The Big Burn (29 page)

In the predawn dark of early Sunday, Pinkie found herself walking on level ground, close to the St. Joe River, and heard voices. She also thought she heard a train whistle. And then the questions: What if everyone was just now leaving? What if she had missed the train? As she approached the outskirts of Avery, she was dizzy and faint with dehydration, her face smeared black, her hair a knot of greasy strands. She knew she was near town because she recognized a couple of the cabins. Also she saw the log palace, the two-story manse of Skip Kelley and his bride. She had only to cross the bridge over the St. Joe and she would be in town. At river's edge, she was stopped by a ranger.

"You can't go into town," he said. "Everyone's getting out. Train's full and leaving."

"I just walked ... twenty-eight, thirty miles!"

"Sorry."

Pinkie pushed past the ranger, sensing that he wouldn't stop her, and if he did, she would fight him. She crossed the bridge, her hobnails clicking on the planks, and rushed toward the slow-moving train; it was packed, not a spare square foot of space available on the few cars. She shouted to the engineer, begging to be let on. The engineer looked at Pinkie.

"What's your name?"

"Adair. Ione Adair." She was a sight—eyebrows burned, revolver on her side, clothes ripped and dirtied.

"Where you from?"

"Forty-nine Meadows country."

"I know your folks."

"Yeah?"

"I think we can do you pretty well."

"How so?"

"On the caboose. We'll put you on top of the caboose here, on the back of the train. Hop on. Quickly now."

Pinkie jumped aboard, crawled up on top of the caboose, and found a handhold as the train chugged out of Avery to the west.

Only black soldiers and men forced to fight for their homes remained in town. The residents were machinists and boilermakers, laborers and track fixers, barkeeps and icemen who hauled loads into cars, the way to keep cargo cold on a transcontinental ride. On the surface, they were hard-edged men, known for brawn and quick fists; they had to be in the Bitterroots of 1910. But in the face of this fire they were lost. Though martial law had been declared, a democracy of sorts prevailed in the depot at Avery. Word came that a final train would be coming through the town, and that gave the men a choice: to battle the windborne flames for their town or leave.

With Ralph Debitt in tow, the train pulled into the depot. The ranger's report was bleak: to the west, trestles were aflame, burning trees were thrown over tracks, no part of the mountains was not burning. As the fire approached Avery in two waves, the soldiers and townsfolk got into a tense exchange. Lieutenant Lewis said he didn't know anything of the country or of forest fires. His men were soldiers; they were trained in warfare, trained to fight, and that was their initial impulse—stay, dig in, do battle.

"What about the tunnel?" a rail worker asked. "We could hide in there."

Less than half a mile from Avery, to the east, was one of the shafts dug into the mountains for the Milwaukee Road. It had been stocked with supplies—water, some food, blankets—in anticipation of the retreat. One faction wanted to retreat to the tunnel. Ranger Debitt disagreed. People died in those manmade caves during fires,
the small, tight space filled with lethal gas. Debitt suggested a walk just upriver, to a bend in the stream, open enough that it might be safe from falling trees. A gun was drawn at one point in the debate. But despite this threat, no consensus was reached.

Later, at nightfall, most of those who had been arguing on the platform took blankets and went to the river, sloshing upstream—a decision of sorts, made by default after other options had been exhausted.

"All hope of saving anything was given up," Lieutenant Lewis wrote of the collective sense of defeat. They might save their lives, but nothing in town.

The bedraggled survivors walked perhaps half a mile, the way slow in the knee-deep water of the St. Joe. But it became clear that this plan was not going to work, Lewis wrote. For one thing, the water was too shallow, not enough of a protective cover. And, more important, the valley cut by the river was far too narrow. If big cedars came down, they would slam into the river and dam its course. Death by drowning, death by a fatal body blow from a tree that weighed as much as a train car—those were likely outcomes. The lieutenant, in accord with the rangers, reversed course—everyone back to town and the waiting train.

The men climbed into three units: an engine, a flatcar, and a boxcar. This train could only follow the tracks east, a route rumored to lead to certain death. Various reports had it that a tunnel had caved in, that a trestle and several bridges had burned to the ground, that the tracks stopped dead in midair over a ravine several hundred feet deep. For good reason, the Milwaukee Road was the most costly stretch of rail line ever built in the United States to that point. It had required Herculean feats of engineering and construction to overcome the Bitterroots' swales and hard rock, its high rises and deep forests. The plan that prevailed was to take the train a few miles out of town, to an area cleared by a burn years earlier. They could try to creep along the tracks, to come just short of a flaming edge or downed bridge, feeling their way to the clearing—a task
for nimble feet, not iron wheels. Fire was directly ahead, though, which meant that to reach the clearing would require them to go through flames.

"We succeeded in breaking through the first fire wave, but we could not get through the second and we were caught between the two fires," Lieutenant Lewis wrote. "The scenes of the fires, the dense, stifling smoke, the intense, blinding heat and the roaring and crackling of the flames were indescribable. The flames seemed to be over a mile and a half high." The heat was so intense it burned the paint off the cars and blistered the varnish. That was on the outside; inside, with the windows sealed, the men felt as if they were broiling. The Buffalo Soldiers, their honor won on battlefields in the Civil War, in the high plateaus of West Texas, and in the Philippine jungles, now faced death in the wilderness West, not even heroic.

"We travelled back and forth attempting to get through at one end or another, but it was impossible," Lieutenant Lewis wrote. "Progress was constantly impeded by landslides or rocks, burned logs, etc. One fireman was killed while picking rocks off the track."

The men on board this train did not know it, but the other locomotive, the one that hauled out of Grand Forks to go to Avery, was also engaged in a stop-and-go dodge of the Big Burn. The engineer had finally taken refuge in a tunnel, parking his train to wait out the fire—a successful move, as it turned out.

For the infantrymen, the hesitancy on the track lasted through Sunday night, the soldiers frustrated by their inability to do anything. Passivity in the grip of a force that defies engagement may be the worst condition for a warrior. The men of the 25 th tasted breath stale and hot; they felt their throats tighten with thirst and their leg muscles knot and cramp. They put up with the moans and whines of the men on the train whose town they were charged with saving, and some of them resigned themselves to dying with this group. When they looked out the window, they saw fire on either side of the St. Joe.

For a long time, the little train didn't move, was stopped in time, just like the men inside it. Then, in reverse, the engineer guided the two cars and his locomotive the other way, a retreat toward Avery. He stopped two miles from town, waiting for the fire to play itself out. First light came around 5
A.M.
, when it looked as if the winds had calmed, a reprieve before another roar. Avery remained standing, though it was empty of people.

Lieutenant Lewis picked up the narrative, the 25 th Infantry against the blowup: "As it was seen that there was no escape through both the fires, preparations were made for a last stand at Avery. As day came on, the wind came up and the fires again started full." It was better, perhaps, to be free of the iron oven. At least in Avery the men could make a stand. On wobbly legs in the dawn of Monday morning, the men disembarked from the train and got to work on a new plan—the final strategy, they agreed.

Backfire, which had failed to get anywhere in Taft, was all they had. To the riverbank they went, just across the St. Joe from Avery, and started a fire. With the river at one side, the intentionally set fire had nowhere to go but uphill, into the scrub brush and downed trees, moving to greet the onset of the main blaze, so close to Avery they could see it a few hundred yards away. Other men were dispatched in front of houses and shops with buckets again, told to toss water at the first sign of firebrands from the big blaze. They lit the ground, waited, and watched. Their backfire took off up the hill, orderly at first, then scampering to one side, toward Spike Kelley's empty manse. It pawed at the place for an instant, like a newly awakened bear examining fresh prey, and then took the big house and its enormous living room full of antiques from Europe and China, the Gilded Age ornaments that Kelley had brought to this forest in the Bitterroots as a way to show what it meant to have a man of his standing in Gifford Pinchot's frontier. The two-story home, so large some people mistook it for a hotel when they stepped off the train in Avery, was destroyed in a great crackling burst, its combustibles reduced to snuff. And after taking Spike Kelley's log
palace, the set fire moved upward ever more quickly, wind-aided now, to join the greater fire.

Lewis: "Both fires seemed to unite as they struck the back fire. About the same time the wind suddenly died out, and if it had not died out about that time, and if there had been no back fire, nothing could have saved the town or people. The flames sank rapidly and in about an hour it was evident that the danger was over and all that remained to do was to watch the fires which were burning out."

After successfully evacuating the town, after enduring a harrowing night inside a hot train, after hauling water buckets and setting backfires, the Buffalo Soldiers had saved Avery. Over the ridge, their comrades had helped get the women and children of Wallace out of town. Two towns, two missions accomplished. Whatever else people in the Coeur d'Alenes thought of the soldiers when they first arrived, by Sunday evening of the Big Burn, some minds had been changed.

"They stuck to their posts like men," said Debitt, who had strayed from his own post during crucial moments.

"There were no better firefighters picked up anywhere than the negroes," said a civilian crew leader, Con Faircloth. "They worked willingly during the day and at night they made the mountain echo with their songs. I never heard such singing in all my life."

"The negro soldiers of the 25th Regiment," one paper reported in a dispatch carried across the country, "have done heroic service and saved many lives and much property."

It was said by fair-minded people that their swift action had redeemed the 25th from the humiliating dismissal after Brownsville and their earlier role as enforcers for mining bosses during the martial law repression in the Coeur d'Alenes. "When the negro troops were last in the Coeur d'Alenes, they were cursed, reviled and sneered at,"
Collier's
reported. "Early laws on the books in Idaho even excluded blacks from prospecting. Now they are hailed as angels of mercy, rather dusky, perspiring angels, but angels at that." In the northern Rockies, people came around to the conclusion, the magazine noted, that "they were white clear through, even if their skins were dark."

And the Seattle papers seemed equally stunned that the Buffalo Soldiers could perform so heroically. "I want to say something about those negroes now," they quoted a man from Avery who helped organize the exodus and backfire. "They were black, but I never knew a whiter set of men to breathe. Not a man in the lot knew what a yellow streak was ... They never complained. They were never afraid. They worked, worked, worked, like Trojans, and they worked every minute. I can't say too much about them, but I will say that my attitude toward the black race has undergone a wonderful change since I knew those twelve heroes."

Although the 25th Infantry had not lost a man, four soldiers were still missing among their ranks, soldiers who had strayed near Placer Creek when the fires moved on Wallace. The troops pressed the rangers to organize a search party for their lost comrades over the divide, four among hundreds of people as yet unaccounted for. Ranger Joe Halm and his crew at the headwaters of the St. Joe had not been heard from since winds kicked up on Saturday afternoon. Nor had some of the rescue trains reached their destinations. Many train cars had gone into tunnels to wait out the storm, but had they made it? The Milwaukee Road estimated that at least a dozen of its bridges had burned, including one that was 725 feet long. On Sunday and Monday, crews were sent out to find the missing, including the soldiers. At the same time, the 25th was given another assignment: hike up the creek to the place where twenty-eight men had been crushed and burned, and over to the hole in the ground where Domenico Bruno, Giacomo Viettone, and five others had died in a half-dug root cellar. These bodies were so badly disfigured that only a soldier, it was explained, would be able to pry them from the places where they had taken their final breaths and give them proper burials.

E
ARLY SUNDAY MORNING
, with the firestorm yet to ebb and communication down throughout much of the northern Rockies, Bill Weigle had tried to put together a party to search for Ed Pulaski and his crew. The Big Burn had swept over the Coeur d'Alene and Lolo forests, the Nez Perce and the Clearwater, and now moved north toward Canada and east into the forested half of Montana.

In Wallace, volunteers were hard to come by. Those who had stayed in town and battled the blaze through the night with hoses, buckets, and shovels were battered and worn, retreating to the remains of their own homes in a town reduced to a heap. Having lived through Saturday night, they feared the still-flaming forest. "This was the hardest task of all," said Weigle. "The men were afraid to go into the woods." What Weigle knew from a messenger at dawn on Sunday was that Pulaski and about fifty men were inside a tunnel up in the Place Creek drainage. Later that morning, two other stragglers arrived in Wallace with an update: five men were dead in the mineshaft. Another had burned to death in the race for shelter. But almost everyone else was alive. And the dead—did that include Pulaski? No. He was alive, but might not make it down. He was in terrible shape.
Up in the mountains, in what had been a fresh-scented crowd of cedars, pines, and larches shading the cool waters of Placer Creek, Pulaski was indeed having trouble finding his way downhill. The forest was gone, but more than that, the heap of the woods continued to smoke and burn in places, which meant that every footstep might land on a hot coal or sink into a pit of ashes. The bottoms of Pulaski's shoes were burned through, as was the case for most of his men. The path along the creek, which he knew so well, was hard to find, covered by downed timber or knocked out by the crush of the storm. It was an obstacle course. As the sun's rays pierced the smoke, Pulaski shielded his face. The only eye that worked was light sensitive to the point of pain. He thought on this Sunday morning that he would have preferred to burn to death rather than go blind. His men were in equally bad shape. What had been described a few days earlier as an army of firefighters marching briskly off to war was now a pathetic ragtag collection of humans thrown against the mountains—men broken, lost, wailing.