Alyssa Kreikemeier, an assis- tant professor of environmental history at the University of Idaho, agrees that the 1910 fires were the beginning of a focus on combating fires—the idea that there’s no such thing as a good wildfire—that came to dominate the federal government’s approach. “That’s the moment where suppression [becomes] the primary goal,” she said. In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1910, the Forest Service’s budget was doubled and the agen- cy “built roads, lookout towers and fire breaks through areas of uninhabited forest. Patrollers used towers, automobiles and, later, airplanes to scan forests for the first sight of a flame.” Experts today generally agree that fire is an integral part of a healthy and sustainable forest, but as Kreikemeier said, “there was no real understanding of fire ecology” at that time. She’s quick to point out that “Native Americans understood that these landscapes needed to be managed with fire,” and there were certainly some experts at the time arguing against stamping out every wildfire, but these viewpoints were on the losing side of a fire-suppression-at-all-costs philosophy that dominated for decades. While effective in the short term at preventing significant fires, the Forest Service ultimately came to understand that the policy actually resulted in an ever- increasing fuel load that built up year after year, with devastating consequences. As Pyne put it, “Every urban fire put out is a problem solved; most wildfires put out are problems put off.” Today, the Forest Service takes an approach in which fire is suppressed but also managed to play its role in nature.
when the fires quickly flared out of control. Realizing that death was racing toward them, he led a miles-long dash to safety, picking up stragglers along the way who had been separated from their own crews. Eventually, Pulaski and the 45 men he was leading found themselves surrounded by flames and left with no option but retreat into a narrow, abandoned prospector’s mine some 80 feet long and barely tall enough to stand upright. Inside, said Pyne, “it was a crowded, fetid, dark place.” Outside, an inferno raged and filled what little refuge they had with choking smoke. Pulaski worked desperately to keep the timbers supporting the adit entrance—the horizontal passage leading into the mine— from burning and bringing the whole tunnel down on their
Big Ed Pulaski “Very little about the Big Blowup is clear,” wrote Pyne in his book “Year of the Fires.” He continued, “Facts vanished like pine needles in the firewhirls .... Accounts written a year or even 30 years afterward are full of events forgotten, sup- pressed, embellished. Probably nowhere is that truer than with the Pulaski saga.” While many of the minute- by-minute accounts of bravery and heroism were lost in the metaphor- ical and quite literal haze of the fires, this much is certain: Edward Pulaski was only two years into his job as a forest ranger, but knew his way around the great outdoors, having worked on railroads and as a ranch foreman and miner. He was supervising a fire control crew south of Wallace on Aug. 20
Rails to Trails MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2025
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