Hello folks I'm Smokey the forest fire preventing bear with a mighy important message for ya. Very rare in history that you have one kind of originating Moment in a way. It's a kind of creation story for explaining who we are In a spring of 1910 the earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet The comet's appearance in the sky seemed to foreshadow the deadly summer of fire that would engulf the Northern Rockies No amount of money, equipment, or firefighters could stop the hurricane of fire that raged out of control on August 20th and 21st 1910 The big blowup would be the catalyst of wildland fire suppression for the next 100 years On August 20th a terrific hurricane broke over the mountains They picked up the fires and carried them for miles The wind was so strong that it almost lifted men out of their saddles And the canyons seemed to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar of a thousand freight trains Ranger Ed Pulaski [Wind] [Music] In the years before the big blowup President Theodore Roosevelt was helping to put conservation on the national agenda He protected millions of acres and national reserves monuments and parks In 1905 he appointed his friend Gifford Pinchot as chief Forester of the newly minted U.S. Forest Service Many accused the president of pushing his agenda too fast Senator Hebron was always after Roosevelt as where most of Western senators They just couldn't stand the Forest Service But more than anything else more than anything else they were against the idea of national forests The railroads were given more than 35 million acres for free an area about the size of New England The Rockefeller family which is building the biggest and most expensive transcontinental railroad in history. Right through the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains right where the fire takes place. And then you have The Guggenheim's and E.H. Harriman and James Jay Hill and the Weyerhaeuser families that are largely known to us today probably only for their philanthropies But then they were at the peak of their Gilded Age power And they wanted this land because they were used to getting it for free Roosevelt took it out of the general public domain and put it in the protector to the Forest Service The forest was to be the people's land. The people were going to use it Yale School of Forestry had opened graduated its first class in 1904 1905 the Forest Service gets control of the National Forest Gifford Pinchot Quickly hired the kids from Yale to be the boots on the ground as Rangers for the Forest Service out West All of the young men looked up to Pinchot he rallied their spirits about conservation Urging them to be part of the great crusade as he called it You know, he was named Gifford Pinchot, and they were called little Gifford Pinchot's or little GP's They came out of Yale, and they were just infused with this idealistic image of the Great Crusade this idea of conservation In order to become a forest ranger one had to have many skills First they had to be able to write legible reports in order to keep Congress informed of their findings Pinchot also required Rangers to pass a test of outdoor survival skills The test lasted two days and was comprised of navigation horse handling firefighting and cooking Pinchot said one test was to cook a meal the other was to eat it They needed these skills and more to survive Because they would be patrolling areas with names like "The High Lonesome" and "The Badlands." Not to mention dealing with the Wild West towns where some people would prefer to kill you over a drink, rather than to buy you one. These people could not have been more out of place there these Yale trained foresters in the Deadwood United States of the West these young forest rangers would go out West and they would find brothels and saloons Wanna buy a lady a drink? One ranger referred to Taft Montana as the wickedest place in america the one town of Taft, Montana named for the 350 pound president had three prostitutes for every man and a higher murder rate than New York City Fittingly a ranger recruiting poster warned invalids need not apply The most successful firefighting organization was probably the US Army and they set a pattern Of firefighting that in some ways is still with us that that was established in 1886. When the cavalry took over Yellowstone National Park They were greeted by fires when they rode in they put out 60 fires that summer that became a kind of ideal model The Army had numerous advantages over the Forest Service when it came to fighting fires The amount of land to Patrol for fire in the parks comprises a fraction of the acreage that lies within the forest boundaries Forest Service Rangers had to plan accordingly They recognized that you had to control the fires while they were small so they had to try to find them they had temporary lookouts They had telephones, telegraph's. They would try to find fires send people out It could take several days to reach a fire in a remote area there might not be any trails Any obvious round end you're just bushwhacking through the smoke trying to find this thing There were no trails, or roads and we had to go in 65 miles Once spent the first week trying to get to the fire It took more time to get into the country than to put out a small blaze Ranger Joe Halm In 1910 Roosevelt was out of office succeeded by President William H Taft opponents of Roosevelt and Pinchot's conservation efforts wielded great influence in Congress They moved quickly to cut off funding to the fledgling Forest Service The Speaker of the House Joe Cannon Said "not one cent for scenery", so there was a huge culture war going on Pinchot and new Secretary of Interior Richard Ballinger disagreed publicly on forest policy Pinchot pushing his limits arranged for a letter to be read in Congress Criticizing the president for misinterpreting Ballinger policies this was the final straw for President Taft he fired Pinchot for insubordination What should have been a debate about policy. What's the best way to manage fire and protect these lands and communities from fire? Got sidetracked into a battle about politics. Whose view of land management and the role of government will prevail? So the fire thing was finally about fire, it becomes, it's remade into a polarizing political spectrum. You're either with Ballinger or you're with Pinchot You're either with limited government and land management, or you're with very active government and wholesale commitment to it You're either with sort of folk knowledge and the Indian way of burning the landscape or you're with professional forestry And the kind of academic heft that that brings with it. You're forced to choose, and that was well. That's very effective politics Forces people to choose, but it doesn't make good policy Because there are really a whole array of things And there were probably different choices that were necessary for different regions The fires of 1910 were not unique in US history for their size There had been huge fires before in 1825 over 3.5 million acres burned in the Northeast Setting into motion a century of very large lethal fires that would follow settlement during October of 1871 the Peshtigo fire burned across northeastern Wisconsin. Spot fire started 10 miles away after jumping over parts of Lake, Michigan The fire ultimately covered one and a half million acres burned down 16 towns and killed more than a thousand people So we have a whole backdrop of these 1910 fires really fit into that larger chronicle what makes them different is that this was not a settlement fire as such That these were fires that were that were raging in areas that had been set aside And been set aside in large order to protect them from the axe and fire as the phrase went they didn't recognize lightning as a problem partly because They weren't concerned about fires in many of these remote areas and in many areas the fires people said overwhelmed the lightning In other words you didn't see it because the amount of human burning So it was not in a sense until they removed people as that ignition source that they began to realize yeah, lightning accounts for a lot of these fires and at that point 1910 does mark a transition. A big fire but of a different sort not one set as a result of settlement, land clearing associated with logging and agriculture But fires for a variety of reasons were being set on forest reserves and hence would be fought 1910 started with plenty of snowfall in the Northern Rockies Lookout Pass held snow well into spring and Placer Creek was flowing strong But the moisture from the sky abruptly stopped In April Glacier National Park reported their first fire and drought began to settle over the area Storm systems would roll through with the promise of bringing needed rain. But instead they only packed lightning. This was part of a vast complex of fires that swept over the northwestern US. There were large fires throughout the West most of it was concentrated in the northwest Especially in the Northern Rockies extending well into Canada "Lets take a tip from our Canadian friends. When we go out into the woods lets be extra careful with fire" [Song] "Alouette, gentille alouette,
Alouette, je te plumerai." The 1910 fire season would be so severe the Forest Service tasked the army to provide assistance Most of the standing army in the northwestern United States was called out to fight the fire. They were an important presence The Forest Service would rely heavily on mining and logging crews who had experience fighting fire and working hard as a team Another makeshift army of temporary laborers had to be employed as emergency firefighters It was a real cross-section of American frontier life and working class Large numbers were immigrants. It was a huge period of immigration into the U.S. Many of them were people who just did unskilled labor on railroads and mines or Random agricultural work there were gangs of people that could be dragged out of saloons. They would then be organized much as they would before laying track in a railroad or building a trail to a mine or some other practice That's why all those people are living in those brothel ridden saloon towns is because they've just put this railroad together howdy strangers staying long communication on the fire lines was difficult at best. In one instance a whole crew walked off the fire line because they thought the boss was not a union sympathizer Rumors spread through the press that many of the temporaries were starting fires themselves in order to stay employed Army soldiers would spread out within a fire crew full of laborers to try and keep some sort of order on the line There's one reason why agencies like the Forest Service continually looked to the Army for help They wanted some kind of discipline the army wasn't necessarily good at digging trenches And throwing dirt, but at least they could obey orders Ed Pulaski had gone west like many before him for adventure, and fame Become a miner in the region northern Idaho primarily in 1908 he was hired by the expanded Forest Service as a ranger in Wallace, Idaho He knew the area knew most of the people Was an older guy. He was about 40 much older than many of the real youngsters who ran lots of the other crews There was a question asked on the application the test for becoming a ranger And it was one was how do you fight the top fire which was their term for a crown fire? And the guy the guys answer was run like hell and pray for rain by August the air felt combustible The townspeople grew desperate in Wallace a folk method of creating loud booms to bring rain was employed Dynamite was randomly exploded for 60 hours straight, but to no avail needless to say people were on edge On August 19th ranger Ed Pulaski road back to Wallace to get more supplies for his crews and to warn his family he had been supervising crews up the West Fork of placer Creek an area of great importance because the fires were close to impinging on the town of Wallace He told his wife Emma in their 10 year old daughter Elsie that he had a bad feeling about the next 24 hours He warned them Wallace will surely burn and they should be prepared to save themselves and then as he left in the morning of the 20th the circumstances were changing and becoming more ominous When he left to go back to the fire lines Emma and Elsie rode with him to the trailhead He told them goodbye and that he may never see them again 10,000 people altogether scattered all over the landscape Again, we come back to the absence of any effective communication when these guys are out in the woods They're on their own. They had no idea of fronts approaching They have no fire behavior forecast No Red flag alert nothing and suddenly fire brands start falling out of the sky smoke has blotted out the Sun There's enormous towering convective columns they start hearing this noise They're in trouble On August 20th 1910 the wind began to blow in the Northern Rockies and didn't stop for two days Hundreds of small fire cyclone in the perfect storm, that would consume anything in its path Fire lines that held for days were overrun by 70 mile-per-hour blasts of wind and flame Over three million acres would burn in just two days And this was a thousand year fire it was off the scale Nobody had seen anything like this. Nothing with this complex of things in the mountains like that where people were there in harm's way The moral presence of leadership the the imposition of personality In conviction that conveyed that people responded to they I mean they were panicking with some cause I mean this stuff's Raining out of the sky on them. What are they going to do? They don't know if they need somebody to tell them what to do and that's what mattered We reached the mine just in time. Where we were hardly in when the fire swept over our trail. One man tried to make a rush outside, which would have meant certain death. I drew my revolver and said, " the first man who tries to leave this tunnel I will shoot" I did not have to use my gun Ranger Ed Pulaski Eventually they all passed out From asphyxiation and some died either from asphyxiation or drowning in the muck, but the rest lived. As they began making their way out the entrance found the body of Ed Pulaski crumpled up on the ground they thought he was dead I did not know how long I was in this condition, but it must have been for hours. I remember hearing a man say "come outside boys the boss is dead" I Replied "like hell he is" He was temporarily blinded his lungs were a mess in the meantime somebody had gotten out they had gone to town And as far as the town understood the whole crew had been wiped out So Pulaski's wife Emma is under the expectation that her husband is among that number. How we got down, I hardly know we're in terrible condition all of us hurt or burned I was blind and my hands were burned from trying to keep the fire out of the mine Our shoes were burned off our feet and our clothing was in parched drags. We were covered in mud and ashes Later as we dragged our way down through Placer Creek. We were met by some women from Wallace They had hot coffee and whiskey and although we appreciated the kindness of those brave women we could take nothing but cold water Ranger Ed Pulaski The flames of the Coeur d'Alene raced towards the towns of Wallace, Mullen, Taft, Saltese, Avery and many more There were a number of communities at risk and these are wooden towns that made of wooden roofs wooden sidewalks wooden buildings there were extremely vulnerable to fire Around nine o'clock on Saturday night the flames rushed into Wallace from Placer Creek with Pulaski's crew had been spot fire started on the east side of town Mayor Hansen ordered the alarm to be sounded and the townspeople became hysterical Run For Your Lives the town is going to burn Newspaper building became engulfed in flames and the sunset brewery burned while beer poured out everywhere in the streets On the Middle Fork of Big Creek Ranger John bells crew of 50 had been working in conjunction with Ed Pulaski screw With the fire chasing them Bell led his crew to the homestead of John Beauchamp Surrounding the homestead was a two acre clearing with the creek running through it most of the crew laid down in the stream for protection Seven others including the homesteader Beauchamp sought shelter in a small storage cave that had been dug to save his belongings as the fire reached them trees started falling in every direction One tree came down over three men lying in the creek Instantly killing two of them the third man had his legs pinned under the tree and screamed for help There was nothing anybody could do he perished in the flames along with the seven people who sought shelter in the cave Ranger Debbitt was in charge of the Avery District Sensing imminent danger he sent the deputy sheriff to Setzer Creek to warn a crew of 70 to evacuate back to Avery But 28 decided to stay back because they felt the Ranger and the deputy we're exaggerating about the fires All 28 men were later found burned to death on a hillside. the largest single loss of the crew we don't know what happened but you can see them retreating slowly sort of up the hill imagine them sort of Doing whatever they could and then finally coming into a small? Stand and just being overrun by the fire The evacuation trains were supposed to be for women and children first but men shove ladies off the trains and selfish attempts to save their own skin a Fat man shoved my kids, and I off the train and took our spot The soldiers were doing their best to keep some sort of order. And they had to have these soldiers at gunpoint with their fixed bayonets Ordered the men off the train there was african-american soldiers who had always sort have done the dirty work of the United States Army they had put down Indian uprisings they had put down labor Wars in this place five years earlier They show up and they're supposed to save this town and are greeted by the Kind of racism that was typical the way of the day. They would have stories about how they're strangely quiet We would think they would be singing at night so all these sort of racial stereotypes were there, but none of The folks who lived there thought these people could fight a fire But the soldiers saved at least one town town of Avery Idaho, and were instrumental in saving another the town of Wallace Thank you soldier Many of the residents of Taft decided if the town was going to burn they would drink all the whiskey before it happened Later a drunk somehow caught on fire Screaming and rolling on the ground a ranger helped to put him out He took him to a steel boxcar, so he would be protected and rest while the Train moved on to Saltese Once in Saltese the burn victim laid in the boxcar dressed in oil and gauze his drunk friend from Taft decided to check on him He lit a match to see but dropped it the match caught the gauze in the oil on fire The victim jumped up and ran out of the boxcar screaming and fanning his own flames. This time he was not as fortunate He was the only fatality of a Taft resident during the blow up trains took thousands of refugees into, Missoula and Spokane Fires ranged from 30 to 50 miles wide. Once they got on the trains,they would get to these trestles over the valleys and the trestles were burning so they'd go hide in a cave they'd back the train into one of these caves that bored through the bitterroot mountains and Once in the cave the fire would find them because it was in search of oxygen It was a beast as a force of its own Lee Hollingshead was supervisor of a crew of 60 on the West Fork of Big Creek With the fire on their heels Hollingshead directed his crew to follow the fire line to another burned over area 19 of the crew members were panic-stricken and decided instead to run down the hill to the Henry Ditman cabin, which was surrounded by flames The men stayed inside the cabin until the roof began burning and falling on them They decided to make a run for it the last man out fell down in the doorway and was trapped by debris This saved his life Hollingshead had arrived at the cabin the next day He was not prepared for the horrific scene he found All 18 men were burned to death within feet of the cabin Along with the five horses and a black bear The firefighters by Arthur Chapman Where's is Smith and Hennessy? Edwards, Stowe? Where's Casey, Link and Small? The Ranger listened and murmured low They're missing chief. That's all Where the smoke rolls high I saw them ride, they wave goodbye to me good god they might as well have tried to put back the rolling sea, I rode for aid till my horse fell dead then waded the mountain stream. The pools I swam were red, blood red and covered with choking steam There was never a comrade to shout hello Though I flung back many a call the brave boys knew what it meant to go. They're missing chief. That's all Of the 78 officially listed firefighters who died the deaths occurred in six separate incidents? So it was not even a case of one mass sort of fatality There were plenty of accounts from the fire that did not involve fatalities Ranger Joe Halm's crew survived the fire by taking refuge at a sandbar in the St. Joe River Sixty-five miles into the bitterroots from Wallace everybody reported them dead until the crew walked out one week later But when the fire happens Pinchot realized that like all people who can see Public policy moments they need their launch point he could see that this would be the fire that would save the agency so he immediately Went on the attack he and Roosevelt Roosevelt was touring the West Reviving his popularity, and they used this fire as the rallying cry That saves conservation. They gave speeches. They gave up the road op eds the rangers who fought this thing They're made heroes the press portrays them as Heroic was covered all over the US the New York Times had several page one stories the European press covered it so suddenly Public sentiment shifted and you saw a dramatic effect in Congress where they refunded the agency. They doubled its budget and they created this bill that have been lingering since Roosevelt today to create national forests in the East. You would not have national forests in the Adirondacks in Virginia and Pennsylvania and New England without this fire Pulaski stayed and this is where he lived he began rebuilding the trails Putting new lookouts up sending people out to fight new fires overseeing the cleanup the rehab the salvage logging all the rest of it and as part of that larger task he Invented a tool he thought we needed a combination tool something to grub with some kind of axe and some kind of cutting tool some kind of axe put them together in his backyard Forge and then over number of years refined it and eventually this was adopted of course became the Pulaski tool, which is now one of the defining implements of wildland firefighting that we picked one one symbol of a wildland firefighter. He or she is going to have a Pulaski in their hand and in many ways that's a perfect expression of Of how the Pulaski story has become embedded in our culture of wildland fire because every time one of us picks up that tool we are reliving that story and All the complexity it brings You know William Faulkner once said that The past isn't dead. It's not even past there are some senses in which the past in the form of the big blowup isn't past We still carry Pulaski tools. It's still a defining tool Much of our paramilitary approach an organization to firefighting still hurts back to 1910 the way we fight fires Bringing in people from outside hiring crews and locals Mobilizing the military all of these things were first put together In 1910 they are still the way, but fundamentally we manage it the legacy of emergency spending enormously instrumental in shaping giving us the kind of infrastructure and Programs we have so the debate those fundamental debates those basic questions are still The questions we're asking today, can we prevent fires do we want to prevent fires? What are the cost of doing it do we want to substitute for wildfires our own? prescribed fires All those questions were first brought together with great force in 1910. We're still living with them in our search for answers Please remember our history the 1910 fires left a plume of scars lessons and heroes that were forged nearly a century ago But out of the ashes we can still learn from this story and others like it Much like the Pulaski tool the firefighter spirit is endured through many different policies administrations tragedies and triumphs It is now up to us to make sure the bonds and experiences shared by firefighters Continue to be remembered and passed on with each swing of the Pulaski from one generation to the next Thanks folks remember only you can prevent forest fires
