The Big Burn (27 page)

Most people took the rangers at their word and left when the train came through, whistle blowing, the conductor warning of "last call" to get out of town. But a hard core of Taft denizens stayed behind and tried to drink themselves to death. For all their surface bluster and hard-shelled scorn for the Forest Service, the big men were helpless when it came time to fight for the life of their town. True to form, the men who made their money on this concentration of vice showed no interest in saving anything but the sources of their passion. They pried open their whiskey barrels and set to the task of chugging hard rye as the night wind tossed hot brands into town, as the air filled with screams of falling trees, as the wall of destruction moved on Taft. They drank and laughed and spat and drank some more.

As it turned out, Koch's men had no time to organize a precision backfire. The inferno galloped over the ridge all too quickly for any action.

"All hell has busted loose!"

Elers Koch was in Missoula, trying to keep track of the firestorm as it moved through the Lolo in the middle of the night, when that
call came from a ranger in Taft. The foresters needed a rescue train to come back to get them. Throughout the day and into the evening, Koch had received hundreds of messages. Most were urgent requests for instructions, but some had a tone of deep fear, the minds of the senders focused by the very real possibility of burning to death.

"I've lost nearly all my crews." This was a call from another ranger down the divide in Avery. He had not been able to reach his boss, Bill Weigle, who was missing Saturday night, and so he called Missoula for the other Little G.P. in the region whom everyone looked to in a crisis.

"Mr. Koch," said a ranger from the Idaho side of the divide, "the fires have all gone wild ... I don't know where my family is and my men and pack strings are all out in the path of the fire, and I am afraid many of them can't escape alive."

From Mullan, a town not far from Wallace, a man said it was like being "inside a deep bowl which is completely lined with seething flames, yourself a spectator in the center."

If Koch knew that his men had toyed with the idea of burning Taft, he never let on. His larger concern was a string of nearly a half-dozen towns, the rail settlements inside the Lolo. Not just Taft but Saltese, Haugan, DeBorgia, St. Regis. If the fire came that far downslope to the east, it might move on Missoula, less than a hundred miles from the ridge.

"This is the last call. Fire is breaking into Saltese. We'll do our best to hold it," said the ranger on the Montana side.

Just ahead of the fire, people heard a train whistle, an incessant get-out-of-the-way series of blasts. A crowd of dispirited firefighters gathered by the tracks, ready to abandon the settled valley and hop aboard. It was the main train from Wallace, carrying the women and children from that town. It was full, steaming east in a race to outrun the fire.

"The whole horizon to the west was aflame," Ranger Roy Phillips said. Then, a shock: the engine never slowed. "The train did not wait for us," he said.

Now the telephone lines went down, leaving Koch without a way to keep track of his men, the hundreds of firefighters spread throughout the Lolo and its necklace of towns. He had not slept, but then nobody who had been hired by Gifford Pinchot slept during the blowup. A few hours later, the sky still dark but for a throbbing light from inflamed mountainsides, Koch took a train up toward the fire to see how close he could get, to see if the towns could be saved.

"The sky turned first a ghastly, ominous yellow," Koch said. "It was completely terrifying."

The binge drinkers of Taft lolled in the street alongside a string of false-fronted saloons, hotels, and restaurants, trying to suck dry the last of their whiskey barrels, ever more oblivious to the collapse around them. One of the drunks caught fire and screamed for his life. Trying to snuff the flames that seared his skin and lit his hair, he rolled around in the dirt of the main street. A ranger picked him up, stomped the fire off him, and led him to a boxcar. Unable to start their backfire, Koch's men boarded the relief engine that had just arrived, the last chance to get out of Taft before it fell. They crowded in with the drunks, riding slowly downslope toward the other towns. Koch was headed toward them, coming from the opposite direction, from Missoula.

Taft had been named for the president, a man who was hearing reports of a catastrophe as first light came to his summer retreat on the Massachusetts shore. He was told that more than five hundred firefighters were missing, scores were dead, that three states were ablaze, that enough timber to build a city nearly the size of Chicago had been knocked to the ground or burned to cinders, that a half-dozen towns lay in the path of a hurricane of flame, and that he may have to send more troops. He was also informed that the Forest Service, which Pinchot had considered the finest agency of government servants, was being routed.

The town of Taft was home to "all races and colors, and to all appearances, John Barleycorn was the bosom friend of most of them,"
a doctor's wife, Edith Schussler, wrote of her time there, using an old term for a slave of grain alcohol. She was horrified by the place, as a refined woman from an eastern city might be. In truth, Taft had few blacks, but many drunks. What she saw as "all races and colors" were mainly Montenegrins, whom the locals snubbed with a phrase that often appeared in the papers too—"mountain niggers"—and Sicilians and other southern Italians. Hungarians, seldom identified by name, but called "bohunks," were also a big presence. And down in Avery, two-thirds of the residents were foreign-born, mainly from Greece, Bulgaria, and Japan. These people had built a thirteen-thousand-foot-long tunnel, the St. Paul Pass, blasting and chipping through rock at the center of the mountain range. It was the kind of job that prompted frenzied efforts to blot it out with strong drink.

Now the potent alchemy of fire had transformed what had been a rowdy eyesore into a geyser of sparks, shooting upward into the Montana night. And while Taft had not been saved, nor had the outpost of Gifford Pinchot, the rangers consoled themselves with the fact that not a soul had died in Taft during the chaos of the night. By threatening to burn the town just ahead of the blowup, Koch's men had managed to scare most of the residents into evacuating. However crazy the plan, it worked. Those who stayed behind to drink, and those who were hired by the government to fight fire, all had made it down to Saltese, about ten miles east of Taft. The freight cars pulled into Saltese with a soot-faced and sweating cargo of survivors.

Saltese was supposed to be a safe harbor, but Ranger Haun said the hills around town were alive with flames leaping from the tips of the tallest trees. Haun—the older man revered by Koch for his even temper and tough-nutted advice—had two hundred firefighters at his command. It was Haun who was the first man to back Koch when he had reached into his own meager savings account to find money to pay for firefighters, money that might save the forest. He set out now to protect Saltese. Why they let Taft crumble while making an effort to save Saltese was never explained, but virtue—or the lack of it—certainly had something to do with it.

Haun had only a few minutes to act, to lay down a protective backfire. He tried to enlist a group of refugees, including some section crews from the railroad. They refused. Fight for this town? Instead, they commandeered the train and headed east again, downhill, leaving everyone else behind. Their path to freedom was blocked a few miles out of town by downed bridges, which forced the train of rebels and mutineers back into Saltese. And there the Forest Service put them to work.

Half the men were ordered to turn hoses on the buildings of Saltese—high spray, full throttle. The other half worked the backfires. A self-started blaze was always tricky, because it could turn inward, on the fire-starters. The wind was variable, and thus Ranger Haun had to calculate his backfire so that the air would carry the flames away from town. On his order, the fires were lit. Small trees and brush caught immediately; flames rose to eye level and then went off in a great burst of speed and energy—as the rangers had desired—into the woods to meet the approaching fires. The ground was cleared quickly, leaving no fuel to give the fire energy to come into town. Saltese was saved.

But there was one casualty—left over, as it turned out, from the debacle of Taft. The severely injured man who had been burned while drinking howled in misery as Koch's men fought to keep Saltese from going to the sky. In Saltese, he was dressed in cotton gauze and oil for his burns, a remedy that was popular among lumberjacks and miners, and then told to lie quietly in an empty boxcar, protected from fire by the metal shell. A fellow drunk from Taft went to look in on his friend. In the dark, he lit a match to see; it fell to the floor and caught on the man's absorbent dressings. The oil-and-gauze combination swiftly burned, and the man jumped from the car screaming yet again. This fire covered his clothes, the fresh dressings, and most of his body. He burned to death—the lone loss of life from Taft, killed by a friend of the jug.

Coming from the other direction, Koch was still trying to get into Saltese, or close to Taft if he could, but his train was delayed by
obstacles. More than once, the slow-moving locomotive put on its brakes as it climbed the Bitterroots, and Koch and his men jumped out to remove flaming branches or downed trees from the road that took them upward. He worried, as did everyone, about the deep ravines they had to cross on wood trestles that had been treated with oil as a preservative. They wouldn't know whether one of these bridges was afire or had been weakened or fractured until they were actually upon it. Nor did Koch know the fate of the towns ahead: that Taft had fallen, that the woods outside Saltese had caught fire, followed by Haugan, or that a fourth village, DeBorgia, was next.

By the time Koch made it to DeBorgia, about eight miles short of Saltese, less than twenty miles from Taft, fire was at the door. The Big Burn had jumped down the canyon that followed the St. Regis River on the Montana side of the divide. This town had a fine new schoolhouse, several bars, and a good hotel, and was set in a much broader clearing than the railroad towns that hugged narrow ground next to the tracks. In the dark, people milled around with their lanterns and hoses. The town constable jumped on his bicycle and rode to ranches in the vicinity of DeBorgia, warning people to flee on the train that had just arrived. When Koch got there, he had no Kipling verses in his head, as when he cruised the High Lonesome with his bride or alone on horseback. He was going on adrenaline, a kid trying to keep a tsunami of wildfire at bay, trying to save at least one town. Koch now fought the fire by hand, with help from rangers who had assembled buckets of water. It was a pathetic sight—Little G.P.s running around in the dark and swell of flames carrying buckets against the biggest wildfire anyone had seen in America, grains of sand compared to a mountain.

Throughout all the informal tutorials at Pinchot's Grey Towers and his family mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, fire had been described as a predictable foe—an enemy that could be conquered by orderly assaults. Man could win, as Pinchot had said many times. Based on the reports from his rangers farther up the mountains just before the lines went down, Koch knew something of the firestorm's strength and speed. But violent, unfathomable updrafts made the
front line of flame stronger than anything in the textbooks. A town like DeBorgia could go in a whiff.

Koch dashed around the streets, desperate to make some dent, looking for a place to set the backfire as buildings burned. Some ditches, a primitive fire line, had been dug in advance. But Koch soon realized that all of it was futile; they could not rescue this town. The bucket brigade was helpless. A backfire was meaningless. The ditches were a joke. He called for everyone to get out, straining to be heard ahead of the galloping wind.

"I can't describe that wind," said a Northern Pacific section foreman, Fred Wence, who'd lived in DeBorgia for twenty years. "It reminded me more than anything of a Dakota blizzard. The dust and cinders and sand went through the air like snow and I couldn't keep my eyes open on the street. The wind didn't come from any one direction. It blew first this way and then that, whirling everything around and around. The fire jumped across the ditches almost before the men could get out of the way and came down toward the town with a roar." The firefighters and residents boarded Wence's Northern Pacific train, and the locomotive shifted into reverse, back down toward Missoula. The retreat was in some ways more harrowing than the ride uphill had been.

"The whole canyon was afire on both sides and the train had to run through it," Koch wrote. "The heat was so great that we couldn't stand in the open door of a box car." Peeking out of the boxcar, Koch caught a final glimpse of the town, the flames joining those of the others that danced all over the northern Rockies. In DeBorgia, sixty-eight buildings crumbled to ash. Only three structures withstood the fire. His beloved Lolo National Forest, put in his care, entrusted to pass on to future generations, looked to be in ruins.

To the west, on the Idaho side of the ridge, stood Grand Forks—for another few minutes at least. The honky-tonk dive where Bill Weigle had gone with a posse to arrest saloonkeepers had already
burned once in 1910, because of an accident. Rebuilt, Grand Forks was a splintered-wood-and-canvas tent camp of unpainted fronts and split logs set on flat ground next to a creek, within a mile of the railroad that switchbacked up into the mountains. The Kelley brothers of Avery kept a store, the Bitterroot Mercantile, and a little off-plumb and leaky cabin held a sign of preposterous intention: ANHEUSER
HOTEL
. The one street through town was dirt, and the sidewalks were uneven boards, covered with oak barrels emptied of their liquor, serving as outdoor furniture of sorts.

The fire took Grand Forks in a sniff. Nature did what the Forest Service never could, clearing the ground of all attachments that weren't there when Teddy Roosevelt decided that this piece of ground would be set aside for the ages. People fled to the creek, and then to the railroad tracks and a small stop, hoping the Milwaukee Road, which always kept a locomotive in the woods on one of the side tracks, would rescue them. Just then, a railroad operator sent a message to his supervisors: "A big fire is sweeping down on us. What shall we do?" A second message, this an SOS, was tapped out, and then the line went down. The urgent plea had been received, though, and was passed on to Avery, the nearest town, where a much larger train was headed to evacuate everyone in the St. Joe Valley. The new instructions were for the engineer to back up about six miles and pick up the people who had run from the flames of Grand Forks. When the train arrived, the engineer was overwhelmed—"people clinging to wherever they could find a place to take hold," as a survivor wrote. Then the train inched down the valley, stopping at each of the trestles to see whether the spans would hold.