The Big Burn (26 page)

The men in the root cellar "were cooked alive," said David Bailey, who had thrown himself into the creek nearby. "All of them tried to get at the very end of the small hole and they were piled up in an awful heap. It was impossible to take out their bodies, for they would fall to pieces."

Later, the Forest Service summarized their deaths this way: "Killed by falling trees and burned beyond recognition in Beauchamp's clearing." The newspapers did not name the two men from Rivara Canavese. A story headlined "Seven Victims Buried in Hole" mentioned by name each of the other men who died, and said something about them — their hometowns, their backgrounds, a good word from a friend or family member. Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone, who had traveled more than six thousand miles to find work to help their peasant families in the Italian Piemonte, who had bounced from mining towns in Wyoming and Arizona only to find themselves as foot soldiers trying to save the dream of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, ended their journey in anonymity.

"Two unidentified Italians," the papers said, and thereafter in news stories and some memorials, they remained as such.

But in one record the immigrants had names and notations: a crew chief's time book, with hours logged on behalf of the Forest Service. It showed that Bruno and Viettone had worked seventeen days without a break since being hired on August 4.

The Italians were killed on the east fork of a creek well up in the mountains. One mile away, on the west fork of the same creek, another crew made a sprint to save their lives. These men were working under one of the youngest Forest Service employees in the region, Lee Hollingshead. He was twenty-two, and listed as a mere forest guard, not yet a ranger. In the rush to find men to lead into the flaming woods, Hollingshead had been elevated above his lowly status and given nearly half as many men as Pulaski. When the big firestorm hit his crew, they were surrounded, the flames heaving over them with no escape plan in place.

Hollingshead knew at least one thing about a wildfire, a retreat strategy the Indians had used: it will never burn the same ground twice. So the young forest guard led forty men at a run back through the fire to get to a clearing that had just been overrun by flame. The dash cost them—burns on hands, face, and feet, hair afire—but they made it.

Nineteen other men in his crew took another route. They ran for a tiny cabin, owned by a man named Dittman, a place where they had tied up their horses and stocked some provisions. As the Italians had done, these men crammed into a tiny space in a group shove, pushed up against one another, a clump on the floor. Fire followed them into the one-room cabin. The walls curled, the roof was ablaze, humans caught fire. As the ceiling fell in on them, a load of fast-burning shingles and dried crossbeams, the men tried to run outside, but made it only a few feet. The next day, when Hollingshead arrived after spending the night in the clearing, he found eighteen bodies burned beyond recognition and the charred corpses of five horses and a black bear. One man was unaccounted for, a firefighter named Peter Kinsley. While wandering in the flaming woods toward Wallace, Kinsley twisted his ankle and fell to the ground. That close to the earth, he found a tier of breathable air. It was enough to save his life.

While no one was sure whether it was heart attack, flames, or suffocation by smoke that killed Patrick Grogan, his time of death was reasonably certain. Grogan's watch stopped at 7:27
P.M.
, Saturday. Since being hired as a cook in the first week of August, Grogan had
become a favorite of fellow Irishmen from Butte — copper miners, most of them, down on their luck or too old to work the pits of feudal Montana. He and his dog were a cheerful sight, Paddy full of stories and song, with a union-tough sense of loyalty and justice, always insisting on extra helpings of food for those who had been without. A picture shows Grogan with his greasy chef's apron, his cap pulled over his forehead, looking well fed for a man of 1910. He is making breakfast in Avery—flapjacks, bacon, and fried potatoes on outdoor stoves—in the photograph. On August 20, Grogan was dispatched to the steep mountains about six miles outside town, on Storm Creek. He was part of a crew of seventy men sent to dig a fire line around a blaze threatening Avery. His boss was the regional forester, Ralph Debitt, a quirky thirty-five-year-old with the requisite swagger and repertoire of ready bullshit needed to live among the railroad toughs of Avery.

On Saturday, Debitt left his firefighters to go into town for supplies. Avery was abuzz with troops and trains, homesteaders and merchants, and hundreds of firefighters awaiting instructions. As the ranger of the St. Joe district, Debitt was supposed to be in charge, and he seemed to be in this place or that, but never at the right time, and never when he was needed to make a decision. Debitt had no sooner arrived in town that evening than the wind came roaring up the St. Joe River. It was strong enough — it seemed to some — to lift the swift river from its ancient stone bed and toss it to the forest. At the same time, word reached town by telegraph downriver that the fire was sprinting toward them and would soon overtake Avery. Debitt sent a messenger back to his crew in the mountains with instructions for them to retreat immediately to town and evacuate. The messenger ran the distance uphill, and found the seventy men in panicky debate about what to do. A few miles away, another crew was having a similar argument, as flames rained from the sky and spit from the woods.

"I can't take it!" said a firefighter, Oscar Weigert, a twenty-three-year-old bricklayer from Montana. He looked possessed, saying he wasn't going to roast to death, wasn't going to die like a sausage on a grill, wasn't going down without a fight. He said this over and over, at times fingering his .32-caliber pistol, as he stuffed so much tobacco in his mouth it made it difficult to understand him. He carried the gun, he explained, because he wasn't going to take any crap from people. His gun was his insurance. The flames shot thousands of feet beyond their launches from the top of the burning forest, a sight that made Weigert all the more jittery. Again he swore this fire would not kill him. He would not stand by and burn. This was not the Army. The Forest Service could not force him to fight and die.

"They'll never catch me in this fire," he said. Just then, complete darkness fell over the forest, though it was hours before sunset. Weigert snapped. He ran for the woods. Seconds later came the sound of gunfire — two quick shots, heard by dozens of members of the crew. Weigert had killed himself.

The men in Grogan's camp thought they too would be killed in the most painful, horrific of ways. When the messenger arrived with the order from Debitt to make a run for Avery, Grogan would have none of it. He gave a short, passionate speech in the wind. He was not afraid of fire, he said. And at the age of fifty-nine, a grandfather of six—one of the oldest men fighting in the Bitterroots—he was not afraid to die. He thought the plan to flee would surely kill them. Who knew the way down? Look—it was nothing but columns of shooting flame and black smoke. Why not stay put on the fire line they had dug? At least they had a strip of ground to stand on that was free of fuel. Odds are, the fire will sniff the earth and move on, looking for something else to burn.

"I can't see no less danger here," Grogan said in his thick brogue.

His plea made sense to nearly half the crew, twenty-eight men in all. They stayed with Grogan and his dog, ready to face the fire in their clearing near Storm Creek. The other half fled for Avery around 6:30
P.M.
, a stumbling dash downhill, tripping often in the
brush and snags. There was no proper trail back to town, just a bushwhack tread through the smoke. The fire caught up with them on the way, though it moved much slower going downhill than uphill. The ground burned, and trees overhead snapped and buzzed. Some of the men lost the soles of their shoes to hot ground and continued to run barefoot. But all of them made it the six miles to Avery—a remarkable retreat considering what they ran through. Avery now was an uncertain refuge, people fighting over whether to board an evacuation train or stay, just as had been done in Wallace. Two hours—at most—was all they had.

Back at Storm Creek, thousands of five-ton pines and centuries-old firs came crashing down. Great swaths fell all at once, entire flanks of flaming forest blown to the ground. Grogan and his dog were incinerated on the spot where they decided to stand their ground. Everyone else scattered. Some tried to run uphill, toward a canyon wall, and found themselves clawing and trapped. Others ran toward Avery, where the fleeing crew had gone. None of them had a chance; they had waited behind too long, and now they were a small part of what kept the Big Burn alive.

The fire was at its peak when it washed over Storm Creek, devouring hair, flesh, bone, skin, and cloth as one, killing all twenty-eight men who had stayed behind. While Grogan's silver timepiece showed 7:27, another watch was stopped at 7:34. It belonged to a man who had run the farthest distance from the clearing, buying himself seven minutes. The glass had melted in the watches, and coins found near blackened bodies were warped from the heat.

"Through a mistaken sense of bravery," the sheriff wrote in his report, "they refused to leave."

Grogan had worked 206 hours since his hiring on August 6, mostly twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, the logbook showed. On August 16, five days before his death, he had worked a twenty-four-hour day. His body was found next to that of his dog.

"A common laborer," the Forest Service noted in its record, just before dispersing Grogan's earnings to his children. Because he was
Irish, it added this about him: "Mr. Grogan was a man that drank but not to excess."

The British Empire, at its height in 1910, lost not just Irishmen in American forests, but Englishmen as well. Louis Holmes was from Birmingham, and was well known and well liked in the Coeur d'Alene Valley, where he worked as a restaurant cook. He stood out because of his accent, which made everything he muttered sound slightly more intelligent than the talk of other cooks, and because he was brimming with grand plans. In 1909, he went home to England and opened an American-style restaurant — his big dream being to bring a taste of the American West to Edwardian Britain. But it proved to be a failure. Steak, beans, and other trail fare just didn't taste the same in damp old England. Destitute, his hopes shattered, Holmes returned to the northern Rockies in 1910 and resumed work as a chef.

In this valley, in a state larger than Britain, he found his place. Holmes was hired by the Forest Service to cook for a large crew fighting in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest. Caught in the firestorm, he rushed into a mine tunnel near the Idaho-Montana border. But as Pulaski and Weigle had discovered, these shafts drew deadly smoke and gases inside, as clean air was sucked outside. Next to Holmes was a boy of seventeen, Val Nicholson, who had defied his parents, volunteering for fire duty in the heat of August. He was a local kid who wanted work, and to do something with the Forest Service. Fighting fire, he had a certain confidence that belied his age. But inside the mine tunnel, as the life was snuffed out of him, Nicholson was a child again, his mates recalled. The teenager died in the lethal air of the cave, most likely from smoke inhalation. Holmes met a similar fate. The boy and the Brit were among eight people who lost their lives in the Bullion Mine tunnel. In its one-line death notice about Holmes, the Forest Service said it could not find a next of kin to notify. But in Holmes's pocket watch was found a small photograph of his mother in England.
Another Birmingham native, Edward Hale, survived, as did a note he wrote to his mother:

"In Bullion Mine, August 21, 1910, 2:05
A.M.
Mother dearest: this is my last. I am in charge of fifteen men in a drift. We are trying to hold out the smoke but chances are slim for us all. Forgive me if I have ever mistreated you, for I do love you. Goodbye. Ed."

S
KIPPING ALONG THE CREST
of the Bitterroots midway through its two-day rampage, the fire took deep inhalations from either side of the summit ridge, consuming towns made of thin-cut timber and primitive planks in Montana and Idaho. The wickedest place in America, as a Chicago paper had described Taft, started to burn not long after midnight Saturday and fell in a few minutes.

The blowup took the saloons and gambling halls, the bunkhouses and chow joints, the stumps in the streets and the sex cribs in trees. Taft was kindling for a firestorm of this size, a tight bundle of shellacked wood, sun-dried boardwalks, and awnings of cloth and velvet. Though the Milwaukee Road had finished its transcontinental line through the Bitterroots a year earlier, there remained much work for crews of single men, with trestles to maintain, coal houses to stock, tracks to repair, tunnels to clear. The feat of engineering that had blasted through the spine of a mountain range drew on the same people who had constructed towns such as Grand Forks, in Idaho, and Taft, on the other side of the tunnel in Montana. These men stayed to keep the trains running; they left when fire chased them out of the woods.

It was in Taft, of course, that Forest Service officials had thought
of trying to destroy the town before they let the fire do it for them. From the start of their uneasy presence there—like a colonial outpost in hostile territory—to this fiery end, the rangers' attitude toward the town was one of disgust. The caches of whiskey and rum, the slot machines, the hundreds of hookers, the killers and felons who mocked the rangers as Pinchot choirboys and fingered their guns to back up their liquid courage—that's what Taft represented to a forest ranger. After Koch's foresters were unable to muster even the smallest force to defend the town, they looked for a suitable place to start a most unusual backfire—toward Taft. They gave people fair warning, gave them a chance to leave on one of the small exit trains. Then they were going to burn the hellhole to the ground, saving only the Forest Service cabin. A backfire would clear enough ground near the station to give the rangers a fighting chance to save their small imprint inside Lolo National Forest.