For a time whites attempted to eradicate the red buffalo from the plains in much the same way they had the brown one.
“Prairie fires are the crying evils—the curses—of our state, and there must be protection against them,” the Emporia (KS) News charged in the 1860s. “We consider that the evil effects of prairie fires . . . are greater than all the drouths, hailstorms, and hurricanes that ever have or will visit us.”6
Most plains communities in the late 1800s viewed natural grass fires with the same dread as they did tornadoes, and many outlawed man-made fires on the plains. But in the Flint Hills, where the rocky soil made farming difficult, the nutritious grasses were a cattleman’s dream. The forage required fire to be salubrious. Ranchers soaked fist-sized balls of burlap in kerosene or diesel fuel and dragged the flaming orbs behind their horses and trucks. Winter and early-spring burns raise the pH level of the soil.7 Late-spring fires lower it. After a fire, sunlight on the blackened ground encourages microbes that recycle nutrients into the soil. Steers dining on the fresh growth that follows a fire gain 10 to 12 percent more weight than those eating old stalks. For more than a century ranchers from as far away as Texas, Florida, and even Mexico have sent their cattle to the Kansas and Oklahoma hills to fatten up on fire-nourished grasses.
Before the vilification of prairie fires, ranchers burning away the old and excess grass that the exiled bison had once mowed down were not the only settlers domesticating the red buffalo. Immigrants to the plains burned to make it easier for them to hunt and to create habitat in which their prey could proliferate. They burned to make space for houses. They burned to deprive pests of homes.
Until about 150 years ago the pests in question were often human. Native Americans and European settlers set fires to drive one another away, to starve their pursuers’ horses of grass, to push enemies into ambushes, to destroy crops, and to make land uninhabitable.
“The Indians now set fire to the prairies and woods all around us,” wrote Charles Augustus Murray in his 1839 book, Travels in North America. “These malicious neighbors were determined to drive us from the district; they evidently watched our every motion, and whenever we entered a wood or grove to hunt, they were sure to set the dry grass on fire.”8
The red buffalo was the most useful piece of the wild ever lassoed by the settlers of the plains. But at its heart, it is still wild, and it often slips its lariat, jumps a fence, or just overpowers the hand that ignited it. In 2010 Celia Harris, a retired schoolteacher, was helping out on a controlled burn in the Flint Hills near her home. The red buffalo killed her the way cattle can crush a rancher—trapping her against a fencerow.9
Downed power lines, sparks from machinery, cigarettes tossed out car windows, and dry lightning still ignite charging herds of flame. The vast, thundering stampedes of the red buffalo gallop across the plains beneath roiling clouds of smoke, dust, dirt, and cinders. While our national consciousness holds the image of a wildfire as a flaming mountain forest, the blazes of the plains are faster and, on occasion, more devastating and deadly.
In March 2006 the fires known as the East Amarillo Complex burned nearly a million acres of the Texas Panhandle in four days. Grasses had proliferated during an unusually wet year, but then dried to kindling when the Panhandle fell into “extremely critical drought” the next year. Two blazes ignited within minutes of each other when high winds blew down power lines more than 20 miles apart. The fires merged to race across 45 miles of prairie in nine hours.
The Texas blaze overran four drilling company workers when their truck was trapped in a ravine as they tried to outrun the fire. They were among 12 people killed on the first day of what was the largest and deadliest wildfire in the United States that year. Smoke smothered Interstate 40, leading to a nine-car pileup that killed four people from Oklahoma. In addition to the human casualties, 4,296 cattle and horses perished. Ranchers reported flames so fast, they incinerated steers where they stood. More than 2,000 miles of fencing and 1,000 utility poles burned.10
Three years later, in Oklahoma, J. C. Myers, a volunteer with the Union Chapel Fire Department, died when he raced his fire truck onto a smoke-filled road and crashed head-on into a pickup driven by his son, Juston Myers, who was responding to the same fire.11 Fires plagued Texas throughout 2011, culminating in a dozen firestorms that broke out across the state on Labor Day. Just one—in Bastrop, near Austin—destroyed nearly 1,700 homes.
NO MATTER HOW WILD IT RUNS, however, the red buffalo is barely a match smoke compared to the Black Dragon, the fire that exploded in China and the Soviet Union during the same spring when I stopped to look at the lazy flames in the Kansas grass. The two fires seemed like a drive-in double feature. The red buffalo was a Western. The Black Dragon unfolded like a monster movie.
The world’s largest coniferous forest, the Da Hinggan—“Black Dragon” in English—fills the northeast corner of China like a flexed arm reaching into Siberia. Its larch, spruce, and pine sprawl from North Korea to Mongolia. Before the 1980s the vast wilderness had just a handful of roads and settlements, but China’s exploding growth fueled a hunger for lumber that led the nation to cut a railway through the heart of the forest that held half its timber reserves.
The tree harvest was overseen by the Black Dragon “family,” a “Mafia-like corporation that ran the forest as a kind of pleasant feather bed with little regard for safety and knowledge of firefighting,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in his book The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng. They built comfortable homes but let fire towers fall into disrepair, and left behind towering piles of shattered wood and brush after their harvests.12
In 1987, when a worker refueling a brush cutter slopped gasoline onto the forest floor, he unleashed a horror like no living human had ever seen. Within hours flames hundreds of feet tall leapt through the forest. The Black Dragon Fire burned more than 18 million acres in Manchuria and Siberia—an area nearly the size of New England and 10 times what the infamous Yellowstone fires would burn in the United States the next year.13
On the Chinese side of the Amur River at least 60,000 people, including two armies of soldiers, battled the blaze. Battalions of artillery shelled the sky with dry ice in an effort to compel the clouds to rain. On the ground tens of thousands of Chinese workers tried to bat down the flames with little more than flyswatters. Despite the explosions in the sky and the flagellation of the earth, the Black Dragon devoured 10 percent of the world’s coniferous forests.
The fire melted telegraph and telephone lines and then washed over villages that, cut off from communications, didn’t realize the size and ferocity of the beast in the sea of smoke. The conflagration killed at least 220 people, an astonishingly low number considering more than 33,000 people lost their homes.
The Black Dragon’s breath would be felt throughout China and around the world for decades. The fire destroyed nearly $6 billion in timber, driving an explosion of lumber imports into China that sped deforestation in a dozen other countries. A year after the fire, the worst dust storms and sandstorms in decades plagued Beijing, more than 1,000 miles from the charred forest.
“When Beijinger met Beijinger there was one word on their lips: Heilongjiang! The Black Dragon fire!” Salisbury, then an octogenarian reporter for the New York Times, wrote. “The fire had begun to take its climatological toll.”14
The fire, Salisbury wrote, “possess[ed] an almost mystical quality, representing a symbol, which I did not entirely understand, of the direction of our future.”
Yet even he couldn’t predict that in the following 25 years, sequels to the Black Dragon horror show would burn on every forested continent.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET from where the Black Dragon had raged, I leaned my hip against the fender of my car and watched the red buffalo slowly graze on the Kansas plains. I’d stopped to watch prairie fires before and would again. Before I quit smoking, I’d light a cigarette as I watched the blaze. I didn’t recognize the connection between the ember h
eld by my lips and the one holding my gaze. Yet the ability to apply smoke to my lungs and also to return the grass’s nutrients to the soil are just two of the myriad benefits that fire bestows on Homo sapiens.
Fire forged and molded the vehicle that I was leaning against, and created the combustion in the engine that brought me to watch the prairie burn. Fire allows us to light the night, drive back the cold, and keep predators at bay—distinct advantages over every other animal. For many anthropologists, it was our alliance with fire that made us human.
Fire created the big brain that allowed me to contemplate the scene before me. Research by Rachel Carmody at Harvard has shown that cooking meats and vegetables releases nutrients, starches in particular, that aren’t digestible in the foods’ raw state. Cooking makes meat easier to chew, swallow, and digest, and gave our ancestors access to foods densely packed with nutrients and animal proteins that allowed our brains to grow some 86 billion neurons—more than twice a gorilla brain’s 33 billion and three times the 25 billion in the average chimpanzee’s.15 Our brain’s size advantage over our closest primate relatives’, however, requires a lot more fuel. The human brain uses 20 percent of the body’s energy when it’s resting—double the portion that other primates’ brains burn. To satisfy our caloric needs with uncooked foods, we would have to eat nine hours a day.
Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist who works with Carmody at Harvard, argues that one way cooked food helped our brains to get big was by allowing our guts to get small. We required less heavy-duty intestines to process food already broken down by cooking, and our bodies diverted the energy no longer required by our more efficient, downsized guts to our rapidly expanding brains.
If I run my tongue over my teeth, I can feel the impact of fire in my mouth. Humans’ “dental chaos”—our teeth are unusually disorderly compared with other animals’—is likely the result of our jaws and teeth shrinking at different rates in response to the need to chew cooked food less, according to Peter Lucas at George Washington University. Chimpanzees spend about half their days chewing, while humans masticate for less than an hour each day.16
Wrangham believes that the time saved from not having to chew raw vegetables freed humans to hunt more—another way in which cooking gave us an evolutionary advantage by adding more meat to our diets. He theorizes that our ancestors began using fire up to 1.8 million years ago. That’s almost a million years before the oldest known evidence of fire use by humans, which was found in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave. The anthropologist points to the evolution of the greater honeyguide, an African bird that leads humans to honey with specialized dances and calls. Humans follow the birds to the hive, then use smoke to disable the bees and gather the honey. The birds also get a payoff in the hive’s wax, which they find delicious. Research by Claire Spottiswoode at the University of Cambridge indicates that the honeyguide required more than a million years after humans began using fire to evolve the guiding behavior.
Plains Indians drove bison with fire, but also noticed the animals preferred grasses growing on prairie that had recently burned. So the hunters started fires not only to herd the bison but also to keep them close with the improved forage that followed the blazes.17 Early Cherokees burned grasslands near their villages so they didn’t have to travel as far to hunt the animal that provided their food, clothes, and tools.
There have always been dragons in the mountain forests, raging huge and red on the jagged horizon, and they have always fed humans’ imagination. But it is the red buffalo that has fed our stomachs, lit and heated our caves and camps, formed bones and wood into tools, melted ores into metals, heated water into steam to spin electricity from our turbines, and fired up the engines in our cars and planes. Fire in its myriad forms remains humanity’s most powerful tool and technology.
But in the eons that we’ve been herding, harnessing, breeding, and butchering fire, we have also marked every inch of the earth with our soot, flames, and hunt for fuel. Black carbon from human fires darkens ice in the treeless barrens of the Arctic and Antarctic, speeding the melting of glaciers. Deserts are filled with forests we’ve planted for timber or fuel. Carbon dioxide from our cars and power plants is changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean, heating the planet as an unintended consequence of our fires. And in woodlands around the world we’ve attempted to eliminate fire as if it were a wild animal that we could exterminate. But now the dragons have returned—larger, hungrier, and, it seems, at least metaphorically, enraged by our efforts to harness them.
As I drove away from the grass fire in the Flint Hills, I saw a pair of headlights on the prairie beaming into the line of flames, while half a dozen taillights around it glowed like cigarettes. Perhaps the drivers were just admiring the same spectacle I was. Or they might have been the ranchers who had started the blaze. In either case, they were keepers of a flame starting to strain against its shackles.
And, I would learn, there are other shackles associated with wildfire.
6
Crazy Woman
I DIDN’T INTEND TO GO TO PRISON. Certainly not to get overrun at a fire.
In 1986 I had just taken a job as a newspaper photographer in Connecticut when I heard about a grass fire over the police scanner. It was the first wildfire I ever responded to, either as a journalist or a firefighter. It couldn’t be anything like the flaming mountains of the West I’d seen photos of, or the fires I’d seen ranchers and farmers set on the Kansas plains, but I was nonetheless eager to get in on the action. I drove to a road from which I could see the smoke plume, then climbed over two barbed wire fences, with my cameras swinging off my shoulders.
When I could see flames in the grass and men digging a line around it, I jogged close enough to start making pictures of them. I’d hardly had a chance to snap a frame before I heard yelling. When I looked, I saw that the shouting wasn’t coming from the group surrounding the fire, but from a man in a uniform who was marching across the field toward me. As he came closer, I could see a badge.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he screamed. “You’ve got to leave. Now!”
He was a guard at the nearby minimum security prison—built like a truck. The fire was burning on the grounds of one of Connecticut’s correctional institutions. The firefighters were inmates. The press was rarely welcome there, and never without an appointment.
I stuttered an explanation but didn’t manage to get a whole sentence out. He came at me like a football player, grabbing me by my armpits and dragging me away as if I were a toddler. I realized he was handling me the way he was trained to restrain the inmates.
“This is a fucking prison!” he shouted. “You can’t just walk in, and they can’t just walk out.”
As his anger exploded at me, the blaze behind him blew up. A ball of flame started rolling across the waist-high grass toward one of the firefighters. It engulfed wooden fence posts and reared above him. He ran toward me to escape it. I raised my camera and tried to get a shot off past the guard’s legs, but my rough-and-tumble removal made framing and focusing impossible.
The guard noticed my telephoto lens banging against his legs and looked down to see me trying to take a photograph. Then, looking over his shoulder, he saw the prisoner and the flames. I expected him to grab my cameras, or at least block my lens with his hand, but he lifted me to my feet and pushed me to face the man running for his life. The guard stepped back as I pressed my finger down on the motor drive. The camera captured a sequence of black-and-white photos of the prisoner running, still carrying his shovel, with the fire exploding behind him. The blaze rolled faster than the inmate could run, growing larger and faster as it devoured more of the thick, high grass. Just as it seemed it would swallow him, the wind subsided and the flames fell and retreated, like a wave crashing on a beach and then falling back into the ocean. Once the prisoner had escaped the flames, the guard grabbed me again, resumed his curses, and pushed me back to the fence where I had come in. I never got a chance to thank
him for manhandling me into the position from which I took the photos. I never learned his or the inmate’s name.
But I did learn that inmates fight wildfires. And most of them are fighting blazes outside prison fences.
When I dug deeper into the use of inmates to fight wildfires, I learned the California state prison system established road camps in 1915 to put low-risk inmates to work. When World War II drew away most of the state’s forestry workers, inmate firefighters battled blazes from 41 temporary camps. A century later, nearly 4,000 minimum security inmates—men, women, and juveniles—were serving on 200 fire crews in California. With the number of California wildfires increasing, as many as 37 percent of the inmate firefighters working in California in 2015 had been violent offenders, according to California corrections officials.1 Most western states have similar programs, putting prisoners in fire crews instead of chain gangs.
“Maybe,” I thought when I learned of the programs, “if they’re so desperate for firefighters they’re putting prisoners on the fire line, there might be an opportunity for me.”
YEARS LATER, IN 2003, a lightning strike on Wyoming’s Crazy Woman Mountain was my ticket to the front lines of the nation’s war on wildfire. After five years of drought, it was virtually guaranteed to start a fire. The bolt blasted the scruffy forest of ponderosa and piñon pine and juniper, and the fire spread quickly through the heaps of bone-dry tinder on the steep slopes.
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