THE
SOURCE
by
Stephen J. Pyne
IT
MAY BE the most obscure site on the National Register of Historic Places. Rockfall and wild growth clog the
entry. The West Fork of Placer
Creek splashes a few feet below. It
is not an easy place to find. It
has the feel of some mythical grotto,
a sepulchre, an oracle, the source of a sacred spring like Lourdes. The Nicholson mineshift is, in truth,
all these, for here, on the 20th of August, 1910 flames burned through conifer
stands like prairie grass and came over the ridges, as one survivor recalled,
with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. One ranger said simply, The mountains
roared.
The trek to the site is arduous, not because it is long (it isn't), but
because the primary trail, which used to trend to Striped Peak, is abandoned and
overgrown, vanishing into a Northern Rockies hillside beneath rockslides, talus,
roots, forbs, the slender shafts of willow and alder. A secondary path to the old mine is even
more obscure. You need a reason to
come here, and you need a tool. You
need something sharp to slash through the scrub. You need something durable to grub out
steps through the loose rubble and root-clogged slopes. You need a
pulaski.
WHAT HAPPENED that astonishing summer was that American society and
American nature collided with almost tectonic force. Spark, fuel, and wind merged violently
and overran 2.6 million acres of dense and odd-disturbed forest from the Selways
to the Canadian border. The sparks
came from locomotives, settlers, hobo "floaters," backfiring crews, and
lightning. The fuel lay in heaps
alongside the newly-hewn Milwaukee Railway over the Bitterroots and down the St.
Joe valley, and across hillsides ripped by mines and logging, and untouched
woods primed by drought. The
Rockies had experienced a wet winter but a dry spring that ratcheted, day by
day, into a droughty summer, the worse in memory. Duff and canopies that normally wouldn't
burn now could. The winds came with
the passage of shallow cold fronts, rushing ahead from central Washington and
the Palouse and the deserts of eastern Oregon, acting like an enormous bellows
that turned valleys into furnaces and sidecanyons into chimneys. Southwesterly winds rose throughout the
day to gale force by early evening, and then shifted to the northwest. Perhaps 75% of the total burn occurred
during a single 36-hour period, what became known as the Big
Blowup.
The summer witnessed the first great firefight by the U.S. Forest
Service. As the weeks wore on, the
fires had crept and swept, thickening during calms into smoke as dense as
pea-fog, then flaring into wild rushes through the crowns. The fledgling Forest Service, barely
five years old, tried to match them.
It rounded up whatever men it could beg, borrow, or buy and shipped them
into the backcountry. The regular
Army contributed another 33 companies.
The crews established camps, cut firelines along ridgetops, and
backfired. Over and again, one
refrain after another, the saga continued of fires contained, of fires escaping,
of new fronts laid down. Then the
Big Blowup shredded it all. Smoke
billowed up in columns dense as volcanic blasts, the fire's convection sucked in
air from all sides, snapping off mature larch and white pine like matchsticks,
spawning firewhirls like miniature tornadoes, flinging sparks like a
sandstorm. Crews dropped their saws
and mattocks and fled. That day 78
firefighters died. One crew on the
Cabinet National Forest lost four men; one on the Pend Oreille lost two; rest of
the dead fell on the Coeur d'Alene.
The Coeur d'Alene was ground zero.
In the St. Joe Mountains between Wallace and Avery, some 1,800
firefighters and two companies of the 25th Infantry manned the lines when the
Blowup struck. A crew north of
Avery survived when Ranger William Rock led them to a previously burned area,
except for one man who, panicking, shot himself twice rather than face the
flames. A crew on Stevens Peak lit
an escape fire in bear grass, then lost it when the winds veered, and one man
died when he stood up and breathed the searing air. A crew at the Bullion Mine split, the
larger party finding its way into a side adit, the rest, eight in all, died in
the main shaft. On Setzer Creek
some 28 men, four never identified even as to name, perished as they fled and
fought their way uphill and fell in a collapsing ring of death. A gaggle of 19 spilled off the ridge
overlooking Big Creek and sought refuge in the Dittman cabin. When the roof caught fire, they ran
out. The first 18 died where they
fell, in a heap along with five horses and two bears; the 19th twisted his ankle
in crossing the threshold and collapsed to the ground, where he found a sheath
of fresh air. Two days later Peter
Kinsley crawled, alive, out of a creek.
Another group dashed to the Beauchamp cabin, where they met a party of
homesteaders. A white pine
thundered to the ground and crushed two men immediately, while trapping a third
by his ankle; he died, screaming, in the flames. Another seven squirmed into a root
cellar where they roasted alive.
And then there was the crew cobbled together by Ranger Ed Pulaski. He had gone to Wallace for supplies and
was returning on the morning of the 20th when the winds picked up their tempo
and cast flame before them. He
began to meet stragglers and then a large gang spalled off from the main ridge
camp. All in all he gathered 45
men, and with the smoke thickening in stygian darkness turned to race down the
ravine of the West Fork toward Wallace.
One man lagged and died in the flames. Pulaski hustled the rest over the trail
before tucking them into a mine shaft.
Then he hurried down canyon with a wet gunny sack over his head before
returning and herding the group into a larger tunnel, the Nicholson adit, which
had a seep running through it.
Pulaski tried to hold the flames out of the entry timbers and the smoke
out of the mine with hatfuls of water and blankets. But by now the men were senseless. They heard nothing but the din, felt
nothing but heat, saw nothing but flame and darkness, smelled only smoke and
sweat. As the firestorm swirled by
the entrance, someone yelled that he, at least, was getting out. At the entry, rudely silhouetted by
flames, he met Ed Pulaski, pistol drawn, threatening to shoot the first man who
tried to flee.
BY THE 1990s the American fire establishment was a wonder of the
world. It could field crews and
aircraft to fight fire in numbers larger than the military of some Third World
nations. It also seemed to many
critics, and to not a few of its own members, to have broken. In 1994 wildland fires burned 2.5
million acres of the public lands, killed 34 firefighters, and swallowed up $965
million off-budget; last summer burned still more land, more intensely, and may
double the costs. For all this, a
century of federal protection had created a crisis of forest health; many lands
suffered either too much or too little fire, from deluges of wildfire and
droughts of fire famine.
The full costs of fire suppression became public, along with the
admission that firefighting alone could not contain wildfire. But perhaps controlled burning
could. That naive formulation
finally ended last spring as the National Park Service kindled two prescribed
fires under extreme conditions. One
escaped Bandelier National Monument and scoured Los Alamos. The other forced the evacuation of the
North Rim of Grand Canyon. It
seemed that the American fire establishment could neither adequately fight fires
nor light them.
Yet it is possible that the breakdown is not simply one of execution but
the upshot of a flawed debate, a false choice between one practice or the other,
that we either had to start or to suppress. But how did that dichotomy happen? Why those choices and no others? The options had become polarized in the
usual way, by politics, personalities, and professional pride. In this case they also had fire to
catalyze the social chemistry. With
uncanny timing, this happened as the fire crews on the Coeur d'Alene were
fighting for their lives.
The idea that fire protection on the public lands meant firefighting was,
in 1910, a novelty. Most of the
general public was indifferent or hostile to aggressive fire control, bar fires
that immediately threatened property or lives. Rural Americans relied on fire - burned
everything from ditches to fallow fields - and accepted the occasional wildfire
as they did floods or tornadoes.
The argument that one ought to systematically fight the flames, all of
them, seemed odd, academic, and ridiculously expensive. The assumption was that wildfires would
go the way of wild animals as the feral landscapes that fed them were
domesticated into farms, pastures, and towns. The reservation of extensive lands for
public parks and forests, however, broke that laissez-faire logic. Wildland fire would flourish because
wildlands prone to fire would persist.
In retrospect the choices are obvious: either convert those lands to
something less combustible or do the burning yourself. And that was what critics at the time
proposed: abolish the reserves or inoculate the forests by wholesale
burning. Better fires of choice
than fires of chance.
But in 1910 those options seemed stickier. The national forests existed to preserve
the forests, not wipe them away. If
federal agents logged them off, they were no better than lumber companies or
homesteaders. If they adopted
wholesale burning, the lands were no differently managed than if they had not
been reserved at all. To forestry
officials, however, it appeared plausible that clearing people out of the
landscape, fielding patrols, and attacking the wayward flames would be
enough. Several decades of
"improvements" - roads, trails, telephone lines, lookout towers - would stamp
fire out of the scene. This was
what the European oracles of forestry argued had to be done, and what the great
colonial powers were attempting in India, Algeria, Australia, and Africa. It was what Americans had to
do.
Yet the critics were adamant.
The doctrine of light burning or “the Indian way,” as it was called, was
remarkably pervasive. Almost all
categories of settlers burned, and saw no reason to cease. An occasional fire would escape and
perhaps raze the occasional town, but that, regrettably, was the price of
progress. Smoke in the woods was
the complement to smoke from factories.
Where land was not farmed but logged or grazed, the preferred means of
dampening wildfire was to lightly burn over the understory as often as the fuels
would allow. In California, for
example, major timberowners hired gangs to prepare sites for burning by filling
basal cavities with dirt or raking around snags. They burned after a couple inches of
summer rain had fallen. The fires
piddled around; they scorched perhaps half the area targeted; they smoldered in
windfall. They burned weakly
because they had not much to burn.
Not every forest could burn this way, but most of those that mattered to
people could, and that was how most people living on the frontier wanted
matters. They found intellectuals
to back them up, like the poet Joaquin Miller, the novelist Stewart Edward
White, the state engineer of California William Hall, and the Southern Pacific
Railroad. Light burning by the
Amrican Indian, after all, was what had created the forests for which everyone
now lusted.
Yet foresters detested and denounced the practice. However slight its apparent damage, they
knew in every fiber of their professional being that it was evil. It sacrificed future growth to current
old growth. It abraded soils,
gnawed the bases of the big timber, abetted frontier habits of sloth, and
promoted folk indifference to the cause of conservation. It was the lost nail that would end with
a lost war. To convince the public
otherwise - especially those who lived on the land - demanded decades of trench
warfare.
But in August, 1910, the quarrel took a quantum leap when Sunset
magazine printed a direct challenge, matching arguments point by point, and even
suggested that the regular Army do the burning so that private landowners could
protect themselves from federal malfeasance. Then, after the Big Blowup, Secretary of
Interior Richard Ballinger championed the cause in a national press
release. Clearly, he argued, the
Forest Service had failed in its firefight; another strategy was worth
pursuing. Gifford Pinchot and Chief
Forester Henry Graves blasted the argument in the New York Times. Fighting fires in forests, Pinchot
enunciated carefully, as though to idiots, was no different than fighting fires
in cities. Left unsaid was the
corollary: no one would burn off carpets to protect houses from roof
fires.
Their polar pronouncements placed the Great Fires squarely in the
political firestorm that was about to consume the administration of William
Howard Taft. Gifford Pinchot had
been a favorite of the Roosevelt Administration - had free access to TR, had
been allowed to trespass across bureaucratic borders, and most critically had
convinced the president to transfer the forest reserves from the fumbling
General Land Office in the Interior Department to the Bureau of Forestry, which
Pinchot oversaw for the Agriculture Department. That happened in 1905. Roosevelt also brought in Richard
Ballinger to clean up the GLO.
Ballinger did, but posted legal guards along the agency borders and told
Pinchot to stay clear. Then Taft
arrived as Roosevelt's annointed successor. Like Ballinger, he insisted that Pinchot
hold to his own turf, and worse, he appointed Ballinger as Secretary of
Interior.
Pinchot found himself, in relative terms, marginalized, and he believed
that Taft was similarly marginalizing the grand scheme of Rooseveltian
conservation, which for him had assumed the status of a political crusade. When a murky matter involving Ballinger
and Alaskan coal lands surfaced, he seized on it to force Ballinger into
disrepute and eventually a resignation.
No formal charges of illegality and corruption were ever filed, but
Pinchot and his allies launched a campaign to discredit Ballinger in the court
of public opinion. Someone had to
go, Pinchot insisted, and on January 7, 1910 Taft decided that that someone
would be Pinchot and fired the chief forester.
The next few months, as congressional committees began their own inquiry,
Pinchot, the Forest Service, and their allies sought to vindicate the
patriarchal Pinchot by villifying Ballinger. While both men insisted they were
"Rooseveltian conservationists," they represented two very different
versions. Pinchot stood for the new
wave of technocratic, federal administration; Ballinger, an old guard, sensitive
to local politics and Western ambitions.
These differences had practical consequences. They mattered, for example, in how each
man responded to the problem of fire.
For both, the Great Fires became a test of larger philosophies. One had to choose between them. One had either to suppress fires or to
start them.
HE CAME TO shortly after midnight.
No one else in the tunnel stirred, and at the entrance he found the body
of Ed Pulaski crumpled in a heap.
He crawled out into a darkness illuminated by flaming snags and logs and
began to stagger toward Wallace.
There he met the supervisor of the Coeur d'Alene, William Weigle, who had
returned from his own misadventures an hour before. The eastern third of Wallace was
afire. He told Weigle that everyone
else at the Nicholson adit was dead.
Weigle organized a rescue mission.
By the time that party arrived, others had roused themselves, including
Big Ed himself. The creek water was
hot and alkaline, too foul to drink.
They sucked in deep breaths, still heavily laden with smoke. They counted off, and realized that five
were missing. They died where they
had passed out on the tunnel floor, probably drowned in the muck and waters that
had ponded behind the fallen bodies.
Pulaski suffered more than most.
He was temporarily blind and his lungs were so charged with soot and
seared with heat that he could breath only haltingly. They began the march to
Wallace.
As reports screamed across telegraph lines, it was not clear how the
fires would be interpreted. Those
on the ground considered the Great Firefight as a rout. On the Lolo forest, supervisor Elers
Koch considered the summer a "complete failure." More than 78 firefighters had died, the
Forest Service had expended almost a million dollars over budget, and the flames
had roared over the Bitterroots with no more pause than the Clarks Fork over a
boulder. At national headquarters,
foresters fretted whether the Great Fires might be the funeral pyre of the
besieged Forest Service. In fact,
those far removed from the flames saw them otherwise. They chose to see Pulaski's stand, not
his flight. They saw a gallant
gesture, not an act of desperation.
The Forest Service's critics claimed the Service had been granted ample
resources and had failed. Its
defenders replied, the Service failed only because it had not been given
enough.
Quickly, the political tide turned in its favor. The Forest Service successfully defended
its 1911 budget. The Weeks Act that
would provide for the eastern expansion of the national forests by purchase and
for federal-state cooperative programs in fire control, stalled for years, broke
through the congressional logjam in February. In March a beleagured Ballinger asked to
resign. Foresters redoubled their
efforts to crush light burning, and all it implied. It was, they sniffed, mere "Paiute
forestry." Light burners belonged
with perpetual motion mechanics and spoon-bending psychics.
The young Forest Service had the memory of the fires spliced into its
institutional genes. The Great
Fires were the first major crisis faced by Henry Graves, Pinchot's handpicked
successor. The next three chief
foresters - William Greeley, Robert Stuart, and Ferdinand Augustus Silcox - were
all personally on the scene of the fires, had counted its costs, buried its
dead, seized upon "smoke in the woods" as their yardstick of progress. Not until this entire generation passed
from the scene would the Forest Service consider fire as fit for anything save
suppression. Three months after the
Big Blowup, Silcox wrote that the lesson of the fires was that they were wholly
preventable. All it took was more
money, more men, more trails, more will.
In 1935 Gus Silcox, then chief, had the opportunity to reconsider. The Selway fires of the previous summer
had sparked a review in which the Forest Service itself admitted the lands it
was protecting at such cost were in worse shape than when the agency had assumed
control. Field critics observed
that the Service was unable to contain backcountry burning. Scientific critics had announced at the
January meeting of the Society of American Foresters that fire was useful and
perhaps essential to the silviculture of the longleaf pine. Ed Komarek observed bitterly that this
was the first time such facts had become public. And a cultural criticism burst forth as
well. Elers Koch noted that the
pursuit of fire into the hinterlands - mostly by roads - was destroying some of
the cultural value of those lands.
The Lolo Pass, through which Lewis and Clark had breached the Rockies, he
lamented, was no more, bulldozed into a highway. All this landed on Silcox' desk. His reply was to promulgate, in April,
the 10 AM
Policy, which stipulated as a national goal that every fire should be controlled
by 10 AM
the morning following its report.
The veteran of 1910 replied, that is, by attempting to squash fire, to
allow it no sanctuary, to tolerate no qualifications, to apply the full force of
the Civilian Conservation Corps and the federal treasury. He would refight the Great Fires, and
this time he would win.
Beneath the surface storms of 1910 politics, moreover, ran a deep current
of cultural sentiment. This was an
activist age - of political reform, of nation-building, of pragmatism as a
formal philosophy. One of its
mightiest intellects, William James, published his last essay in the same month
as the Big Blowup. "The Moral
Equivalent of War" argued to redirect the growing militarism James saw boiling
over in Western civilization to more constructive purposes. Why, he reasoned, could there not be a
moral equivalent of war as there was a mechanical equivalent of heat? Why not divert those martial enthusiams
into a war against humanity’s common enemy, the forces of nature, to replace
wars against other people?
James had written the essay in Europe. He returned to America, terminally ill,
even as Ed Pulaski and William Rock and Joe Halm were standing before flames
unlike any short of the Apocalypse.
He hurried to his country home in New Hampshire and lay dying as the
smoke from the Big Blowup passed overhead and turned the New England sun to a
copper disk. The firefight as moral
equivalent of war. Why not,
indeed?
TO AN ASTONISHING DEGREE the Great Fires contain, virtually in all its
pieces, voices, and avatars, the grand narrative of American fire. The politics. The contrast between federal and state
fire protection. The controversy
between fire-setting and fire-suppressing.
The use of the emergency fire fund (1910 saw a 20-fold increase over
previous expenditures). The mass
hirings and the appeal to the military.
Lavish meals in firecamp.
Wholesale salvage logging.
The (attempted) rehabilitation of burned landscapes. Inaccurate and self-serving
reports. The confused memorializing
of the dead. The stories of crews
saved and crews felled. The
metaphor of the firefight as battlefield.
A platoon even hauled away an injured bear cub. The profound impact on persons and
institutions: the Great Fires acted on the Forest Service as the Long March did
Red China. Almost every fire story
since has its rhetorical structure forged in the flames of 1910, and no fire
since has harbored all the parts so completely. Nearly every incident, controversy, or
idea had its rehearsal in the Great Fires. Fundamentally the same story plays out at
Blackwater, Pepper Run, Mann Gulch, Rattlesnake, Inaja, South Canyon, or the
next-millennial fires of 2000. The
fires stayed.
Most of the people who fought them, however, did not. They moved on, transferred, climbed up
the ranks. A few did hold, Ed
Pulaski among them, homesteading bureaucratically in Wallace. At 40 he had been older than most. He was married and had an adopted
daughter and a house and remained on the Wallace district until a car accident
in 1930 drove him into retirement.
Because he stayed, he never left the aftermath of the Great
Fires.
He refused to become a celebrity.
He wrote only once about his experiences, for an essay contest sponsored
by American Forestry, and that because he needed money to pay for eye
surgery. (Through bureaucratic
fumbling, he had received no compensation for his fire injuries.) He tended the two mass graves hastily
dug at the Wallace cemetery for those who had died and were otherwise unclaimed,
and in fact unidentified. He
pestered the Forest Service for a more fitting memorial, which finally arrived
in 1921. He rebuilt the trails
blocked by blowdown; assisted with timber cruising for salvage logging; helped
replant the hillsides; upgraded the fire-control organization. When, a decade later, the Missoula
office sought to collect the remembered stories of the Great Fires, he declined
to contribute. More words didn't
matter.
He remained a field man and a man who, as all who knew him remarked, a
man who took pride in the things he could make with his hands. Practice, not theory, would decide the
future. Tools, not ideas,
determined what could actually happen.
He had led his crew by example, not by exhortation. Acts not texts revealed his
meaning. It was fitting then that,
after the burns, he devised a combination tool, half ax and half mattock, to
send into the field. There was not
much enthusiasm when he first presented the device to forest supervisors. But he persisted, lengthening the shaft,
widening the ax, shrinking the mattock, all in his backyard forge. He sent out the tool with
smokechasers. Only in the field, he
insisted, could its value be tested.
The smokechasers soon took it to heart. By 1920 so did the Northern Region of
the Forest Service, which ordered commercial companies to manufacture it out of
industrial steel. Along with the
shovel, the pulaski tool became the basic implement of fire control, and the one
tool both universal and unique to wildland fire.
CONTEMPLATE THAT TOOL. Three
parts make it up: the ax, the hoe, the handle. It's a practical not an elegant
tool. Cutting and grubbing don't
balance easily. It's awkward. It's ungainly. Yet it works, and it embodies the saga
of Big Ed and the Big Blowup as nothing else could. Every time a firefighter hefts a
pulaski, he or she is retelling the story of the Great
Fires.
So, too, an institution like that which governs America's wildland fires
requires three things. It needs
practice, poetry, and policy. It
needs practice to make things happen on the ground. It needs poetry to inspire people, those
within its ranks and the general public both, to make them understand and
believe in its purpose. And it
needs policy, like a handle, to hold those two opposite-facing edges
together.
The Great Fires had it all.
They had story, purpose, tools.
Modern fire management does not; it holds policy like an empty
handle. Fire officers know they
cannot continue with the Great Firefight alone. They know fire in the West will return,
either wild or by choice; but come it will. If contemporary fire agencies had the
chance to replay the light-burning controversy, they would almost certainly
choose fire lighting over fire fighting as a basis for wildland
stewardship. They know the problem
was not fire suppression, but the abolition of controlled burning, that
magnificent and misguided attempt at fire's wholesale exclusion. Yet they know by now that an equally
scaled reintroduction isn't possible.
They should know that the issue is not fire but its regime, that fire
synthesizes its surroundings, that it takes its character from its context, that
flame is not some kind of ecological pixie dust that, sprinkled over land, xan
make the bad and ugly into the good and beautiful. Messed-up forests only yield messed-up
fires.
The truth is, policy by itself is incompetent. Contemporary fire management has policy
aplenty - has had adequate policies for 20-30 years to do what needs to be done
without seeing hard results on the ground.
Turning existing policy inside-out is not likely, alone, to reverse
overgrown woods and scrub-infested savannas. Pumping money into controlled fire will
do no more good than sluicing money into fire control. Contemporary fire management doesn't
need more policy, dumb as an empty handle.
It needs a hybrid head of practice and poetry to swing at policy's
end. It needs a
redesign.
It needs iron, forge, flame, smith, and vision. It needs knowledge bred into the bone by
long practice. It needs flames
equivalent, catalytically, to those of the Great Fires. It needs someone to stand before those
flames. It needs a story to explain
them. It needs a site that 90 years
hence someone can hack into and know that here Creation occurred. It needs a Pulaski.