The Big Burn (2 page)

"Men fought with women for precedence, well-dressed men eager to get into the coaches and save themselves," the
Idaho Press
reported in its eyewitness dispatch. The men were cowards, the railroad's freight agent said. "The women were the heroines." To the mayor's dismay, among the weak men were prominent citizens who had talked earlier of holding the line, of fighting for the town and setting an example for the children, for the community. In truth, they came to this mountain town to get rich, and damned if they were going to die trying to save the place. The mayor consulted with his fire chief about ejecting all the men by force. Before he could issue an order, a soldier removed a well-known roustabout from the train, "a fat gambler," as the papers called him; he was forced off at the end of a fixed bayonet. Still, men dodged, slipped, and pressed to get on; they were in life-flight, bloated with adrenaline.

"Let the bastards go," Chief Kelly said to Mayor Hanson.

Missing from the rescue train was John Boyd. He had ignored his son's pleading, returning to the house to rescue his parrot. He found the bird in a frenzy. Boyd took the cage outside, then paused and set it on the ground. Perhaps the house could be saved. He turned on the garden hose and sprayed the outside walls, the roof, the porch—just enough water for good measure, and surely his son would thank him for thinking like a fireman and not like a coward in abject confusion. Then he picked up the bird cage and hustled for the rail tracks. His gait was unsteady. Snagged by smoke
and heat, he gasped and trembled. He had trouble getting a deep breath in the heated air that smothered the town, and it hurt his chest to cough. He sat and rested on the street, taking slow, deliberate breaths, mumbling promises to his parrot. Now when he stood it was difficult to take more than a step or two. After walking a few hesitant paces, he fell to the ground, his grip tight on the birdcage no more. John Boyd and his parrot died on the streets of Wallace, of smoke inhalation.

Also missing from the train was Emma Pulaski. Her husband was a ranger with the Forest Service who had spent the month of August trying to knock down small blazes in the mountains. He had nearly three hundred men under his command at one point, working a few miles from Wallace. If anyone could keep the fire from jumping into town, it was thought to be Ed Pulaski, one of the few rangers in the fledgling Forest Service who knew the region—its trails, creekbeds, and ridgelines. He knew the winds, the mining holes, the path of afternoon thunderstorms. He knew how to calm a horse when lightning struck, and could craft a tool from a plank of rough cedar, and could pitch a lean-to in less time than it took other rangers to finish a sentence. Chronically short of supplies while commanding a brigade of confused men, Pulaski had fought a rear-guard, defensive action, trying to hold flames in check by digging lines that would deprive the fire of fresh fuel. The strategy was simply to keep the fire a safe distance from Wallace, the biggest town in the valley. On Friday, the day before the evacuation, Pulaski had returned to Wallace for food, blankets, shovels—anything to restock his bedraggled crew. He stopped by his house to see Emma and their ten-year-old daughter, Elsie. He had a bad feeling about the next twenty-four hours, he told them.

"Wallace will surely burn," Pulaski said to his wife. "Be prepared to save yourselves." His was a voice of doom, not a hint of optimism. Wallace had never looked so vulnerable: all this fuel, in this narrow slot of humanity, at the base of a dense forest that had not seen noticeable rain for months. Pulaski and Emma discussed
the town evacuation plan first, then another idea of staying behind and hunkering down near the mine tailings by the river, a berm of graveled waste. He was not long into his visit when another ranger rushed up to the house—a fresh fire, much bigger than anything to date, was moving close to town. Pulaski had to go back into the mountains and tend to his firefighters; his orders were to corral this thing before it advanced any farther down the valley. Emma and Elsie went with him to the trailhead, an eight-mile ride from town.

At road's end, Pulaski faced his wife and daughter. In his fashion, he was blunt, devoid of sentiment, telling them this might be the final goodbye. He turned and started up the steep, faint trail, a corkscrew that had been hacked along a creek by miners. Emma and Elsie rode back to town through a thicket of smoke and blowing embers, Emma's eyes red from the sting of the air.

When Emma and Elsie reached home, the front yard was littered with burning bark and the porch was covered in ash. They spent a sleepless night. The next day, Saturday, as the winds picked up in the early evening, the house shook so violently Emma thought it might be pushed off its foundation. Those who did not head for the train streamed out of town, their furniture, pots, pans, blankets, and linens piled onto horse-drawn jalopies. Emma still thought she could ride it out. She put her child to bed at 8:30
P.M.
, closed the doors and windows. In the dark of Saturday night, a neighbor banged on the door.

"Mrs. Pulaski," she said, "leave the house!"

Emma glanced outside and saw flames far down the flanks of the mountains, lapping at homes in the foothills. She woke Elsie, grabbed a few blankets, and made a run for the mine tailings. She would try to survive the night in a bed of crushed mineral waste — one thing that would not ignite. Her thoughts were up higher, with her husband in the chop of flame.

No living person in the United States had seen anything like the flames that roared through the Bitterroots in the summer of 1910:
at its peak, the storm would consume three million acres in barely two days. In the weeks leading up to the blowup, before Wallace was evacuated, nearly ten thousand men had been thrown together in three states, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. The woods were a snarl of smoke, thousands of small blazes consuming a prime piece of the Rockies, and it looked as if many lives were at risk. After sending out a rescue call to save the national forests, the government enlisted college boys from California; day workers from Denver, Salt Lake City, Butte, Missoula, Spokane, Seattle, and Portland; and immigrants, thousands of foreigners—from mining camps in Arizona and Colorado, from irrigation ditches in California, from timber towns in the coastal Pacific Northwest, people working at jobs that American citizens would not take. It was the greatest force yet assembled to fight a wildfire in the country.

President William H. Taft had also sent Army troops to the region. Taft was 335 pounds of insecurity, growing politically weaker and physically bigger by the day. A year and a half into his first term, he was never out of the strong wake of his predecessor, the peripatetic Theodore Roosevelt. At the same time that Taft monitored the fires from his summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, Roosevelt was beginning a nationwide speaking tour—a firestorm of his own, heading west, arena by arena, his spectacles steamed as he barked on behalf of ideals he had promoted in the new century. The road show of high-minded rhetoric would further highlight the inadequacies of the man Roosevelt had handpicked to follow him in office, a man he would soon abandon.

The Republican Party that Teddy Roosevelt had built—the uneasy meld of progressives, Main Street capitalists, and the founding voices of American conservation—was falling apart. One big reason: the establishment of national forests in an expanse of wild country that Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, had kept from the control of men they castigated as robber barons and plunderers of the public domain. The land that had not been settled, not been promised to vanquished Indian tribes, not been given over to
railroads, not been cleared for cities, factories, and farms — this big, rumpled, roadless quilt of original America belonged to everyone, Roosevelt said; it belonged to the ages. It was sweeping and simple as a philosophy, and maybe even obvious in retrospect. But this was a radical idea then, one formed over brisk, heart-pumping walks with the über-passionate Pinchot. It did not go over well in places where a fortune could still be made from the remains of Manifest Destiny. After cutting the great forests of Maine and Michigan, after leveling much of the Appalachian hardwoods and southern piney woods, the leading timber industrialists coveted Idaho and western Montana, the native nursery for the largest body of standing white pine on the planet, with trees 250 feet tall or more. The land was little changed since Lewis and Clark stumbled through it a century earlier.

The president's enemies in Congress had tried at every turn to blunt his biggest domestic policy dream. "Many rich men were stirred to hostility, and they used the Congressmen they controlled to assault us," T.R. wrote in his autobiography. Roosevelt and Pinchot reveled in the fight. They saw politics in stark terms: good versus evil, the people versus the powerful, the virtuous against the corrupt. They had the momentum of an idea in ascendancy, they felt, and it helped that Roosevelt had invented the bully pulpit—named for his favorite exclamation. He appealed to the expanding middle class in a century dawning with technological marvels, to new citizens from the Old World, to those without a trace of sentiment for something so foreign as preservation of wild land. Every American had this birthright: holding a citizen's share in an area nearly as large as France. Even if they never set foot on it, never saw it, never knew where it was, it was there, and it was
theirs.
Throughout his presidency, his grand plan grew ever more audacious: Why not quadruple the national forests? And the Grand Canyon, as American an icon as the Coliseum is to Rome—why not leave it as it is? Why not set aside marshes and rivers, high plains and low valleys, for the creatures that lived there—wildlife refuges all over the country? Of
course, one reason to preserve those creatures was to have the opportunity to kill them later, as Roosevelt was not a passive observer of the food chain. But his love of nature was deep and consistent. "When I hear of the destruction of a species," he wrote as a young man, "I feel just as if all of the works of some great writer had perished."

After Roosevelt left office in 1909 and went off to Africa and Europe for more than a year, his enemies had an easy time with the befuddled Taft. He did not really want to be president, he said later, and certainly did not enjoy the job. He wanted to be a judge, and he wanted to be liked, and he wanted to eat his dinner in peace, without all the sniping and second-guessing about his weight. The papers said he looked like a walrus in a postprandial snooze.

With Taft's indifference, it fell to the Forest Service, an agency just five years old in 1910, to protect the new reserves of public land. The rangers were despised in much of the West, scorned as Teddy's boy scouts, or worse—hapless elites from the Yale School of Forestry. Around mining camps and logging towns, the places where agents for timber trusts set up shop to foil the new national forests, rangers were sometimes threatened at gunpoint or chased from the woods. In Congress, opponents tried to starve the Forest Service to death. Low salaries forced good people out, and the budget was squeezed so tight that by the time the fire tore through the Rockies a single ranger was responsible for more than 300,000 acres on average. With such a large beat, it was impossible to thwart timber thieves and assorted opportunists who were prowling public land like burglars in an unlocked house, let alone keep a fire from getting away from them. When the hot summer of 1910 got under way, some rangers had to pay firefighters out of their own pockets, from their meager salaries. To the enemies of the Forest Service, the fire was a chance to kill the crusade of conservation.

So on the afternoon of August 20, 1910, it appeared as if the land at the heart of Roosevelt's big idea would be lost or saved on the backs of ten thousand firefighters guided by a handful of young forest rangers. They had few tools, few pack animals, and only flimsy bedrolls to keep them warm on cold Rocky Mountain nights, when temperatures would dip into the thirties even in August. Some of them knew how to milk a cow or plow a field in a country where, for the last time, a majority of citizens still lived in rural areas. Some knew how to weld a broken axle together or frame a house. Some knew how to extract silver or copper from deep underground. Some could speak three languages, though many of them spoke no English at all. They came from the mountains of Serbia, or the Danish coast, or the stony hills of Sicily to the last place in the contiguous United States to be fully mapped and charted. As
Collier's
magazine put it: "There were Scotsmen and Negroes, Italians and Danes, Micks, Macks and Scandihoovians." With flames closing in on Wallace and four other towns, the fate of this land was in the hands of people often derided as bohunks, dagos, or "dusky dough boys." They came because it was a job, paying twenty-five cents an hour — though many were paid only with promises. Ranger and immigrant alike, they shared but a single thing: not one of them knew how to engage a wildfire of this magnitude.

In the East, the monied interests were well aware of what was at stake on the afternoon of August 20. On a map, the location of this fire looked far removed from anything, but it was known in many a mahogany-paneled boardroom. The resource kingdom of the northern Rockies was one of the last arenas for the clash of Gilded Age plutocrats, from E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill to the Rockefellers, Morgans, Guggenheims, and Weyerhaeusers. Fire could prove to be the mortal blow to the Forest Service, clearing the obstacle to further big-business control of the land. But it could also destroy the very thing the titans wanted to get their hands on. For the first time, the major newspapers covered the burning West, giving it as much attention as they gave to military battles in a foreign conflict. The enemy was on the rampage. Troops were assembled. Let the war begin.

"It was the first organized and large-scale battle against forest
fires in the United States," wrote Stewart Holbrook, the western historian.

By 10
P.M.
, the streets of Wallace, Idaho—where President Roosevelt had walked seven years earlier—were overwhelmed by flames, and the forest he had set aside for future generations was in ruin. Hundreds of firefighters were lost and thought to be dead. Looking for guidance in a town where nearly half the buildings were on fire, people tried to find William Weigle, the commanding ranger, in charge of the Coeur d'Alene National Forest that surrounded the town. Weigle was missing, just like his brother rangers, wandering somewhere on the burning slopes of the Bitterroots. What about Ed Pulaski, then? People called his name. The most experienced ranger in the district was racing through another part of the mountains, chased by a crown fire, flames leaping from treetop to treetop, pushed by gusts approaching eighty miles an hour. His horses stumbled, whinnied in agony, panic evident in their movement; they might roast before his eyes. His men had nowhere to go. They sobbed and moaned about loved ones, wives and mothers, children, or in acute self-pity. They were going to die on this smoke-choked mountainside so far removed from their homes, going to die in the most painful, horrid way. To be buried alive was one thing. But to be burned while still breathing, every nerve ending screaming, the skin boiling, dragon breath inside the lungs, that was the worst.