HISTORY ALONG THE GREAT AMERICAN RAIL-TRAIL
of that magnitude. The fledgling service “rounded up whatever men it could … and shipped them into the backcountry,” he said. Presi- dent Taft’s authorization of mili- tary assistance added 4,000 troops to the firefighting efforts, and the inclusion of seven companies from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Reg- iment—the Buffalo Soldiers—was said to almost double the Black population of Idaho at the time. Forged in Fire The fires of 1910 fundamentally shaped the nascent Forest Service, with “the memory of the fires spliced into its institutional genes,” said Pyne. More than just another natural disaster, “the Big Blowup is the creation story for the American way of wildland firefighting.” Indeed, three months later, an associate district forester named Ferdinand Augustus 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. Twenty-five years later as chief of the Forest Service, he was able to put this philosophy into practice, implementing what became known as the 10 a.m. policy: the goal that every fire should be controlled by 10 o’clock the morning after initially being spotted.
A Red Demon From Hell Contemporary accounts confirm the magnitude and destructive power of the event; a forester named Edward Stahl wrote of flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, “fanned by a tornadic wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veri- table red demon from hell.” Thick smoke blotted out the sun, leaving the darkened landscape illumi- nated by violently burning trees and wind-powered fireballs that rocketed across canyons to ignite the far side in an instant. “The fire turned trees into weird torches that exploded like Roman candles,” one survivor told a reporter. The Great Fire of 1910—also called the Great Idaho Fire, the Big Blowup and the Big Burn—ravaged northern Idaho, western Montana and parts of British Columbia. Before it was through, it claimed 87 lives—78 of them firefighters—and destroyed about a third of the town of Wallace, Idaho. During remarks delivered at a rededication of a firefighters’ memorial in 2010, Pyne asked the audience to consider that the U.S. Forest Service had been in exis- tence for barely five years before being tasked with taming the 1910 wildfires and had never faced fires
The fires of 1910 fundamentally
by the same mechanism since time immemorial: lightning arcing downward from rainless thunderstorms. But others were very much manmade—campfires set by miners, loggers and homesteaders that grew out of control, and by embers thrown off by wood- and coal-powered locomotives along hundreds of miles of tracks that pierced the forested landscape. Strong Palouse winds blew into the Bitterroots on Aug. 20, combining the innumerable smaller fires into bigger and stronger blazes. As the fires merged and grew, the vast amount of rising hot air drew in fresh air at gale-force speeds, intensifying the inferno in the same way that bellows feed a forge. “The flames roared over the Bitterroots with no more pause than the Clark Fork [River] over a boulder,” said Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, TED Talks speaker and author of more than 30 books, among them “Year of the Fires,” a comprehensive look at the fires of 1910. shaped the nascent Forest Service, with “the memory of the fires spliced into its institutional genes.” — Stephen Pyne, Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University
157
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online