The rodeo and fires might have been easy to confuse—often the first alarm for blazes was a volley of revolver shots. Other times, fires set off ammunition in burning buildings.
In 1889 arsonists started “two successful, and two unsuccessful” fires to break prisoners out of the Prescott jail, the Miner reported. One suspected arson burned down the plaza stables, killing 11 horses, on the same night that D. Levy & Co.’s barn was ignited with rags and coal oil. Later that year, in “A Notice to Fire Bugs,” the paper announced the hiring of six night watchmen to stop the wave of arsons.
By mid-July 1900 residents watering their gardens had drained many city wells. The fire wells were out of use and covered. On July 14 the mayor prohibited the use of city water for irrigation, threatening to cut the supply to residents who didn’t comply. Prescott was without water that day anyway, as mechanics repairing the system had disconnected the engine that ran its pumps.
It was Saturday night, and the saloons of Whiskey Row were overflowing with miners, ranchers, and cowboys. Roulette wheels spun, faro dealers called out their games, and piano players pounded out ragtime.
The most popular, if disputed, history holds that a miner stuck his pick candle into the wall of his room and forgot to blow it out before heading to Whiskey Row for a drink. Nobody disputes that the blaze on the “Night of Terror” raced easily through wooden bunkrooms and on to Whiskey Row. “The firemen are perfectly powerless,” the Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner reported, “as there is no water.”5
Harry Brisley, the owner of a pharmacy in the Burke Hotel, recalled “a scene worthy of a Western movie thriller,” as the city engineer careened around the corner of Gurley and Cortez Streets on his way to the pumping station in a wagon pulled by his old white horse. “The slowly swelling hose proved the pumps were in motion,” he wrote.
But it was, literally, too little and too late.
“The city faced the severest hours of its thirty-eight years’ history, when from the nozzle came a dirty stream falling weakly to the street a few feet from the source,” Brisley wrote. “By this time, fire had entered the . . . Scopel hotel.”
Brisley reported (and others disputed) that firefighters threw dynamite into the blazing Scopel to try to collapse the building, but the masonry walls stood. Embers from the burning building landed on the wooden siding and shingles on the back side of Whiskey Row.
Firefighters dynamited other buildings, including the Burke Hotel at the end of Whiskey Row, in an attempt to create firebreaks. They had stopped the spread of at least one previous fire using this technique, but this time the flames easily leapt the gaps. Soon every building on the Row was burning. The entire block between Montezuma and Granite Streets burned to the ground. Gunshots rang out through the night as the flames set off bullets in stores and hotel rooms. Bucket brigades hardly slowed the flames; residents and shopkeepers saved whatever valuables they could. The huge, intricately carved backbar in the Palace, which had traveled to Prescott from San Francisco by boat and covered wagon, now rode on the back of the bar’s patrons, who carried it across the street to Courthouse Plaza to save it from the flames.6
In less than five hours “the Great Fire” destroyed five blocks of the city, leveling 61 of its wooden buildings and doing nearly $1.5 million in damage. Only two of the buildings on Courthouse Plaza survived.
The day after the blaze, four bars opened in pinewood shacks in the plaza, and more came in the following weeks. The board of supervisors assigned each business that burned a site on the grassy square as close as possible to its ruins. Pianos, roulette wheels, and card dealers sang out from the park. And they had something to celebrate: nobody had died in the Great Fire of 1900.
Nearly every commercial building was reconstructed by 1901. But while wood shacks filled the plaza during the reconstruction, the buildings that rose from the ash were of stone and brick—architecture as fire resistant as it was grand.
But even that didn’t stop the fires on Whiskey Row. Just a year before I visited, patrons sitting at the bar in the Bird Cage Saloon saw flames above the backbar. Hundreds of city residents, some of them weeping, spread across the courthouse lawn to watch flames leap behind the six-foot-tall Bird Cage sign.
A splash of fiery color fills an entire square of the timeline walkway to mark the Great Fire. Fires that transformed more than just the city are marked farther on. A mushroom cloud notes a Nevada nuclear test that shook Prescott, the nation, and the world. A few steps along, an air tanker carved in the concrete commemorates the first use of planes to fight wildfires.
As I stepped from Prescott’s past into its present on Monday, July 1, 2013, the first day of the weeklong Frontier Days celebrations, both the rodeo and Whiskey Row were as healthy as ever. An elderly couple in matching western shirts sewn from American flags joined me on the plaza. Below the neon Harley-Davidson sign gray-bearded bikers gathered in black leather. Some downtown visitors displayed arms sleeved with tattoos, while a few others donned historic western garb. “Everybody’s Hometown” lived up to its nickname.
In the coming days other unusual costumes filled the square. More than 100 bagpipers and drummers in kilts—the largest gathering of its kind since the terrorist attacks of 9/11—marched along the timeline in front of the courthouse. Firefighters from around the world filled the Firehouse Kitchen and mingled around Old Firehouse Plaza, “Prescott’s Hot Spot for Shopping and Dining.”
But, as opposed to the rodeo fans and tourists, the firefighters and pipers in Prescott were anything but celebratory. On Jersey Lilly’s balcony, some tourists in town for the Fourth of July rodeo cheered out a toast. “To the firemen!” they shouted.
I was confident that none of Prescott’s firefighters were on the plaza to hear the tribute.
27
Defusing the Time Bomb
Prescott, Arizona—1990
IN 1990, WHEN DARRELL WILLIS was Prescott’s deputy fire chief, the former professional fast-pitch softball player kept fit by jogging through the city with Ed Hollingshead, who was in charge of dealing with wildfires in the Prescott National Forest. The patchwork of overgrown ponderosa pinelands and oily chaparral that surrounded the city combined to created a landscape as flammable as any in the country. The two firefighters would run through different subdivisions, bantering about the hazard.
“This house isn’t going to make it.”
“We can’t deploy a crew here.”
“We’ve got a problem here,” Willis told his friend. “I don’t think either one of us, whether it’s the forest [service] or the fire department, is going to solve it.”
That year a fire threatened the city a few weeks before the Dude Fire killed six firefighters near Payson, 100 miles to the east.
“That just sparked an interest,” Willis told me.
Willis and Hollingshead founded the Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission, giving it the flaming logo “Living on the Edge.” In 1991 they started holding evacuation and firefighting drills in Prescott’s forested developments, but few residents took the threat seriously.
“We struggled for 10 years to get the community aware,” Willis said. “I’d been telling the city these things, and they said, ‘We don’t believe you. We don’t think it’s a problem.’ ”
By 2000, when the National Fire Plan set funds aside to help communities prepare for wildfires, Willis was the fire chief in Prescott. He went to the city council to promote a wildland fire code requiring that homes that might confront a wildfire be built with flame-resistant materials and have defensible space cleared around them.
“The developers and the shake-shingle roof people all came out of the woodwork,” Willis recalled. “They said, ‘No, you’re going to shut development down by increasing the cost.’ So we have this battle . . . and in 2002 we have the Indian Fire.”
That blaze nearly burned into the city.
“I went back in with the interface code, and I said, ‘Is this proof enough?’ ” Willis said
.
The city council adopted it, but angry developers later compelled the council to rescind its decision.
Willis brought in a consultant to analyze the wildfire threat to Prescott, and the city put together a committee of developers, contractors, firefighters, and residents to deal with it. By 2001 they had a community-wide vegetation plan. A grant from the state paid to clear some defensible space around private property.
Other grants funded the fire department’s first fuels crew—a team of seasonal workers to cut chaparral and ponderosa pines from homes and developments at the edge of the city. By 2003 they had cleared defensible space around nearly 1,700 homes and removed 10,000 beetle-killed ponderosa pine trees. Willis couldn’t get all the building codes he wanted, but he got some implemented for new construction in the most hazardous areas. In 2002 the city with the oldest fire department in Arizona finally got its Wildland Urban Interface Code, also the first in the state.1
But the city was hardly keeping pace with the hazard.
A risk-assessment company from California rated Prescott one of the West’s 10 most likely communities to be burned over in a wildfire. Housing was sprawling fast. Even with a city fuels crew to do the work, residents were resistant to removing trees and brush around their homes.
Willis retired as fire chief in 2007, but came back in 2010 as chief of the city’s Wildland Division, which he had created. Members of the division studied the threat to thousands of homes with a “Red Zone” computer program, inspected nearly 400 homesites a year for code compliance, and reviewed scores of building plans. At annual town hall meetings and in elementary school programs, they explained how defensible space would save homes.
But the city’s greatest advancement in protecting itself from forest fires arrived in the form of a single man.
IN 2003 WILLIS HIRED a former hotshot to lead the fuels crew.
Eric Marsh was born and raised in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains but fell in love with both wildland firefighting and Arizona when he joined a U.S. Forest Service crew during his summer break from studying biology at Appalachian State University. After graduating he moved to Arizona to fight fires full-time.2
Quiet, confident, and direct, Marsh had worked as a hotshot with a crew out of the Tonto National Forest before coming to Prescott. His affinity for the woods and penchant for pushing his body were the perfect combination for a career in wildland firefighting.
Marsh was an avid mountain biker who competed in 24-hour endurance rides, an equestrian with a beloved mount named Shorty, and a motorcyclist with a patch on his leather vest that read “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God!” A ski patroller, fisherman, and climber, he proposed to Amanda, his third wife, on an ice-climbing trip to Ouray, Colorado.3 Sober since 2000,4 he carried his drug of choice—a plastic bottle of Bisbee coffee along with a camp stove—with his fire gear so he could brew up in the woods or a parking lot. When he wasn’t working or playing outside, he was cutting stone or welding steel in his effort to build a life in Arizona. Despite his taciturn demeanor, Marsh became a fixture in Prescott and eventually helped his parents, John and Jane, move from North Carolina to Arizona so they could be closer to their only son.
Shortly after his arrival in Prescott, Marsh and his second wife started the Arizona Wildfire Academy in the living room of their mobile home. Ten years later it was one of the largest and most respected training facilities of its kind in the country, drawing more than 700 attendees from across the nation. By the time the academy celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2012, the National Fire Protection Association honored the Prescott Fire Department’s wildland fuels management program as the “Gold Standard” in the nation.5
In 2004, just a year after Marsh joined the fire department, the fuels crew completed training as a Type 2–Initial Attack wildland firefighting hand crew, giving the city 20 dedicated forest firefighters during the height of the wildfire season. But Marsh and Willis had something more in mind. Their audacious plan to deal with Prescott’s increasing vulnerability to wildfire was to turn the crew that most residents saw as a group of glorified landscapers into an elite Type 1 team of hotshots.
Nearly all of the more than 100 hotshot crews scattered around the United States were run by the U.S. Forest Service or the Department of the Interior. None had ever been part of a municipal fire department. But with increasing demand for hotshot crews to fight fires throughout the West, the city would get the protection of an elite team of wildland firefighters that, at least on the surface, was nearly cost neutral. The federal government’s payments for the crew to fight fires outside their jurisdiction would pay for most of their work around Prescott.
Marsh dedicated himself to building his crew, pushing its members to improve their fitness and skills. Early in his time in Prescott, he got a reputation for being hard on people he disagreed with, but Willis urged him so much to be kinder that niceness became one of the guiding principles for the crew and its superintendent. Marsh, who had no children of his own, would come to be called “Papa” and would refer to his firefighters as his “kids.” He gathered the crew for barbecues and drove them to doctor’s appointments, but discipline was strict in his firefighting family. Even when covered with char, he made them keep their clothes and hair neat, with shirts buttoned up and tucked in. They addressed supervisors and homeowners with the same southern manners he was raised with.
“The first couple years [were] really rough because we hired a bunch of—and I was one of them—kids that really had no clue about life, much less fire,” recalled Pat McCarty, who started with the crew in 2005. “Those guys just wanted to have a cool summer job and make some extra money and . . . go around saying, ‘Hey, I’m a firefighter.’ ”
Others who saw all the elements of a disaster growing around the city joined in to help. Marty Cole, a Prescott firefighter with years of wildland experience, stepped off a fire truck to be a leader of the crew. Tim McElwee taught them techniques he’d learned fighting wildfires in California.
Within a year or so, crew members who weren’t serious about the job began to drop out. “Eric just had a natural ability to get people to be honest with themselves,” McCarty said.
On McCarty’s first training hike with the crew, normally a four-mile hoof up a mountainside, a crew member carrying a chainsaw fell behind. Marsh grew angry and stopped the line. “I need somebody else to carry this saw,” he said.
“I’ll do it,” McCarty replied, eager to impress.
“Rookie, don’t you put this down until we get done with this hike,” Marsh ordered. Then he extended the hike into a grueling 10-mile loop. All he said to McCarty at the end was “Good job.”
“That next day, the guy who he took the saw off just goes, ‘You know, this isn’t for me anymore,’ ” McCarty recalled.
Marsh’s crew stood out. “All those federal crews, they got green buggies. We pulled up in white vans and pickup trucks, and everybody’s like, ‘Well who are these guys?’ ” McCarty said. “ ‘They work for a [city] fire department? Well, what do they know about wildfire?’
“Most of those crews were all older, grown men—full beards. We weren’t allowed to have a beard.”
The men that spilled out of the white trucks looked like they could still be in high school. But Marsh made sure they stood out on the fire line, too.
“Eric had a very competitive side to him,” McCarty said. “Eric wanted to be the best hotshot crew in the nation.”
He had something to prove to the Prescott Fire Department as well as to other wildland crews. “A lot of guys in our own department had a hard time getting used to these brush guys running around . . . with ‘Prescott Fire Department’ on the side of their trucks,” McCarty said.
IN THE MIDDLE of the mountains of training and paperwork required to build his crew, Marsh drove to a view of Granite Mountain, pressed a piece of paper against the windshield of his truck, and traced the shape of the craggy peak. He turned the sketch
into a logo and, in 2007, had it stenciled on the crew’s trucks with a “T” to indicate the Granite Mountain Hotshots were in training.
He adopted a phrase in Latin as the crew’s motto: Esse Quam Videri—“To Be, Rather Than to Seem.” An essay he wrote explained it to his crew:
“We have a desire to continuously push ourselves physically and mentally, whether in training or on the job. We will exceed our perceived limits of what we can endure to tie in a piece of line, complete a hike or catch a spot . . .
“We always say Hi and act friendly. We remain humble and helpful at all times . . .”
A year later the crew was on a fire near Hells Canyon, in Oregon’s Klamath National Forest, when Marsh got a call during the morning briefing with his men. He took a knife and peeled the “T” off the logo on his truck. “We’re hotshots now,” he said. “You guys earned this.”
The crew had a quick round of high fives, then headed to the fire.
When city officials continued to make it difficult for the crew to meet its requirements, Marsh wrote another essay explaining his crew to the community.
“To our peers, the 110 other Interagency Hotshot Crews in the nation, we are an oddity. In a workforce dominated by Forest Service and other federal crews, we have managed to do the impossible; establish a fully certified (hotshot) program hosted by a municipal fire department . . . We look different. Not because our buggies are white instead of green, but because we smile a lot. We are different. We are positive people. We take a lot of pride in being friendly and working together, not just amongst ourselves, but with other crews, citizens, etc. . . .
“To our city coworkers, we are a bit of a mystery. Guys that work in the woods a lot . . .
“To our families and friends, we’re crazy. Why do we want to be away from home so much, work such long hours, risk our lives, and sleep on the ground 100 nights a year? Simply, it’s the most fulfilling thing any of us have ever done . . . We don’t just call ourselves hotshots, we are hotshots in everything that we do.”
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