to himself and to us, to be apart from death, especially from death leaving behind no explanation of itself either as a sequence of events or as a moral occurrence in what-kind-of-a-universe-is-this-anyway. It is the frightened and recessive grief suffered for one whom you hoped neither death nor anything evil would dare touch. Afterwards, you live in fear that something might alter your memory of him and of all other things. I should know.

  A few summers ago, thirty years after the fire, I sent what I hoped was gentle word through a common friend to a mother of one of the Mann Gulch dead asking if I could talk to her, and she returned through the common friend gentle word saying that even after all these years she was unable to talk abou
t her son’s death. I thought next I would try a father, and he came in dignity, feeling no doubt it was a challenge to him that he must meet as a man, and he talked in dignity until I began to tell him about his son’s death. I had assumed that he knew some of the details of that death and, as a scientist, would care for other details that would help him participate in his son’s last decisions, very thoughtful ones though tragic. As I mistakenly went on talking, his hands began to shake as if he had Parkinson’s disease. He could not stop them, so there is no story, certainly no ending to a story, that can be found by communicating with the living who loved the young who are dead, at least none that I am qualified to pursue. A story at a minimum requires movement, and, with those who loved those who died, nothing has moved. It all stopped on August 5, 1949. So if there is more to this story for me to find, I shall have to find it somewhere else.

  The silence, of course, could never be complete. Some things do remain—worn-out things, unconnected things, things not in the right place or clearly of another time: a worn-out fishing jacket, a few unrelated letters written by him, a few unrelated letters written to him, a childhood photograph that is hard to imagine as his, a picture in which something may be right.

  A movie supposedly based on the Mann Gulch fire can still be seen now and then as a rerun on television. In 1952, while litigation was still in progress, Twentieth Century—Fox released Red Skies of Montana, filmed at the Smokejumper base in Missoula and on a fire just outside of town. The cast included Richard Widmark, Constance Smith, Jeffrey Hunter, and Richard Boone. At the beginning of the plot a foreman on a forest fire lights an escape fire, as Dodge did when the flames closed in; then he lies down in his own fire and the likeness to Dodge continues—his own men “do not heed him” and he alone survives only to live in disgrace.