The Big Burn (24 page)

Some of those missed seeds would sprout in earth that fire had opened to the sun. And some seedling would grow into trees.

But long before any of that happened, across the Coeur d'Alene railroads would be running again, ranger stations busy, mines reopening, rebuilding begin—people reclaiming the Big Burn.

If you take the Moon Pass road from Wallace down to Avery, you'll see off to your right an occasional snag still standing where it burned in 1910.

If you turn west from Avery and drive the road that parallels where the Milwaukee used to run, you'll eventually reach St. Maries, where two circles of stone in a small cemetery mark the graves of many of the firefighters who died fighting the Big Burn. Some of the stones have names on them. Others have just a date and place—Setzer Creek, Slate Creek, Big Creek.

The snags and the memorials tell stories of land and individuals caught and forever changed by events beyond anyone's control. Close to ninety people died. A good part of Wallace was reduced to rubble, and several smaller towns were wholly or partially destroyed.

Two and a half million acres of public forest land burned in the Northwest that summer, most of it in the blowup that began on August 20. And that's a measurement made without consideration for the steep landscapes of the burned area. If you flattened out Idaho's mountains—turned their vertical heights into a flat, horizontal acreage—you'd have a state larger than Texas.

And that two and a half million acres doesn't count all the private land that burned.

It's no wonder that if you talk long enough to anyone who knows fire or Forest Service history, sooner or later you'll hear about the Big Bum. They'll assume you know where they mean and when it happened. And that you'll understand, too, why, for decades, memories of it would influence how foresters thought about fire and fire fighting.

***

As I write this we are approaching the end of a droughty summer, and fire crews are stretched thin across Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Across the Northwest, hot days last week paired with nights of dry lightning. Winds that moved in ahead of a cold front fanned embers into flames and spotted fires across hand lines and fuel breaks.

I can hear the growl of an air tanker flying overhead. It's carrying fire retardant from the aerial depot west of Missoula to dump in front of a wildfire burning in the Seeley Lake Ranger District, where my son, Kurt, has a summer job on a Forest Service fire crew.

Kurt's not anywhere near the Seeley Lake fire, however. Instead, he's over in Idaho, part of a twenty-person crew sent to help fight wildfire on land burned in the summer of 1910. And, probably, several times since.

Fortunately, the parallel pretty much ends with the place, a loose similarity in weather, and the time of year.

For Kurt is not Jarrett, going into an unknown situation, without protective clothing, untrained except for a few instructions from a big brother and a fireline friend. Kurt wears fire-resistant Nomex clothing—olive pants, a long-sleeved, bright yellow shirt. He wears a hard hat, gloves, high boots. Sometimes he filters air through a dry bandanna.

He frequently uses a chain saw, but his favorite tool is a Pulaski. Part ax, part hoe, it's named for the man who perfected it—the same Ed Pulaski who was a ranger on the Coeur d'Alene in 1910.

Kurt also wears a fire pack that stays with him when he's on the line—he could lose his job if he were caught without it. Inside are flares called fusees, brightly colored flagging for marking trails and hazard trees, a two-way radio, a first-aid kit, a fireline handbook, a file for keeping tools sharp, food, and a gallon and a half of water. And, most important, a heat-resistant shelter. It looks like a brick of accordion-pleated foil. Opened out, crawled under, anchored down with feet and hands, it could save his life in a blowup.

And he's trained. He attended classes to get his red card—the required ticket to a job fighting forest fires—while still in high school. Then, before his first fire assignment, the Forest Service put him through days of training, conditioning, and certifications. And at the start of each fire season, he and his crewmates retake a class called Standards for Survival, learning again about the "watch out" situations—the situations that have led to accidents and tragedies, and that nobody wants to repeat.

Because, despite the many great advantages that today's firefighters have over those of earlier years, when they go on a fire, they go in harm's way. Fire fighting remains a very hazardous job, and hardly a year passes that wildfire doesn't claim at least one life.

That more aren't lost is in large part due to lessons learned, sacrifices made, and memories forged, going back to the Big Bum and coming forward to today. It's a heritage renewed every time a firefighter goes out to meet fire.

Jeanette Ingold
Missoula, Montana
August 20, 2001

I'm indebted to many people for helping me understand the forces—fire, weather, people, institutions—that combined strengths or collided when the disastrous forest fires of 1910 swept across northern Idaho and western Montana. I was also fortunate in having a wealth of written material to draw upon in my research, and I've put into the suggested readings list several of the published sources that I found especially helpful and that might be good starting places for anyone interested in learning more.

One wonderful source, not readily available in its entirety, is the four-volume
Early Days in the Forest Service,
a collection of memoirs of early foresters compiled by the U.S. Forest Service in the 1940s and selectively republished in "
I'll Never Fight Fire with My Bare Hands Again": Recollections of the First Forest Rangers of the Inland Northwest.
The section contributed by William W. Morris contains "The Great Fires of 1910," a piece about his experiences as a young ranger that fateful summer, beginning with his trip up Striped Peak, an account that I drew on to begin this book. Another Forest Service publication,
When the Mountains Roared: Stories of the 1910 Fires
by Elers Koch, supervisor of Montana's Bitterroot National Forest that summer, recounts the experiences of several rangers caught in the blowup and places them within the framework of the fire season's progression and aftermath.

Among newer publications, Stephen J. Pyne's
Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910
brings together a huge amount of information about the 1910 fire season and the events of the blowup, and examines them within a larger context of fire and Forest Service history.

Contemporaneous local newspapers are always one of my favorite sources for the historical details and voices of a particular time and place, and in researching this book I found the July through September 1910 issues of the weekly
Idaho Press
invaluable. I'm grateful to the Wallace Public Library for making them available on microfilm. Great help also came from the librarians and collections at the University of Montana Mansfield Library and at the public libraries in Missoula and in Spokane, Washington.

I'm indebted to Dr. Richard Hutto of the University of Montana for sharing his knowledge of the regeneration that occurs in burned forests.

Forest Service people have been generous with their help, and I'd like especially to thank David Asleson, Amanda Burbank, Cort Sims, and David Stack. And thanks go, too, to those who helped me with historical details—John Amonson, Kermit Edmonds, Jason Patent, and L. J. Richards.

Others that I'm very grateful to for their guidance and cm ical reading are my good friends Wendy Norgaard, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Peggy Christian, and Dr. Ted; my son, Kurt; and my husband, whom I can always count on to bring fresh eyes to a project.

Books

Beil, Karen Magnuson.
Fire in Their Eyes: Wildfires and the People Who Fight Item.
San Diego: Harcourt, 1999.

Guthrie, C. W., ed., with additional material by C. W. Guthrie, Jean Liebig Soldowski, and Don Bunger.
The First Ranger The Stories of Frank Liebig and Fred Herrig.
Huson, Mont.: Redwing, 1995.

Rothman, Hal K., ed. "
I'll Never Fig/it Fire with My Bare Hands Again ": Recollections of the First Forest Rangers of the Inland Northwest.
Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1994.

Taylor, Murry A.
Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire.
New York: Harcourt, 2000.

Internet Sources

Idaho Panhandle National Forests home page.
http://www.fs.fed.us/ipnf

Lolo National Forest main page. Describes forest life after a fire.
http://www.fs.fed.us/ri/lolo/wl-fire-ecology/firei.html

National Interagency Fire Center (Boise, Idaho) homepage.
http://www.nifc.gov

U.S.D.A. Forest Service home page.
http://www.fs.fed.us

Books

Cohen, Stan, and Don Miller.
The Big Burn: The Northwest's Great Forest Fire of 1910.
Rev. ed. Missoula, Mont: Pictorial Histories, 1993.

Koch, Elers.
When the Mountains Roared: Stories of the 1910 Fires.
Missoula, Mont.: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1944.

Morris, William W.
The Great Fires of 1910.
Vol. 1 of
Early Days in the Forest Service.
Missoula, Mont: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1944.

Pyne, Stephen J.
Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires 0/1910.
New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.

Spencer, Betty Goodwin.
The Big Blowup: The Northwest's Great Fire.
Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1956.

Newspaper

The Idaho Press.
Wallace, Idaho. July-September, 1910.

Books

Crowell, Sandra A., and David O. Asleson.
Up the Swiftwater. A Pictorial History of the Colorful Upper St. Joe River Country.
Rev. ed. Coeur d'Alene, Idaho: Museum of North Idaho, in cooperation with Sandra A. Crowell and David O. Asleson, 1995.

Johnson, Stanley W.
The Milwaukee Road in Idaho: A Guide to Sites and Locations.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho: Museum of North Idaho, 1997.

Books

Bailey, Linda C.
Fort Missoula's Military Cyclists: The Story of the 25th U.S. Infantry Bicycle Corps.
Missoula, Mont: The Friends of the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, 1997.

Meyer, Bette Eunice.
Fort George Wright: Not Only Where the Band Played: A Historical Geography.
Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1994.

Nankivell, John H., comp. and ed.
Buffalo Soldier Regment: History of the Twenty-fifth United States Infantry, 1869–;1926.
1927. Reprint Fort Collins, Colo.: Old Army Press, 1972.

Sorensen, George Niels.
Iron Riders: Story of the 1890s Fort Missoula Buffalo Soldiers Bicycle Corps.
Missoula, Mont: Pictorial Histories, 2000.

Internet Source

US. Army Center of Military History home page.
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/

1. Why is Lizbeth so drawn to this land?
   
2. Is it fair for Samuel to chastise Jarrett for leaving their father when Samuel, himself, had left two years earlier?
   
3. The season for burning permits has passed, yet Celia sets a brush burn anyway. What are her motives?
   
4. Why does Celia refuse to evacuate—even when Samuel strongly urges her to leave? Would you want to stay?
   
5. Is Mr. Blakeney right in firing Jarrett for leaving his section of fire duty at the railroad? If you had been in charge, how might you have handled this situation?
   
6. Why does Seth feel so inadequate as a soldier? Is he being fair to himself? Why did he join up in the first place?
   
7. Why does Seth go along with Avery's schemes?
   
8. What reasons might Sarge have for not telling Seth what he really thinks of him?
   

Question:
How long have you been writing? Was there a moment when you chose it as your life's work?

Jeanette Ingold:
I've been writing as long as I've been reading, in the sense that all readers help complete a book by using their own experiences and understandings to flesh out the author's words. Writing became a career when a newspaper job taught me the excitement of searching out and interpreting a story.

Q:
What is your writing process? Do you work certain hours or days?

JI:
When I research, I hunt out primary source materials, go to where my books take place, and try to learn what my characters must face. When I'm writing, I keep a pretty set routine, getting up early and working for several hours five or six days a week.

Q:
Do you show your work in progress to anyone?

JI:
I tend to keep my initial efforts—the character sketches and first drafts—to myself. But then I rely on my writers group—a half dozen good friends and fellow writers—to tell me what I'd better work on next.

Q:
How do you come up with story ideas?

JI:
It's more a matter of being open to them. Ideas lie in bits of history, in newspaper stories, unexplained pictures, overheard conversations. They're in the
why
and
who
and
what did it mean
questions that all sorts of things present.

Q:
Do personal experiences or details ever end up in your books?

JI:
Sure. And even when I don't write them directly into a book, they're my best reference for checking that I'm telling a valid story, with characters that think and behave the way real people do. Bits and pieces of many people I know often join together in my characters.